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The Sea
by John Banville


5.8

based on 25 reviews
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based on 14 votes
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BOOKS:

Christine Falls

Official Publisher Site

This tale of memory and loss from the Irish novelist centers on a man who returns to the seaside town where he spent summers as a child after the death of his wife.

Knopf, 208 pages
11/01/2005
$23.00

ISBN: 0307263118

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

NOTES:
Winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Boston Globe Gail Caldwell

An autumnal, elegiac novel whose desolate story is carried along by the sweet and stormy tides of its exquisite, sometimes too exquisite, prose.

Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones

[Banville's] best novel so far.

Publishers Weekly

This novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life. [7 Nov 2005, p. 54]

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran

Above all else, expect from The Sea a ceaseless tide of ravishing prose, the cadences of which are designed to slowly dissolve the shoreline separating the artificial exercise of recording felt experiences from the actual experiences themselves. [5 Nov 2005]

The Independent John Tague

[The Sea] confirms Banville's reputation as once of finest prose stylists working in English today and, in the sheer beauty of its achievement, is unlikely to be bettered by any other novel published this year.

Washington Post John Crowley

The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of its fragments... are a wonder.

USA Today Deirdre Donahue

The Sea offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. It's not a comfortable novel, but it is undeniably brilliant.

The Guardian Nicholas Lezard

Banville's book recalls such poised masters as Proust and Beckett (and, indeed, James) not because he wants you to know how well-read he is, but to invoke a kind of guarantee that he knows fiction has responsibilities to its subjects as well as its readers.

The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty

This misshapen but affecting novel turns out to be about something even more familiar than the loss of innocence: it's about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife.

The Nation Claire Messud

Banville's novel is remarkable in the end not for what it says, self-consciously, about life's great themes but for what it knows, and richly conveys, about what it is to be alive, while continuously experiencing loss.

New York Review Of Books Gabriele Annan

Banville's prose can be lush to the point of overwritten. That is the price the reader has to pay for the overwhelmingly sensuous impact of sight, sound, and smell in it.

The Independent Peter J. Conradi

[Banville] is prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase, so we read him slowly, relishing the stream of pleasures he affords.

The Spectator Sebastian Smee

It is a brilliant, sensuous, discombobulating novel.

The Guardian Finn Fordham

Literary allusions play hide and seek in this very literary novel.

The Economist

Mr Banville's style affords the reader a voluptuous, unfashionable pleasure that grows with every re-reading of the book and casts the story with ease into second place.

Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp

Has so many beautifully constructed sentences that every few pages something cries out to be underlined.

Kirkus Reviews Bruce Allen

A beautifully composed narrative that shifts among multiple time frames and obsessive preoccupations.

London Review Of Books Adam Phillips

In The Sea, Banville has written an utterly absorbing novel about the strange workings of grief, and the gratuitous dramas of memory.

Los Angeles Times Jack Miles

An utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile. [6 Nov 2005]

Daily Telegraph Tibor Fischer

There's lots of lovely language, but not much novel.

Entertainment Weekly Mark Harris

Banville's craftsmanship and exactitude are always in evidence. But, for a novel that unfurls a virtual thesaurus of adjectives to describe the ocean and sky, The Sea is, ironically, a bit too dry and airless for its own good

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters, whose fierce powers of observation and description are rendered poignantly meaningless by failings of moral temperament, but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody.

New York Observer David Thomson

Too much of The Sea is an elbow in the readerâs ribs, and a weird uneasiness on the part of the writer. [14 Nov. 2005, p. 31]

TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Robert MacFarlane

The Sea feels--disappointingly from such a gifted and interesting writer--tired and retried, and other near-anagrams indicating second-handedness.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

A stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale about an aging widower revisiting his past.

The average user rating for this book is 5.8 (out of 10) based on 14 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Michael A gave it a10:
Don't let the fact that it won the Booker prize color your opinions or anything. This sort of asshattery is exactly why user reviews for media other than movies and videogames is utterly and absolutely worthless to anyone who has read anything in the last five years that isn't Harry Potter.

Jeff A gave it a0:
Worst book i have ever read

Brian F gave it a5:
A short story with at least a hundred pages of florid, occasionally maudlin padding. The substance of the book, memory mainly, is sometimes insightful and interesting. Don't know how it's Booker material.

Dan B. gave it a3:
Pretty much I'd agree with Janet P, below, except that I didn't find the prose particularly compelling, despite many fine and poetic phrases. Frankly I couldn't read the whole thing... after 75 pages or so I started skpping around, which I don't recall ever doing before.

Anna F gave it a4:
I loved the Untouchable and thought I could rely on Banville for a demanding but rewarding read- for precision and originality- but what has happened to him in recent years? His prose flows beautifully but he didn't seem to be saying anything -even to himself- that wasn't already overfamiliar. The characters never came off the page. I wasn't convinced that the parallel between the childhood memories and his experience of loss was anything more than a literary device. I didn't feel he was focusing on what he was saying - only on how he was saying it- and he overdid that too!

Chris K gave it an8:
Nabokov's influence is quite apparent throughout this novel, but Banville creates a style of his own.

Warrick W. gave it a9:
Slow and meditative, this beautiful novel hovers between the sea and the land, between the present and the past, between memory and imagination. Don't look for a plot, let it wash over you.

The Sea by John Banville

The Sea
by John Banville