Memories as Burdens in John Banville’s The Sea

Abstract

William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Banville has published many novels, short stories, plays, non-fiction and book reviews. Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of English, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling. He is known for his dark humor, and sharp, wintery wit. The Sea is a poetic prose written performance by John Banville dealing with the life of an art historian Max Morden. The Sea is a novel published in 2005 and it has won the Man Booker Prize the same year. It is the fifteenth book but thirteenth novel of Banville. The story of the novel “The Sea” is about an Irishman named Max Morden, a sixty years old man. Max has just lost his wife Anna to cancer and decided to return to his native town, along with the seaside, where he has spent his childhood and youth. John Banville’s intimacy with the sea is very much visible in this novel whenever he tries to describe the form and beauty of the sea and its shore. The series of photographical memories of his past dwell as a sweet and yet bitter burden in his wounded heart forever. John Banville’s The Sea is an attempt to recapture the past. Morden is an example of an ailing man who has a blurred idea of his unpleasant past yet he has come to live amidst the rubbles of it because “the past beats inside him like a second heart”. At the end of the novel, the narrator feels peace as he understands that waves are inevitable in the sea. The beauty of The Sea is its exquisite prose which looks like poetry. It is more suitable and has emerged out successful in this novel because it talks about love, loss and past. Max’s desperation and anguish with his past, present and future are very well related in this novel.