Genre: Literary Fiction
Page Count: 268
The beach had a downward slope and so the waves, which were
higher on that overcast day, came rushing in with more intensity and height. I
went to sit nearer to the sea, and my younger sister soon joined me. There, the
waves not only reached us, but fell right on our lapses, flowing away the sand
beneath our crossed legs. There were stones places at this spot of the beach,
as a protection for the people to hold on to, in case the waves on their return
to the sea, should try to take them with it. But where I was sitting, there
were no stones. Unaware I was of the waves power and the sea’s horrifying
abundance. A big wave rose and fell upon me and my sister, and I immediately felt
the earth, or sand, on which I was sitting, melt and disappear. I was now
floating on the water and so was my sister. With the same intensity, or even
more intensely, as the waves had fell upon us, they now rushed back to the sea
– taking us with them. Our smiling and cheerful faces soon would have turned
bleak to those watching, or to us at least, as we neared to drown. The waves
had carried us off the beach and into the beginning of the sea; our shouts, if
we could shout, were not of joy but of terror. I grabbed by sister’s arm, or
her sleeve really – how the mind decides what is dear to us even in the most
baffling of moments. The second wave came, pushing us into the sea water, and
upon its return, drifted us even further into the abundant water. I couldn’t
see, or hear, except for the muddy and grey water or the roar of the waves;
looking back, I can see myself and my sister being rolled over and over, like
laundry in the washing machine. With each new wave, I was drifting further, and
so was my sister, whose sleeve I clung unto with all my might. I didn’t know
how to swim, my sister definitely not; but being the elder one, I knew I
wouldn’t give up just yet, and so grabbing onto my sister, I would stop her
from giving up either. I did not know how long or how far we had drifted into
the sea, but soon the lifeguards reached, and swam us both to the shore. I had
salt water flowing from my nose, ears, and mouth. Coming out, I quickly looked
over to my sister, who looked even worse, with a shock on her face, but a weak
one, just like herself, being beaten by the sea’s abundancy and indifference.
It was the summer of August 2019.
Reading Banville’s Booker prize winning novel ‘The Sea’, I
was reminded of this incident that took place on a family holiday a couple of
years ago. Banville’s truly beautiful and deeply reminiscent prose brought
back, not only this horrible incident, but many memories from each of my
sea-shore visits. And like Max Morden, the protagonist of this novel, I found
myself reliving these moving memories of the past in the static present in
which I was reading this book. Morden is an art historian who, at the opening
of the novel, visits a seaside village he used to come to with his parents.
Coming back to this place that had shaped his past, Max is soon struck by a
Proustian moment whereby he recalls the Grace family who were also here on a
vacation on that summer holiday. Mrs. Grace, whom Max, at his puberty age,
eagerly wanted see naked, and Mr. Grace, a man interested more in newspapers
than in his family, and their twins, a boy named Myles and a girl named Chloe,
both roughly the same age as Max himself. Also Rose, the nursemaid of the
twins, whom also Max wished to see bare.
Max is here with his daughter now; here to distract or unfix
his mind from, Anna, his wife’s recent and tragic death. Claire, Max’s
daughter, an adult herself now, elder than Max from his childhood when he met
the Grace family, is here with her father on another vacation. She doesn’t
understand or know Max much, but is very concerned about him – trying to bring
back her father from what seems a dissolving misery. Anna, whom Max remembers
and recalls so vividly now that she is no more, seems more alive and present in
Max’s recollections than her presence itself was when she was alive. But is the
retreat to this village, where in that summer vacation Max felt drawn and eager
to make acquaintance with Mrs. Grace and the twins, would offer Morden a mere
distraction or a life reflecting exercise whereby he would put into perspective
his past and present?
Having already written a paragraph from a novel, or memory,
of my own, followed by a lingering and extensive blurb of the novel itself, I
would avoid my general dive into the whereabouts of how I crossed path with
this novel (at the Karachi international bookfair) – but would instead write
what I have been eager and patient to write about ever since I started reading
this book, which is how beautiful – truly, magnificently, deeply, awesomely,
mesmerizingly – beautiful this book is! Banville’s prose is just purely
literary and purely touching. I dare say that never have I had this much of
profound pleasure and joy in reading a novel, and particularly, a story that
matched so perfectly with the voice, sentences, delivery, and prose of the
author. Banville not only has a deeply touching, profoundly reminiscent,
fascinatingly reflecting, and utterly lovely story, but a prose that so
befittingly and perfectly matches the tone and feel that story. If Barnes’ ‘The
Sense of an Ending’ was my last year’s favorite book in my newly discovered
genre of ‘memory-novels’, this is definitely my favorite of this year – and even
my favorite of all time, yet.
‘They are like hits of some delicious drugs, these
sentences’, writes Daily Telegraph in praise of this novel – which is so true
both of Banville’s prose and about it. His sentences are repeatedly infiltrated
by thoughts, and more thoughts, and what Banville does is not to stop them, but
let them fall as they fall, and place them in between commas, and more commas.
This is my favorite kind of prose; this is it! This prose is a reflection of a mind
that speaks in an uninterrupted and continuous manner, and often, because of
its flow, thoughts keep emerging, one after another, each befitting in its
place, important in beautifying and completing the narration, the sentences,
and Banville’s pen acts like a submissive medium to this mighty yet humble and
beautiful narration, and lets the words fall, making perfect, contrarily
coherent, and deliciously hitting sentences. Making of a prose that is so
effortless and enlivening to read! Whoever said that writers work so hard to
make it look so easy, said it right – but Banville’s hard work is paradoxically
an easy one, that of not interrupting the flow of your thoughts and words.
While there is a mild anxiety when a novel takes a dual-timeline
approach in telling its story, where the reader has to adjust himself each time
a chapter ends, and another begins, from a present tense to a past one,
Banville does this so seamlessly and effortlessly that ‘the present and the
past seems to melt into each other’. There are no chapters here, and the novel
is separated into two parts only. Banville moves back and forth to past and
present as if he’s writing about one thing, one tense, one narrative – just
one, not two. And never once did I feel the need to know which story Max is
telling, his wife’s death or the twins’. Despite its only two-parts and the
continuous narration, the flow from past to present, and vice versa, is truly
amazing and effortless to read in this novel.
As if this novel had already not been a surprise favorite of
mine in every way, its passages where Max, experiencing a sexual awakening,
eagerly waits to see glimpses of bare female bodies, struck right to my heart
and sensual feelings. As of recent, I have become ungently aware and driven by
my sexually awakened feelings and emotions, and in order to cope and contact
with these vulnerable and intrusive sexual thoughts and awareness, I have been
looking for literature based on such tales of sexual awakenings. Max’s
experiences of watching Mrs. Grace’s shadow as she takes off her clothes, or
seeing Rose change her wet swimsuit behind a towel on the beach, measured in an
exacting way to my eagerness in wanting to see and touch bare parts of a
woman’s body.
‘The Sea’ has one of the most gently impactful stories I
have ever read with a gentle jaw-dropping ending, and one of the most and
truly, and I mean truly, beautiful and perfect-to-the-story prose that I know I
won’t find anywhere else soon. Read this book readers of the literary fiction –
this deserves all your heart-won compliments!
Ratings: 5/5 ***** January 26, 2021_