Book Twenty Nine - The Sea

Jesus, what is it with me and picking all the books about elderly men confronting their mortality? Seriously! Is it the List's fault? Was the List compiled by an elderly man confronting his mortality? If I have to read about someone's legacy one more time I am going to throw the book across the room.

That being said, this book wasn't as terrible as the other two. Banville sure knows his way around words; his prose is beautiful and at times caused me to re-read sentences and passages over and over again, just to appreciate the language. The parts about the main character's wife dying are really poignant and struck a true chord for me. Dying, after all, isn't all about the moment of death - sometime it's a long, slow process where you don't know quite how to behave. As Banville nicely points out, death can be tragic and terrible, but death can also be awkward, and that's something the book deals with quite deftly. However, the whole story with the Graces feels way of place for me. It makes sense that the main character should be reminiscing about them, given that he's returned to the scene of the crime, as it were, but I wasn't sure what the reader was supposed to get out of his memories. Wasted life? The suddenness of death? I thought pretty early on that he was building to some kind of crazy twist with that story, and when it came, I was disappointed. The conclusion felt simultaneous contrived and underdone, and I gotta say, if I was supposed to feel a shred of emotion about it, Banville's gonna have to be a bit more original.

A couple other things: I don't know if it's deliberate on Banville's part of a reflection of his own sensibilities, but the main character does not understand women in the slightest. His treatment and thoughts about his own daughter, Chloe Grace, and Rose are all full of errors in judgement and gross mischaracterizations, and the fact that any of them will even associate with him is kind of remarkable. I think it has to be on purpose - otherwise, I'd be really concerned for Banville as a human being. Secondly, I did really like the undertone of malice throughout the book, especially when the Graces were concerned. The picnic scene especially hit that home for me; I mean, what could be more innocent than a family picnic by the seaside? But the way he writes it, every the most innocent of actions are full of hidden intent and foreshadowing, and in the end, it's a sense of uneasiness that prevails, not a sense of joy. 

In Summary: A hit and miss book that manages to be almost painfully evocative at some points and pointless in others, but I would say it's worth a read for the prose alone.