Fishing in Soupy Waters

IN modern marketing jargon, they’re called ‘tweens’, a word that encompasses all things store-bright and brand-beautiful. Mat...

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IN modern marketing jargon, they’re called ‘tweens’, a word that encompasses all things store-bright and brand-beautiful. Matter-of-fact parentese labels them adolescents, a time of life best outgrown ASAP. It takes, then, a special kind of creative imagination to decipher in the years between eight and 14 the kind of tumult that shapes lives, forges bonds and destroys souls.

This, an extension of the the grand Wordsworthian principle of the child being the father etc, is the central premise of John Banville’s second shot at the Booker. As a fictional concept, of course, it’s not new. Novelists as varied as Bernhard Schlink and Khaled Hosseini (in that remarkable debut, The Kite-Runner) have used the idea of a buried trauma to fashion journeys back to adolescence and consequent closure.

Banville’s USP lies elsewhere: in the creation of a grand, brooding atmosphere that owes more to Hardy than Joyce — the compatriot whose heir he’s often described as — in the pacing of a story whose terrible secret is unveiled with exquisite restraint, in the philosophical profundity that tells universal truths in the guise of governing a single life.

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That life belongs to Max Morden, an aging art historian, who returns to a childhood holiday destination to grieve the death of his beloved wife, Anna. There, by the sea, he undertakes a tortuous, tortured spiritual journey that finally welds together his past and present, reconciles the fragmented memories of a summer half-a-century ago to the fresh loss, to hint at some kind of equilibrium.

But it is a tenuous equilibrium, which doesn’t survive the last page of the novel. Banville’s language could be partly responsible: it’s stunning initially, stupefying subsequently. Exquisite metaphors (‘‘soupy waters’’) lose their charm when they are found to be recycled in thin disguises (‘‘the sea was as sluggish as soup’’), or when every instance of rust is likened to a ‘‘filigree’’.

There’s also a generous sprinkling of Irish words and allusions to art and mythology. Granted the narrator/author are Irish, and the protagonist is an art historian, but an overdose of insider references can have the reader feeling a bit left-out, if not missing significant nuances. Consider this:

‘‘(Anna’s) consultant’s name was Mr Todd. This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De’Ath…’’

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What Banville doesn’t footnote for us German-ignorants is that tod means death in that language. Similar instances of presumptuousness abound through The Sea; worse, they come with a self-consciousness that is unforgiveable in a novelist of his stature. Language may be just a tool for the novelist, but if it comes in the way of the story, literature is the poorer for it.