The Sea

John Banville’s novel won the Man Booker prize last year, and after reading it I understand why that decision was so controversial. It’s not a bad book – it’s very readable, with interesting language and a good flowing storyline – but it’s fairly pedestrian, especially compared to the competition – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Apparently in his acceptance speech he said something about being grateful to the judges for rewarding a ‘real novel’; by which I suppose he meant a ‘real old-fashioned honest to goodness novel novel’. Old-fashioned can mean classic or it can mean dated, though, and I feel that in the 21st century, his book is dated.

Basically – Max has lost his wife. He goes to live in a boarding house where he once holidayed as a child, and where he had all his ‘coming-of-age’ moments; first kiss, finding out about adult secrets, witnessing death. He’s losing it to alcohol and to the past, and in the end his adult daughter comes to take him away. A simple enough story, and it’s fairly well told, but the language is pretentious (although near the end I did wonder if it was deliberately so, because it’s written in the first person about an unpleasant art critic, who would of course speak and write pretentiously – for example, he never uses contractions, even in direct speech, and that’s just crazy). The twist at the end is rather silly (landlady turns out to be Rose, the girl in the background got old, and she’s a lesbian, though he doesn’t state it so blandly). It’s one of those books which focus on the ugly and unpleasant – deliberately, I’d say, he’s depressed and so forth – but in spite of that it’s not too difficult to read. Of course, Ishiguro has already won a Booker prize, so fair enough giving it to Banville, but if you’re going to award prizes on that basis, you may as well hand it over to Martin Amis and be done with it. It’s an all right book, but it’s not one to jump up and down about.