The Sea

Max Morden, an art historian recently widowed, returns to the seaside village where his family took a chalet the summer he was eleven, and lodges in the house the Grace family rented then. He has come to write about Bonnard and does no work at all. What he does instead is remember: Chloe Grace and her mute twin Myles, their mother Connie, whom he desired with the helplessness of a boy who had no vocabulary for it, their father Carlo with his gappy grin, and the governess Rose. Interleaved with that summer is the recent one, in which his wife Anna was diagnosed and declined and he behaved, by his own account, badly. Banville's sentences are the point: exact, ornate, hunting the precise word for a quality of light or the smell of a room, from a narrator who is pompous, evasive and knows it. The novel circles two griefs and withholds the resolution of the earlier one until the final pages, and the disclosure, when it comes, reframes everything. It is a book about how memory shapes itself into art in order to be bearable, and about the failure of that arrangement.