The Sea

John Lee has his work cut out, presenting this restrained and beautifully written novel, which won the Booker Prize in spite of an elegiac pace and almost complete absence of action except in memory. He gives us the inner life of Max Morden as he returns, after the death of his wife, Annie, from cancer, to a seaside village where he spent childhood summers. Max takes a room in a house once rented by the Grace family, who entranced him when he was young, and keeps company with The Little Corporal, his bottle of Napoleon Brandy, as he remembers the complicated loves of his childhood and his marriage. Lee's beautifully accented, fully felt performance brings warmth and color to what could be a bleak portrait. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

November 7, 2005
Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his wife's recent death—and his blighted life. "The past beats inside me like a second heart," observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the Grace family—father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles—lived in a villa in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal "chalet." Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ("the mud shone blue as a new bruise"). As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.