Summer Challenge '08: The Sea by John Banville

[Virgil]

It finally began to click, and and does seem wonderfully written. I am having a hard time keeping the time straight. Hopefully it become clear shortly. I'm enjoying it now. Here check this sentence out:

Immediately then, and for the first time in I do not know how long, I thought of Ballyless and the house there on Station Road, and the Graces, and Chloe Grace, I cannot think why, and it was as if I had stepped suddenly out of the dark into a splash of pale, salt-washed sunlight.

[Virgil]

I've now read 50 pages which is about a quarter of the book. Antiquarian was right, the prose is marvelous. I love the writing. I love the way Banville is flipping from the past and present, and the relationship between the narrator and his daughter is marvelous. The problem I'm having is that here I am a quarter of the way through and there is no inkling as to what the story is. There is the narrator's experience as a boy that keeps coming up and there is the death of his wife, but what's the story? The author is just waiting too long to get to the crux.

For those that have read this, there is no need to respond. The story line will become apparent shortly. At least I hope.

Here's a little passage that shows the past and present and its significance, and his marvelous prose:

When we arrived I marvelled to see how much of the village as I remembered it was still here, if only for eyes that knew where to look, mine, that is. It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned. We passed the deserted railway station and came bowling over the little bridge--still intact, still in place!--my stomach at the crest doing that remembered sudden upward float and fall, and there it was before me, the hill road, and the beach at the bottom, and the sea. I did not stop at the house but only slowed as we went by. There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.

(p34-35)

[Walter]

August is almost upon us so it sounds like time for me to go once through the book one more time to examine the notes I laboriously made to sort out the time frames and flashbacks, and then perhaps formulate the linear story behind the involuted narrative. Though I have been mostly quiet, I have to say I am making progress and getting toward sorting it out. The elusive part to me still is understanding what he learned from his rumination over all the past events described in the book. But if it is there, one should be able to find it.

[Walter]

I think the nickel has finally dropped for me in understanding Max Morden so, with about a hundred slips of paper sticking out of every part of the book, I think I'm ready for discussion when it arises. Tracing threads through the story has made for a fascinating puzzle that underlies what seems to be nominally a memoir.

[Virgil]

I think the nickel has finally dropped for me in understanding Max Morden so, with about a hundred slips of paper sticking out of every part of the book, I think I'm ready for discussion when it arises. Tracing threads through the story has made for a fascinating puzzle that underlies what seems to be nominally a memoir.

I'm approaching half way through Walter. I'll definitely be there for the discussion. Feel free to bring up a topic, preferably one toward the beginning of the book.

[Walter]

Virgil,
I think I'll prefer to wait because it is so hard to find the beginning of the book. I say that in jest, but only partly, because the allusions in that first paragraph stretch so deeply into the book, more than 3/4ths of the way, for their eventual resolution. And the next paragraph is fifty years later, although that is not so obvious either.
I think Banville has written an amazing tour de force of stream-of-consciousness narrative to tell a story that weaves back and forth through about five different periods of Max Morden's life in about four different venues, and which very nearly needs a score card to keep track of. I finally did have to resort to numerous bookmarks and extensive marginal notations to sort things out, but for me that is part of the total pleasure of reading a book of this complexity. I hope you are sailing along quite well and having an easier time of it.
No hurry.

[plainjane]

Walter,
Yes, tracing threads through 4 different time frames makes for a great puzzle! Max is a much more complex person than I thought the first time go around.

[Virgil]

Virgil,
I think I'll prefer to wait because it is so hard to find the beginning of the book. I say that in jest, but only partly, because the allusions in that first paragraph stretch so deeply into the book, more than 3/4ths of the way, for their eventual resolution. And the next paragraph is fifty years later, although that is not so obvious either.
I think Banville has written an amazing tour de force of stream-of-consciousness narrative to tell a story that weaves back and forth through about five different periods of Max Morden's life in about four different venues, and which very nearly needs a score card to keep track of. I finally did have to resort to numerous bookmarks and extensive marginal notations to sort things out, but for me that is part of the total pleasure of reading a book of this complexity. I hope you are sailing along quite well and having an easier time of it.
No hurry.

Walter,
Yes, tracing threads through 4 different time frames makes for a great puzzle! Max is a much more complex person than I thought the first time go around.

Can either of you list the time frames. I can see three so far:
1. As a child when he first meets the Grace family.
2. His wife's cancer and decline.
3. Present with his daughter Clair and the trip to the summer home of his childhood.

I must say I'm completely fascinated with the novel, but I can see how the delay of a real story line so far into the novel can turn people off. But Banville's writing is just gorgeous.

[plainjane]

Virgil, he also covers his younger adulthood, meeting and marrying his wife, all the whys and wherefores of the marriage that does lead into her illness, but I'd have to put that as a different time frame.
So I'd say,

1. Childhood/Graces/explanation of Max's parents situation.
2. Young adulthood, manner of meeting wife and early marriage, all the explaining of her father and his business.
3. Wife's diagnosis and illness to death.
4. The present at the Graces old house.

[Virgil]

Virgil, he also covers his younger adulthood, meeting and marrying his wife, all the whys and wherefores of the marriage that does lead into her illness, but I'd have to put that as a different time frame.
So I'd say,

1. Childhood/Graces/explanation of Max's parents situation.
2. Young adulthood, manner of meeting wife and early marriage, all the explaining of her father and his business.
3. Wife's diagnosis and illness to death.
4. The present at the Graces old house.

Thanks Jane!! You're right, I forgot the courtship of his wife. And who says you're plain.

[Nightshade]

Actually I would split up the first one into
childhood_ at the beach the graces etc
and childhood_ afterwards parents divorce living in a flat in the city etc.

[Walter]

Timeframes and locales intermingle to produce many combinations like that. After his wife dies and before he decides to return to the Cedars there feels like another combination where he is still at home but without his wife and it feels like a different time frame. It all makes counting them slightly fuzzy. Maybe those different combinations are different 'settings' for the story line, to add yet another word?

[Virgil]

Timeframes and locales intermingle to produce many combinations like that. After his wife dies and before he decides to return to the Cedars there feels like another combination where he is still at home but without his wife and it feels like a different time frame. It all makes counting them slightly fuzzy. Maybe those different combinations are different 'settings' for the story line, to add yet another word?

The intermingling of time frames is brilliantly done. I am really impressed with Banville's writing. But it's still hard to grasp a story line. Do memories of a central character constitute a story? I can't wait to finish to see. I hope there is some grand epiphany.

I really can't help but type out some of this magnificent prose. Here's another fine passage.

It was an evening just like that, the Sunday evening when I came here to stay, after Anna had gone at last. Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shaped of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving. Our home, or my home, as supposedly it was now, had still not been sold, I had not yet had the heart to put it on the market, but i could not have stayed there a moment longer. After Anna's death it went hollow, became a vast echo-chamber. There was somethig hostile in the air, too, the growling surliness of an old hound unable to understand where its beloved mistress had gone and resentful of the master who remains. Anna would allow no one to be told of her illness. People suspected something was up, but not until the final stages, that what was up, for her, was the game itself. Even Claire had been left to guess that her mother was dying. And now it was over, and something else had begun, for me, which was the delicate business of being the survivor. (p.109)

[plainjane]

Banville certainly has an unconventional manner of presenting "flashbacks", I don't think I've encountered his method before. I know I missed a lot on the first reading and I'd lay odds I could get even more from a third rereading.
In a way it is a quest novel, yes? Questing for himself, his life, his meaning, his future.
I don't want to go into the end till you finish though Virgil.

[Virgil]

Banville certainly has an unconventional manner of presenting "flashbacks", I don't think I've encountered his method before. I know I missed a lot on the first reading and I'd lay odds I could get even more from a third rereading.
In a way it is a quest novel, yes? Questing for himself, his life, his meaning, his future.
I don't want to go into the end till you finish though Virgil.

Thanks Jane. I am enjoying it. I don't know if the flashback technique is unconventional. It's just that he's such a smooth writer that it appears seemless.