Reviewers who disliked the novel cited the author's dense and sometimes obscure language. Why would John Banville risk using a vocabulary that might alienate readers?
What the Critics Said
“A chilly, desiccated and pompously written book,” blasted Michiko Kakutani in “Book of The Times: The Sea,” in The New York Times on November 1, 2005.
On the other side of the debate, in a June 6, 2005 review in The Telegraph, Lewis Jones raved, “Banville’s prose is sublime.”
Pompous or sublime? To answer we must look at how words function in the life of the novel’s hero.
A Hero and His Vocabulary
Max Morden, the protagonist of The Sea, is an aging, Irish art historian. Recovering from the death of us wife, he returns to a seaside inn where he recollects a childhood holiday spent there. As he tranquillizes his grief with alcohol he also records—with painterly, poetic and frequently obsessive detail—memories, reveries, speculations and reconsiderations of a few key events in his life.
The novel is full of memorable word-paintings by Max. (He is, after all, an art historian.) His character and state of mind are defined by his word choices, as when, grieving and possibly suicidal, he describes sunlight falling through a window “like shards of glass in a burning building” (The Sea, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005).
It’s true he loves obscure words, but he can use them to vivid effect: “We have had a storm. It went on all night long… I enjoyed it outrageously, sitting up in my ornate bed like a catafalque … the room aflicker around me and the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones.”
Words are Max’s comfort.
Vocabulary as Consolation
“Immersed in words,” Max tells us, “paltry as they may be … I had felt myself break through … into another state where ordinary laws did not operate…where I was … more vividly present than ever I could be in what we call, because we must, the real world.”
To a man who frequently refers to the world as ‘indifferent,’ a theatre stage where everyone is acting, a man who finds love suspect, words and their uses offer the rare comfort of being joyfully, fully present in the moment.
Contemplating his own death, he says, "I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife… No, what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression. That is it, that is it exactly: I shall be expressed, totally. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said. ”Words transform, he suggests, even from flesh to "unsuffering spirit."
It is Max’s nature to undercut such statements with pompous skepticism or dry humor, but his habit of shying away from feelings of grief or hope in this way also allows readers—at least some readers—to feel empathy with him.
Learn Max’s Words - A Glossary
It’s possible the language of The Seaisboth pompous andsublime, depending upon Max’s mood. But wherever you stand on their literary merit, it’s helpful to know what the words mean. Learn their definitions in a glossary of The Sea.
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