Reading Order
The Sea Reading Order
John Banville's The Sea (2005) is the Booker Prize-winning Irish novel about Max Morden, a recently widowed art historian who retreats to the seaside town where he spent a childhood summer that ended in tragedy — and who narrates, in Banville's sumptuous, image-heavy prose, both the present of his grief and the past of that summer. One of the most formally accomplished novels in the Booker Prize history, it is a novel about memory, loss, and the impossibility of recovering what is gone — written in a style that is simultaneously mourning and celebration of the language itself.
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The Sea
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The Sea
John Banville·2005·Stand-alone Booker Prize winner. Banville's other major novels include The Book of Evidence (1989), Shroud (2002), and the Benjamin Black crime novels written under a pseudonym.
The Sea — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Sea by John Banville about?
The Sea follows Max Morden, a widower and art historian, who returns to the seaside village in Ireland where he spent a childhood summer many decades before with a wealthy family called the Graces — a summer that ended in a drowning. Alternating between his present grief for his recently dead wife and his memories of that childhood summer, the novel is about the way the past is both irrecoverable and inescapable, and about the relationship between grief for a person and grief for a self that existed before everything went wrong.
Is The Sea by John Banville difficult to read?
The Sea is formally demanding in the sense that Banville's prose is highly wrought — he is one of the most deliberate stylists in contemporary fiction in English, and his sentences reward slow, attentive reading rather than reading for plot. The novel's structure (alternating between two time periods, each narrated from the perspective of the same man at different stages of grief) is fairly accessible. Readers who love Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day or Marilynne Robinson's Gilead — novels of retrospective narration and formal prose beauty — usually find The Sea immediately congenial.
What other books has John Banville written?
Banville's major literary novels include The Book of Evidence (1989, Guinness Peat Aviation Award), The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse (2000), and Shroud (2002), along with several earlier novels. He also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black — the Quirke series of Dublin crime novels set in the 1950s, beginning with Christine Falls (2006), which are accessible entertainments quite different in style from his literary fiction. The Sea is generally considered his masterpiece and the most accessible starting point for readers new to his literary work.
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