The Sea
John Banville
Language: English
Pages: 195
ISBN: 1400097029
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel — among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.
other side of the garden a neighbour’s piebald cat comes creeping, soft-stepping pard. Watch out, birdie. That grass needs cutting, once more will suffice, for this year. I should offer to do it. The thought occurs and at once there I am, in shirt-sleeves and concertina trousers, stumbling sweat-stained behind the mower, grass-haulms in my mouth and the flies buzzing about my head. Odd, how often I see myself like this these days, at a distance, being someone else and doing things that only
though the sun would be long up the night’s moist coolness would cling on in the cobbled yard, where hens picked their way with finical steps among their own chalk-and-olive-green droppings. There was always a dog lying tethered under a leaning cart that would eye me measuringly as I went past, teetering on tiptoe so as to keep my heels out of the chicken-merd, and a grimy white cart-horse that would come and put its head over the half-door of the barn and regard me sidelong with an amused and
night of broken high notes, missed prompts, collapsing scenery. Claire and I sat down side by side on a sofa and presently an awkward, ginger-haired boy tricked out in a waiter’s black jacket and trousers with a stripe down the sides brought a tray and set it clattering on a low table before us and fled, stumbling in his big shoes. The tea-bag is a vile invention, suggestive to my perhaps overly squeamish eye of something a careless person might leave behind unflushed in the lavatory. I poured a
was however nowhere in evidence, and everything about to be interrupted with a grinding of cogwheels and a horrible, stomach-turning lurch. All sorts of things began to happen at once. Through an open doorway a small black woolly dog came skittering in from outside—somehow now the action has shifted from the living room to the kitchen—its nails making frantic skittling noises on the pitchpine floor. It had a tennis ball in its mouth. Immediately Myles appeared in pursuit, with Rose in turn
read, and put the book aside. Bun’s visit had upset the delicate equilibrium of the household, there was a sort of noiseless trilling in the atmosphere, as if a fine, taut alarm wire had been tripped and was vibrating still. I sat in the bay of the window and watched the day darken. Bare trees across the road were black against the last flares of the setting sun, and the rooks in a raucous flock were wheeling and dropping, settling disputatiously for the night. I was thinking of Anna. I make