All Life Is Lived In The Past

The Sea by John Banville (2005)

The Sea is a marvel of efficiency; in less than 200 pages, Banville writes a “memoir” that is spare and yet touching and profound.

The Sea is the story of a rapidly aging widower who, after the death of his wife, travels to the seaside resort town where he spent several summers as a child. Taking up residence in a long term boarding house filled with other hurting and lost souls, he thinks about his life; first his childhood summers and the life defining relationship and events of those years, then the days preceding and during his wife’s illness and death, and then finally the unkind truth of his present life. These narratives are weaved together throughout the novel until they coalesce towards the end.

I could ramble on for a while about how much I liked this book, how true Banville’s observations rung, how deep the sense of loss is, how scary it makes one feel about getting old. I could, but you should just buy the book and experience it for yourself.

Banville won the Mann Booker prize for The Sea.

"On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. Usually these days I do not dally before my reflection any longer than is necessary. There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly disheveled figure in a Hallowe’en mask made of sagging pinkish –grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head."

"When we arrived I marveled to see how much of the village as I remembered it was still here, if only for eyes that knew where to look, mine, that is. It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned."

"I looked aside quickly for fear my eyes would give me away; one’s eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within. I knew what she meant. This was not supposed to have befallen her. It was not supposed to have befallen us, we were not that kind of people. Misfortune, illness, untimely death, these things happen to good folk, the humble ones, the salt of the earth, not to Anna, not to me."

"I recalled walking in the street with Anna one day after all her hair had fallen out and she spotted passing by on the pavement a woman who was also bald. I do not know if Anna caught me catching the look they exchanged, the two of them, blank-eyed and at the same time sharp, sly, complicit. In all that endless twelvemonth of her illness I do not think I ever felt more distant from her than I did at that moment, elbowed aside by the sorority of the afflicted."

"[my daughter] understands me to a degree that is disturbing and will not indulge my foibles and excesses as others do who know me less and therefore fear me more. But I am bereaved and wounded and require indulging. If there is a long version of shrift, then that is what I am in need of. Let me alone, I cried at her in my mind, let me creep past the traduced old Cedars, past the vanished Strand Café, past the Lupins and the Field that was, past all this past for if I stop I shall surely dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears."

"Have I spoken already of my drinking? I drink like a fish. No, not like a fish, fishes do not drink, it is only breathing, their kind of breathing. I drink like one recently widowed-widowered? – a person of scant talent and scanter ambition, greyed o’er by the years, uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-induced oblivion. I would take drugs if I had them, but I have not, and do not know how I might go about getting some."