Sentimental Journey

...That is understandable...

...So there is reason to question the wisdom of this year's Booker Prize panel...

...Consciousness, in Banville's universe, is often little more than "puppetshow twitching," as The Book of Evidence's narrator has it...

...A good writer can get away with unlikely coincidences, symbolic excess and outsized emotions if the voice is convincing and he has prepared the way...

...When Banville's 14th novel, The Sea, not only made the short list but unexpectedly won the award, there was speculation Banville had precisely this in mind when he went after McEwan...

...Reviewed by Mark Kamine Contributor, "TLS,' New York "Times Book Review," the "Believer" Last May John Banville gave Ian McEwan's highly topical, impressively researched novel, Saturday, a thrashing in the New York Review of Books...

...In his estimation, the characters were clichéd and vague, "like the dim stars of a lost galaxy...

...Before the narrator falls for Chloe he falls for her mother, Constance Grace, and here Banville's skill as a portraitist is displayed: "I would have said then that she was beautiful, had there been anyone to whom I would have thought of saying such a thing, but I suppose she was not, really...

...She smelled of sweat and cold cream and, faintly, of cooking fat...

...Grace and their twins on the beach, where the girl Chloe is springing a trick on a nanny...

...Still, I'm pleased that a terrifically skilled, heady artist of long achievement will finally be able to sell more than the usual few thousand copies of at least one of his beautifully composed novels...

...So sudden was the blow, so complete, it seemed a definition of some small, unique and vital thing...

...Max' wife's cancer specialist is named Mr...

...The author's intraspective, deeply intellectual narrators are uniquely unable to get at why they are the way they are...

...Spirits and departed gods (Banville favorites) are frequently invoked...

...hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set...

...in The Sea, the moribund nostalgia of the narrator's Remembrance of Deaths Past leads him to a drunken reckoning with his own mortality...

...Just another woman, in other words, and another mother, at that...

...Max, age 10 or 11, first spots Mr...

...Max Morden, G/ie Sea's narrator, is telling a retrospective story of milder content, but not without a gothic element...

...He also is reported to have said he prefers his one previously short-listed novel, The Book of Evidence (1989), to his current winner, The Sea...

...He has an unhappy adult daughter and a trove of adolescent memories to reckon with...

...Max' strongest memories are of his wife's dying, and of the now dead members of the Grace family who inhabited the Cedars all those years ago...

...What I said was never exactly what I felt, what I felt was never what it seemed I should feel, though the feelings were what felt genuine, and right, and inescapable," the same narrator declares...

...Although The Sea exhibits Banville's stylistic strength and thematic cohesion, it lacks the earlier novel's taut premise (a murderer looking back at running from the law) and a narrator with extreme psychological polarity (a cultured, introspective man who, having allowed his inner beast to briefly emerge, is left with a feeling of having enjoyed his brief excursion into aggression...

...The Sea is a death-haunted book...

...A few times during The Sea the narrator sees his life as if in a series of "tableaux," a commonplace tactic in Banville's work...

...and Mrs...

...Yet to me she was in all her ordinariness as remote and remotely desirable as any a painted pale lady with unicorn and book...

...One could give the author of The Sea similar demerits for heavy-handed foreshadowing (that "Todd"), storyteller's tricks (a twist at the end only works because the author has withheld the connection between one character's first and last names), and crucial stretching of credulity in the novel's climactic scene, since the deaths that therein occur, while fhematically consistent, seem only faintly motivated and a far more extreme response than circumstances justify...

...I heard the echo of it ping back from a corner of the ceiling...

...An art historian doing a monograph on Pierre Bonnard, Max has returned to the seaside resort of his childhood after his wife's death...

...Saturday's final chapters strike Banville as oozing with a "level of bathos that is hard to credit...

...She was rather stocky, and her hands were fat and reddish, there was a bump at the tip of her nose, and the two lank strands of blonde hair that her fingers kept pushing back behind her ears and that kept falling forward again were darker than the rest of her hair and had the slightly greasy hue of oiled oak...

...the structure was clunky, its "set pieces...

...We stood a moment motionless, I with my face averted, and she took a step backward, and laughed, and then pouted sulkily and went on to the window, where she picked up something from the table and looked at it with a fierce frown...

...Banville posits a reader who shares his skepticism, who must find Saturday's symbolic gestures "clumsily obvious," its plot elements evidence of a misuse of "storyteller's tricks," and its development too feel-goody to be believed...

...Tod, "death" in German...

...The novels tend to swing between a tracing of the vagaries of their narrators' inner lives and the emotional eruptions that surprise or baffle them...

...Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," was that review's opening salvo...

...The latter is a more widely known author whose thin chiller Amsterdam won the 1998 Booker, while Banville's far more substantial—some say career-best—novel The Untouchable did not reach the final round...

...Todd (i.e...

...IN criticizing Ian McEwan's Saturday, Banville again and again raises questions of believability—a kind of "that would never happen" criticism of questionable usefulness when isolated from issues of tone and style and structure...

...Banville is an expert anatomist of the cruel and even violent side of childhood, picking up on how newly met children look at each other with "hostile enquiry" and with what unmotivated glee rages can quickly erupt and just as quickly subside: "Chloe had come in from the kitchen and was crossing to the window and I stood up from the sofa and went toward her, I suppose to try to get my arms around her...

...Immediately at my approach she stopped and brought up her hand in a quick short arc and delivered me a slap full in the face...

...Typical in the passage for a Banville narrator is the sense of the mind's "obscure" workings...

...McEwan's otherwise widely praised work failed to be short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize...

...In The Book of Evidence, the narrator's considered, supercilious musings about the hapless world are both affirmed and made irrelevant by his sudden murder of an innocent girl...

...and the politics were "of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew.' It was one of those memorable if questionable attacks that drew responses from the British literary community similar to those following Dale Peck's assault on Rick Moody's memoir, The Black Veil...

...Instances of introspection alternate with a sketching of character or action so that the novel does not proceed neatly from one event to another but presents people or scenes to be commented on and, by association, spun into a kind of philosophical cotton candy...

...He does this best, though, when his narrator's ruminations are tied to events of more dramatic, or thornier, import than those present in The Sea...

...Amazed, and disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past...

...Banville has dismissed such charges as "ridiculous...

...She walked at a languorous slouch, the muscles in her haunches quivering under the light stuff of her summer dresses...

...The Sea is chiefly made up of his reconstruction of what happened one summer when a new family showed up at the grand local house known as the Cedars: "I am amazed at how little has changed in the more than 50 years that have gone by since I was last here...