John Banville's latest novel is simultaneously about growing up and growing old. Its narrator, now in his sixties, is revisiting the Irish coastal resort where, as a child, he encountered the Grace family, who mysteriously changed his life. But Max Morden is not simply retrieving his childhood. His wife having died, he is also in flight from bereavement and the smell of mortality. Interweaving traumatic episodes from his remote and recent past, the novel is concerned with rites of passage: coming-of-age and coming of old age; awakening and dying.

Generically, the situation seems promising. The whispered promise of revelation is reminiscent of, say, Michael Frayn’s Spies, which satisfyingly combined reflections in old age with the puzzles and discoveries of childhood. Here, however, progress towards enlightenment is clogged by stylistic excess. Endlessly fussing over his phrases — “if that is the word I want”, “if that is the way to put it” — Morden proves a maddening narrator. Self-caressingly fond of fancy epithets (“velutinous”, “cinereal”, “horrent”, “caduceus”), he cultivates a style of puffed-up grandeur. Announcing that his wife was diagnosed with cancer, he writes: “In the midst of the imperial progress that was our life together a grinning losel had stepped out of the cheering crowd and sketching a parody of a bow had handed my tragic queen the warrant of impeachment.” Asking his twentysomething daughter whether she still has teddy bears, he says: “Your lares familiares . . . I suppose you have them still, propped on your maiden couch.”

Morden’s addiction to exotic conceits makes it difficult to determine just what he got up to during his seaside holiday. At the age of 10 he regarded the Graces as “gods” who had singled him out for their favour. Since they had a motorcar and stayed in a big house, while he and his parents rented a chalet, his awestruck response is understandable. But, in fact, this social explanation fades out while the deification of the family remains. Mr Grace is an “old grinning goat god”, a satyr (but also, confusingly, “the Poseidon of our summer”). Mrs Grace is a daemon, an avatar, a maenad. The twin children are also recruited for mythology. Myles, who is mute and has webbed toes (“the marks of a godling”), is a “malignant sprite”. Chloe, producing “an archaic pipe-note” by blowing on a blade of grass, is Pan. Even the children’s governess, Rose, is “Ariadne on the Naxos shore”.

Supplementing these mythic allusions are numerous embedded quotations from literature (Yeats, Keats, Milton, Tennyson, Conrad, Shakespeare, Eliot, Stevens) and recurrent analogies from painting. The narrator compares his face in a mirror to the last studies Bonnard made of himself and to an early self-portrait by Van Gogh. He notes that Rose variously resembles a Picasso portrait and a Duccio madonna, and that his daughter, with her “spindly legs and big bum”, is like Tenniel’s drawing of Alice.

Whose voice are we hearing, one wonders, and what are we to make of it? Morden is a retired art historian, which explains the painterly analogies. He has been, by his own account, a dilettante kept by a rich wife. At one point, he recalls a frustrating dream of typing on a machine “that was lacking the word I”. This is not a problem afflicting his waking self: precious, sensitive, narcissistically verbose, he is glued to the first-person pronoun. Perhaps, then, Morden is a flawed narrator. Perhaps his mythic parallels, his artistic allusions, all the apparatus of his cranked-up eloquence are meant to be as laboured as they seem. Yet, tempting as it is, such a reading seems doubtful. Most of the literary features of the book are prominent elsewhere in Banville’s fiction, and its climax provides no sense of withdrawal from its egotistical protagonist. In fact, despite Morden’s roguish enquiry, “why should I be less susceptible than the next melodramatist to the tale’s demand for a neat closing twist?”, the climactic revelations, such as they are, lack both neatness and drama. Banville has a talent for sensuous phrasing, and pungent observation of human frailty, but in other areas important for fiction — plot, character, pacing, suspense — The Sea is a crashing disappointment.

THE SEA
by John Banville

Picador £16.99 pp264

Available at the Books First price of £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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