John Banville and The Sea
Ireland's Most Evocative Novelist and Winner of The Man Booker Prize
Sep 20, 2009
John Banville won The Man Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel, The Sea, making him, at the time, only the second Irish writer to win the prestigious prize. The Sea was not tipped by any critics to win, and the bookies had it as a 7-1 outsider. It was a stunning victory in several ways. The most stylistically written novel of the six books in contention, it was considered the least commercial. A reviewer in The Daily Telegraph wrote, ‘It has been said of the Irish by some English person that we gave them a language and they taught us how to use it. This is true of Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett, and now Banville.’
Who is John Banville
Born in Wexford in Ireland in the 1940s, John Banville's is arguably Ireland's leading novelist. His first work, a short novel, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. He has held several positions as literary editor and writer for Irish national newspapers including The Irish Times. He has won many literary prizes during his career and his work was previously short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1989 with The Book of Evidence. The Sea is his 14th novel. His publishers described The Sea as a reconciliation with loss and an extraordinary meditation on identity and remembrance. The chairman of the Booker judges, who cast the deciding vote, summarized The Sea as ‘a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected’. On Banville’s writing he said, ‘You feel you’re in the presence of a virtuoso. In his hands, language is an instrument.’
Banville's Style is Pure Language
It is to his language that many admirers are drawn. Readers may have to reach for a dictionary a good many times to discover the meanings of such words as ‘velutinous’, ‘cinereal’ and ‘horrent’ among others. And, in some corners his writing has been described as being 'narcissistically' verbose but it is precisely this quality that others find exciting. With Banville, one finds oneself sipping the phrases, pausing at the delights of his language.
Examples of Banville's Prose
‘The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam.’ – The Sea
‘It was a morning after storm, and all outside the window of the corner room looked tousled and groggy, the dishevelled lawn littered with a caduceus fall of leaves and the trees swaying still, like hungover drunks.’ – The Sea
The Sea is about an art historian in his sixties, named Max Morden, who returns to the seaside village where he spent a childhood summer. Painterly images of the sea and the landscape around ebb throughout the narrator’s remembrances, as he grapples not only with the past but also with the recent loss of his wife. He revisits the house of the Graces in an attempt to escape his grief and to revisit the memories of its family who not only captured his youthful imagination but whose own trauma left an indelible stamp on his heart.
Some Other Novels of John Banville
Of his other novels, Birchwood, his second novel, is a marvelously subtle parody of the Irish 'Big House' novel. In it the reader encounters a cast of characters like Granny and Gabriel Godkin inside the decaying world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. The writing is poetic and evocative, and eccentric with a certain mischievousness. Doctor Copernicus, the first of Banville's three novels about science or more particularly, astronomy, is a creative historical re-invention of the life of the great Copernicus. Historically quite accurate, it is an important work on the subject of the creative life of the scientist. – a theme Banville returns to again in Kepler and in The Newton Letter.
John Banville's latest novel, The Infinities – called a 'masterpiece of a book' by the UK's Telegraph – was not even long-listed for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, much to the amazement of many critics. But John Banville doesn't mind. In a interview with Untitled Books he says himself, "The thing about having already won is that you never have to care about it again."
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