Thanks to my colleague Joanne Buckley who buys hardcover novels, I just finished John Banville’s The Sea along with some of the others Booker nominees like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Reviewers like Michiko Kakutani in A Wordy Widower With a Past – New York Times are dissappointed in the choice of The Sea for the Booker prize over the other candidates and I think they are wrong.
Never Let Me Go is a light, though well written, work of “speculative fiction” (which is what Atwood wants to call “science fiction” with pretentions to high literature. The premise is not original, but the unfolding of the lives of the children cloned for organ donation is elusively written. At the end of the day it is neither particularly interesting speculation or convincing human drama.
Saturday is gripping in the beginning, but then languishes. I found myself jumping to the end. McEwan is again trying to write a literary thriller and he doesn’t quite have it. Give me Le CarrÈ’s pacing over McEwan.
The Sea on the other hand has the carefully crafted prose of Ishiguro hauntingly tripped-up by deliberate undigestible images and words. Banville is trying to go beyond smooth poetic prose by inserting disturbing anachronisms and physically repugnant images. For those of us tired of stylistics there is much to think about in The Sea.
Further, Banville succeeds at revealing precisely that polished, culture conscious, and uninspired academic who woud value crafted prose. The narrator Max is dealing with the failure of all his poise to make meaningful relationships in the face of death. Without being banal, Banville plots an educated man’s reflections simultaneously on when he came of age with his coming to terms with failed age. These reflections combine the petulant pedantry that comes with failure with a remained nose for the smell of others. A novel that will leave you flat and depressed for a weekend, but won’t leave you.