Now and then I get the idea that I should undertake some grand reading project -- reading all the Booker Prize winners, for instance. (The fact that I've never considered such an undertaking for the Pulitzer or National Book Awards must owe to a latent Anglophilia, at least when it comes to books.) I believe my ownership of a copy of
The Sea dates to one of those moments when I was more actively attempting to collect Booker Prize winners. That said, I'm rather surprised to find that my records show (I have such good records now!) I have read 15 Booker winners, compared with 13 Pulitzer winners and just 6 National Book Award winners. In any case, I knew nothing about
The Sea except that it was a Booker winner, and on that strength alone I've also acquired a couple other Banville books that I've happened across over the years (
The Untouchable and
Doctor Copernicus). It was the research I did when I was reorganizing my library that prompted me to actually read Banville. The second sentence of his Wikipedia page says he has been described as "the heir to Proust via Nabokov," which was enough to convince me. I don't know that Proust or Nabokov is who I would land on if I were looking for a comparison, but there is at least one common element: memory.
Memory itself forms a large part of the subject of
The Sea. The narrator peers into his own memory and tells us about his past, with precisely the challenges, confusion, and lapses we encounter when we are remembering long distant things. If you try to recall a place you visited or a scene that occurred decades ago, there will be holes and incongruities. In the present day of the book, the narrator is staying in a house he visited as a child and the space - though he has been assured it has not changed - won't line up with his memory of it. A comment the narrator makes about memory, which I find is largely true for me, is that it is static moments -- snapshots in time, rather than moving pictures. Though this book is small, the language is dense. I felt I had to sort of plod through it, and yet still it was often playful and self-reflective. It takes a very interesting and surprising turn just at the end -- I truly gasped when reading it.
