He has also been ‘elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007’, and in 2017 ‘Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood)’.
Furthermore, it was The Sea that won him that 2005 Booker Prize, and on Goodreads the novel has 12,530 combined four and five-star ratings compared to just 4,037 one and two-star ratings: that is a third more, and more than 8,000 reviewers thought The Sea a good or very good novel than didn’t.
So filing a downbeat minority report on the novel by such an honoured and distinguished writer — as I am about to do — is probably as reprehensible as repeatedly farting loudly at a requiem mass. The Austrians and the Italians will be outraged! But . . .
First, I must repeat that as far as I am concerned all literary judgements are quintessentially subjective, and that no number of congruent subjective judgments make up an objective judgment: there can be no ‘objective judgment’. I think that is a crucial point to make. And it follows that no judgment can be ‘right’ and none can ‘be wrong’. All judgments are just opinions.
Then there is the simple matter of ‘what we like’ and ‘what we don’t like as much’ (and even ‘what we don’t like at all’). Those, too, will vary, and that, too, must also be borne in mind. So as for The Sea, it was the kind of novel that 12,530 reviewers here ‘liked’, but what 4,037 reviewers ‘didn’t much like at all’.
Broadly, The Sea gained very good reviews when it was published on autumn 2005, but there was some dissension. In a New York Times review Terrence Rafferty suggested The Sea was ‘apparently the sort of novel English writers do in their sleep’ (though he does point out that Banville is Irish). In view of that (that it is the kind of work he suggests it is), he posits that The Sea is sly parody of the kind of novel ‘that receives rapturous notices in The Guardian and The Independent’.
Although Rafferty’s review does make it reasonably clear he was a tad underwhelmed by The Sea, he does pull his punches a little and can’t quite bring himself to say what his fellow NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani was not at all shy about proclaiming: The Sea is a ‘stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale’. And that, too, sums up my view.
I must confess that after an all-too-brief encouraging start, I soon found that picking up The Sea again and carrying on reading it became something akin to a duty and a chore. And that is never a good sign.
There is also a pleasing rhythm to his prose, another feature of much work by Irish writers which, in my experience, is all too often sadly lacking in their English rivals. But that anticipation of pleasure wears off surprisingly fast.
Mellifluous language, pleasant turns of phrase and an agreeable prose rhythm might sustain a short story, but flag quickly in a novel. A novel needs more, and that, in more ways than one, is where to my mind Banville falls horribly flat: there is a great deal in The Sea, but it doesn’t gel in any particular way.
The admiring critics assure us the novel is ‘about memory’, and ‘invention’ and so on, but when at the end of the day the novel’s disparate elements — and there are many and they might all have made rather good individual short stories — are nothing but disparate, seemingly unrelated elements, we are obliged to concede that something crucial has gone wrong.
Sadly there is more to complain about. In The Sea — I haven’t yet read any of his other work — Banville betrays an addiction to arcane and obscure words, and the pages of The Sea are larded with them, all demanding that it’s best to read the novel with a dictionary by your side. Among many we get ‘leporine’, ‘strangury’, ‘perpetuance’, ‘finical’, ‘flocculent’, ‘anthropic’, ‘avrilaceous’, ‘anaglypta‘ and ‘assegais.
So, you ask, what’s wrong with that? Well, on the face of it nothing, really. After all each word exists because it is unique and — in theory — no other word can convey what it means (well, sort of) and that’s exactly why we use it.
But that welter of arcane words, the remorseless encounters with words you often think don’t even exist, came quite soon to smack of nothing more noble than blatant posturing and showing off. And if that’s the name of Banville’s game, it’s not a game I much care for.
Banville might protest: he uses words, he might plead, because ‘each is unique and — in theory — no other word’ etc. To which this reviewer can only respond: up to a point, Lord Copper.
In The Sea Banville is also horribly addicted to similes, and they pop up at every turn, about three of four a page on a bad day. And just one simile will simply not do, so we often get two. Those similes also come across as markedly forced and recherché, and thus, to be blunt, are quite simply phoney.
Then there’s the inevitable ‘literary’ adjective used to qualify pretty much everything: and I mean everything. Significance — or apparent significance — and meaning lurk everywhere.
The overall effect of the style of the novel — the many, many similes, the arcane language, the cod philosophy, the well-defined ‘literariness’ of the work, the extraneous and seemingly random pseudo-profundity that is ladled out ensure that The Sea has ‘fine writing’ all over it. But it’s like drowning in honey, and so it’s not ‘fine writing’.
Furthermore ‘fine writing’ is never ‘fine writing’. ‘Fine writing’ is bad writing. I happen to subscribe to the notion, which many do not, of course, that ‘art should conceal art’. That is ‘what I like’. It quite obviously is not what others like, and patently not what Banville likes.
The novel is in the first person, and it did briefly occur to me that Banville adopts his rich and — courage, Patrick, courage, and say it! — pretentious style as a way of delineating his protagonist: thus it is not Banville, but his protagonist ‘Max Morden’ who is the pretentious git. Well, I tried that line, but I couldn’t persuade myself. Sorry, but it is Banville.
If, as the professional reviewers (that is the women and men paid to pontificate about the books they read, unlike you and I who do it here for free) inform us The Sea is ‘about memory’, the combined weight of the ostensibly ‘fine writing’, the forced similes, the litany of words most of us have never before come across (and never will again), simply defeat Banville in his efforts to ‘examine memory’, and do so without difficulty.
We are told that we readers must often ‘work’ a little when reading, that they must make a certain intellectual effort to get our heads around what the writer might be doing. That’s true. But I suggest that just as we readers have certain obligations, writers do, as well: they are obliged somehow — just how is their problem, one of many they will face and hope to solve when writing — re-assure us that our effort will, sooner or later, be rewarded, that the effort we put in was worth it.
On that score Mr Banville gets nul point.
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