Han Kang – The Vegetarian

Writers generally care about justice, and perhaps it is a sense that they can right certain wrongs with pretty prose which first prompts many of us to put pen to paper. Yet with time, as the world has slowly changed, the injustices in focus have shifted too. Among recent novels, I remember being surprised at Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plough over the bones of the dead, which takes the injustice of humanity’s treatment of animals as its central theme, as some of J.M. Coetzee’s works had done previously. Despite its title, The Vegetarian, by the Korean writer Han Kang, the Nobel laureate in 2024, is not just about human mistreatment of animals. It is rather about human violence more broadly, and avenues for escaping it – not always ones we might expect.

The novel is divided into three parts, each with a different narrator and hence different angle. Three voices to guide us, yet the most important character is Yeong-hye, who is seen through others’ eyes but remains almost silent throughout a story that is nevertheless her own. It is she whose journey of rebellion begins with vegetarianism, but gradually morphs into something more complex. It is she whom, most of all, we as readers are trying to understand.

In “The Vegetarian”, the novel’s first part, things appear straightforward. As straightforward, in fact, as the viewpoint of Mr Cheong, Yeong-he’s wife. Mr Cheong is an asshole, the kind of casual misogynist I imagine many male readers may find themselves slightly unnerved by their proximity to, as I did. He works, expects his wife to know her place, to follow tradition and to keep silent. To him she is “unremarkable” – always a term of endearment, I have been reliably informed by my own girlfriend – until she stops eating meat. This sets off the novel’s drama, but it doesn’t cause any introspection on the part of Mr Cheong, who is incapable of such things.  

Yeong-hye stops eating meat. She has a dream nobody around her really cares enough to try to understand, and then decides that enough is enough. Her existence becomes poisoned by constant nightmares and the first action she takes to protect herself is to remove the meat from the house. There’s a telling moment when Mr Cheong first finds his wife emptying the fridge – he accidentally steps on the squishy bags of meat on the floor because he was only looking straight ahead. This idea of sight is possibly a central one in The Vegetarian – what is seen, and what we would rather avert our eyes from.

Of course, as readers, we have to pay attention, and the text makes sure we see what others might not. “Beef for shabu-shabu, belly pork, two sides of black beef shin, some squid in a vacuum-packed bag, sliced eel that my mother-in-law had sent us from the countryside ages ago, dried croaker tied with yellow string, unopened packs of frozen dumplings and endless bundles of unidentified stuff dragged from the depths of the fridge.” This is just a list, a hallmark of realistic novel detail. But it’s also a lot of meat. All of which came from animals killed in conditions that were probably not exactly humane. It’s just the contents of a fridge-freezer, but at the same time it morphs into a tablet describing human-inflicted suffering.

Korea, as described here, is a society of meat eaters. Yeong-hye’s decision to abandon meat quickly throws her up against her family and her husband. When at a work dinner with Mr Cheong she refuses to eat meat, she tanks his career. When at a family lunch she does the same, her father actually forces her mouth open to make her eat the food while the rest of her family looks on passively or declares their shame at her behaviour. All this is utterly bizarre, if you think about it. A decision not to do something, which harms nobody, (and in fact protects animals), even if it may not be deemed praiseworthy should at least be easy enough to tolerate.

Yet instead, this minor act of rebellion brings to the surface all of the underlying demands (Korean) society places upon the individual, and in particular upon women, to obey their parents and their husbands. Everyone turns on poor Yeong-hye, even as we see just how much violence there is behind their society through their meat-eating, through their childrearing practices (Yeong-hye was beaten as a child), through their traditions. We see the power of society to enforce its norms even as The Vegetarian reveals the very insanity of those norms.

The second part of the novel, “Mongolian Mark”, takes us in a slightly different direction. Yeong-hye has already been “discarded” by her husband and lives on her own after a stint in a mental hospital, where she continues to break the rules by spending a lot of time in the nude, doing something suspiciously close to photosynthesising. We take the perspective of her sister In-hye’s husband, who is an artist. Like Yeong-hye, he is also haunted by a dream. His, however, concerns filming himself having sex with Yeong-hye while they are painted with flowers.

Such desires are neither wholly appropriate nor generally sensible to act upon. However, Yeong-hye has set herself outside of society, and this allows the artist to believe he can act as he wants with her. He is both disturbed and attracted by her, someone who is like a “Buddhist monk” with her “uncanny serenity.” Having cut herself off from society in her flat, Yeong-hye is able to do what she wants, including let herself be painted and taken advantage of. Eventually, the artist gets what he wants, less because Yeong-hye has consented than because she has already spiritually left her body behind. The experience is too strange to be sexual.

For the reader, it is only uncomfortable. Because Yeong-hye has essentially floated her spirit away, she is reduced to a body for her brother-in-law to use. But this just makes it very obvious how men can treat women – as bodies, nothing more. Especially as the moderate efforts the artist puts in to get close to Yeong-hye really involve no efforts to actually understand her or listen to what she has to say.

In the final section we follow In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister, as she tries to take care of her sister, now permanently stored in a mental hospital in the countryside. Yeong-hye has continued her journey out of society, even geographically now. Where in the first part she refused to eat meat, and in the second attempted to photosynthesise, now she refuses to eat at all: “I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” Now Yeong-hye’s goal is simply to wither away and become like a tree – silent and harmless. 

If Mr Cheong were the uncaring voice of casual male misogyny, and In-hye’s husband the kind of predatory misogyny that waits for vulnerability, In-hye is interesting for being a far more reflective and responsible human being, even having a son, Ji-woo. She watches her sister’s decline with a kind of jealousy, for she herself cannot imagine throwing off social responsibilities, yet at the same time seems to long to. This jealousy is mixed with anger – because before Yeong-hye revealed the oppression of her world, In-hye had never been aware of it, or at least thought to question it.

Although it is something we increasingly debate, doctors traditionally have had to keep patients alive whatever their own wishes, and as Yeong-hye no longer eats this becomes an increasing challenge for those around her, one resolved with needles and drips, straitjackets and a screaming Yeong-hye. There’s something truly disturbing in the details of this forcing of life upon someone who has dared to question its value, a final attempt to control Yeong-hye and deprive her of any choice, any control over her own body. Meanwhile In-hye, herself increasingly sleepless, struggling as a (now single) mother and as a business owner, finds herself ever more attracted to Yeong-hye’s own fate, and the strange freedom it represents.

While reading The Vegetarian there were two recent works I thought of for their overlap in themes: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plough over the bones of the dead, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Tokarczuk’s novel has vegetarianism and human cruelty towards animals as its focus, but there was less of a sense of rage at society’s treatment of humans themselves. Partly this was because of the book’s rural setting and isolated protagonist, where The Vegetarian is by contrast a very much more urban, social novel, set in Seoul. But partly this seems to be because the narrator of that novel was just more interested in animals than people. Since the narrative of The Vegetarian is focused on human violence, vegetarianism is only a part of a wider picture, where men hit and control women, kill misbehaving dogs, fathers beat children, and hospital workers restrain those considered mad and force them to behave. It reveals the cruelties we had taken for granted.

Yeong-hye’s response to this violence against her is to become a plant: I wonder whether this was driven by an awareness that to be a human at all meant to be complicit in this violence. Even giving up meat and wearing animal products would not be enough to avoid this, as you would still be part of a patriarchal, soul-crushing society. Once you start seeing the violence everywhere, your options are limited – retreat, acceptance, or repression. In-hye attempts repression, while her sister attempts retreat, and most of the other characters are unaware of any violence at all – and in fact are usually its perpetrators.

And so Yeong-hye retreats into her vegetal state. In this she is not unlike the heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who also retreats from the world, but this time through drugs rather than a rejection of food. Yet while I didn’t have much love for Moshfegh’s novel, I quite liked The Vegetarian, even though both effectively seem to be “pro-retreat”. The difference, I think, is in the characters. The narrator in MYoR&R is basically a super-privileged person like myself whose criticisms and person seem a bit pathetic, while Yeong-hye actually seems to be in a totally hellish society with extremely limited avenues for self-expression or freedom. Hence her retreat seems more defensible.

I don’t think Han Kang actually believes that we should all become plants, either. I can tell she’s really angry about how badly Korean society treats its women. By contrast, I got the impression that Moshfegh didn’t really care about how society treated anyone. This means that The Vegetarian works as a critique even if we dismiss its apparent conclusions. And indeed, In-hye’s section is quite interesting in this regard, as she challenges herself on her own historical inaction, whether when Yeong-hye was a child being beaten by their father, or at the fateful lunch when she was force-fed by the same man. In other words, the novel doesn’t just say “do nothing, retreat” in the way that MYoR&R seems to. It says retreat is a reasonable option in the face of great suffering, but also that action is better than passivity, even if that action is merely to flee.

Not every book, I know, has to propose solutions. Chekhov believed that the writer’s goal was merely to state the question correctly. Like so many great novels of demonstrating the conflict between society and the individual, The Vegetarian shines a light on so much that is wrong yet taken for granted. If its solutions are depressing, they are only depressing in the context of the book. For you or me, the book itself is already part of a solution, raising awareness of problems we might otherwise have passed over in silence. In that sense, it’s already a greatly moral piece of art.

Congrats on the Nobel.  

Writing Catastrophe – Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

More and more we will have to ask ourselves how we might respond to natural disasters in our stories, the kind of stories they might lead us to write. What is the significance of a catastrophe? This is almost a literary question, insofar as it concerns the interplay of meanings and appearances. Man in the Holocene, a novella by the Swiss writer, Max Frisch, provides an example of how we might begin approaching the topic. Ostensibly the record of a widower’s isolation in a Swiss valley cut off by bad weather, it is really a short but intense look at humanity’s attempts to live inside a world where their power and lives are limited.

A recent widower, Herr Geiser finds himself stuck in his house in a valley in Ticino as bad weather cuts off the town from the outside world. Soon even the power goes and he has to stick to matches and canned goods. He entertains himself by building things out of crisp bread and reading. His mind is not that of a young man, however, and he has to take notes by hand to remember what he reads. A little later, he decides instead to use scissors to cut out sections from books and stick them to the wall. Next, he makes an attempt to flee on foot to a neighbouring valley, but returns home. His note-mania continues as his mind declines, with whole diagrams plastered onto the walls, and shortly thereafter the story ends.

Narration

One of the first things I noticed about the novella, which I read in the original German, is the strange narratorial voice. Readers are not close to Herr Geiser at all: to give two examples, we do not learn his first name, and through impersonal and passive constructions (“es” (it), “man” (one)) or phrases like “it is not thinkable” Man in the Holocene builds up a feeling of being almost a work of science or technology, rather than a story. It is as if we are observing some creature at the zoo, except that here the creature is an old man, shuffling about. As a result, we come to see Herr Geiser not as an individual so much as a representative of Man in general (to refer back to the novella’s title) just as the creatures we see at the zoo are supposed to embody their whole species.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, let alone as automata – I certainly do not, at any rate. But Man in the Holocene does much to force us down this route through its most distinctive formal trait – the cuttings that Herr Geiser sticks to the wall.

Cuttings

These are a fascinating novelistic technique and worth dwelling on. When I say cutouts, I mean just that – real cutouts are plastered across the text. They are drawn primarily from history books and encyclopaedias, with a little of the Bible thrown in for good measure, and all are presented in their original formatting. (I never want to read Fraktur, the “German” typeface, ever again, no matter how beautiful it is to look at when you do not actually need to make sense of it.)

Herr Geiser is a man of facts, unlike his wife, who was a reader of fiction. Man in the Holocene presents Herr Geiser attempting to make sense of the world via these facts. When he reads, he reads to expand his knowledge, hence the note-taking which expands into making cuttings. This process of gaining knowledge for the process of understanding, even control over his environment, makes Herr Geiser again rather representative of humanity’s recent Enlightenment destiny as a whole. Furthermore, this entire process of meaning-making is noted explicitly in one extract as something distinctively human – in other words, Herr Geiser’s actions make him more human, even though I said above it had the opposite effect.

One reason for this is because there is more to texts than the motivation behind covering the wall with them – there is also what they say. Generally speaking, like a text by W.G. Sebald, we have a sense as we read Man in the Holocene of accumulating catastrophe. As we learn about Ticino, we read about the countless catastrophes befalling its people, through rock slides and floods and war. Mostly, these are natural catastrophes, which highlight humankind’s powerlessness in the face of nature. We also learn about flora and fauna native to the world, and as Herr Geiser explores his interest in geology we learn about dinosaurs and prehistoric times. 

A sense of scale is one thing that rather makes us seem like animals. Because we are a speck in comparison with geologic time, the significance of our significances seems like nothing of the sort. “Man appears in the Holocene” is a more accurate translation of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän – in other words, we were nothing but ashes in all the years before then, and perhaps just as fated to short lifetimes as the dinosaurs. Indeed, reading about the Tyrannosaurus Rex in particular, it’s hard to avoid making the comparison in our heads that we too are an apex predator, yet just as fragile when we consider the power of nature. Another theme of the cuttings is that we shape nature to live in it, but little good does it do for us when faced with entire valleys slipping away.

This is not the main thing, however. Herr Geiser also cuts out diagrams of dinosaurs, but the final diagram in the book is that of a human being. This kind of echoing reduces us, in spite of our investigating the world, into a creature to be investigated and no different from the dinosaurs on the pages before. Our meaning-making, in particular via religion, is also challenged through the primacy the text places upon scientific work. The Bible might demonstrate humanity’s development, but not if the sections extracted (Noah’s Ark, Creation) are contradicted by the other extracts. Instead, this makes human reasoning look further flawed.

It does not help either that by the end of the book Herr Geiser has essentially lost his mind – there’s an obvious narrative irony in the way that all these attempts to understand the world and the catastrophes befalling it bring Herr Geiser no closer to escaping or mastering them. Note-taking does not make the world take note. This is most explicit, and quite funny, in one of the novella’s central sections, where Herr Geiser endeavours, in vain, to remove a salamander that has ended up in his bathroom. After a few pages of struggling, suddenly readers instead read several extracts about the biology of salamanders – the implication seems to be that Herr Geiser believes that by understanding them a little better, he might be considered the real victor in their duel. It is, of course, not so.

In short, these cuttings are an ambiguous contribution to the novella’s network of meanings. On the one hand, they celebrate humanity as this meaning-deriving creature, driven by knowledge. On the other, they show its animal heritance, frailty and smallness. Generally speaking, they also do something else important – they force readers to put the extracts in relation to the rest of the text and interpret them for ourselves, thus increasing our participation beyond passive reading. We can even say that we join Herr Geiser even if we do not get close to him as a human – we become representatives of the “human being” too.

A Social Animal

Herr Geiser’s wife Elsbeth has died, I presume, shortly before the novella begins. The idea of human beings as social animals is one which I realise is also an important part of how the story builds its network of ideas. Herr Geiser is alone, with only his cat for company. He does visit a local inn at one point, but is largely asocial, before becoming actively antisocial as the novella draws to a close. He reads, but his reading seems pointless, especially when he finds he forgets it all. At the same time, he’s actually dependent on others, though he does not acknowledge it – to give an example, a neighbour brings him soup, without which I doubt he would be able to feed himself.

Frisch’s ideas of gender are a smidgen dated, I have noticed, but the function of Elsbeth’s memory within the text, I think, is to demonstrate how incomplete Herr Geiser’s life is when he is alone. His wife, who we learn reads fiction, symbolises an emotional interaction with the world just as Herr Geiser, through his encyclopaedia mania, symbolises a technological engagement with the world.

Neither, on its own, is sufficient for a fully human life. Man in the Holocene demonstrates how poor Herr Geiser’s single life is by showing how, alone, he declines. (Dementia develops faster in people with less regular social interaction). This is a further irony, because this decline as a human being, into a kind of animal or child, comes even as Herr Geiser continues his knowledge-obsession. The more notes he takes, the less sense he himself makes or can make as a human being.

Through the cutouts which praise human subjugation of the natural world, and the very fact of the town’s existence – “the Federal and local government do everything to ensure the valley does not go extinct” – we have a sense that even though human endeavour seems ultimately insignificant on a geological timescale, it is still better to try to work collaboratively to build human habitable worlds, than just to retreat into ourselves as Herr Geiser does. In this sense, the text is not entirely nihilistic.

As a Novella

With that said, it is hard not to read Man in the Holocene as an overall depressing, nihilistic work. It is a work where we humans simply do not matter. The cutouts, and the descriptions of nature, paint us as utterly insignificant and totally vulnerable to disasters. “Only man knows catastrophes, and only if he survives them; nature knows no such thing.” The relentless repetition of geologic facts emphasises the shortness of our lives, even the lives of homo sapiens as a whole.

We do not even need the cutouts, however. Man in the Holocene is a novella, and it shares many of the central ideas that form has gathered around itself during its storied history within German-language literature, such as madness in the protagonist. In terms of humanity’s smallness, however, another novella trope is important – a serious interest in time and its movements. In Frisch’s story, this comes across in the idea of cyclicity. Throughout the novella we get a sense of the valley as functional unit, with the post bus with its hooting in particular coming to be the obvious symbol for this. But at the novella’s end, all of these things are described in a long panoramic section without Herr Geiser being mentioned once. In other words, we loop back to the story’s beginning, and find that nothing has changed once we remove its central character. We do not need geologic time – even in the short timeframe of the novella we see how easily we are wiped away and replaced without a change to the world’s essence.

In the Context of Frisch’s other works

Man in the Holocene is my third Frisch, after Homo Faber and Montauk. While it shares themes of aging with the latter, in its concern with humanity’s development the more obvious point of comparison is with the former novel. I remember Homo Faber as being critical of humanity’s technological development through the figure of its narrator, who was obsessed with his electric razor, but ultimately struggled to experience emotions, leading to a kind of ruinous personal life. Like Herr Geiser, Walter Faber in his novel tries to understand his world through statistics and facts, but unlike Herr Geiser Faber finds strange coincidences and love forcing him out of his comfortable worldview.

Where Homo Faber was ultimately a cautiously optimistic work, describing a kind of way out of an entirely mechanistic worldview through emotional engagement, Man in the Holocene is no such thing. This is not merely because Herr Geiser’s mental decline is permanent. Rather, what is important here is that it simply does not matter. Humans may change the world however they will, but in the end it will all be washed away by floods, or crushed under heavy stones.

The world has existed since so long ago that we cannot even conceive it, and it will continue long after we have all gone extinct. The result is that nothing matters, even the attempt to write about it or gain knowledge about it, even the attempt to write blog posts about it. Because Elsbeth is dead, there’s no way out for Herr Geisler. Instead, there’s just a nature that is beautiful, but completely indifferent to him and all of us.

Depressing or not, I found it very interesting that the work demonstrated one way we might approach writing about things like climate change. A way that is probably morally irresponsible, but still valid – to write about life in this geological timeframe, showing how meaningless human endeavour is. This is the voice of a climate pessimist, or even a sceptic. The climate is changing extremely fast, geologically speaking and compared to historical changes to the climate, but the effects are felt the same way they are described here in Frisch’s work – as something huge, unstoppable, and utterly indifferent to us. A few weeks ago we had wildfires in California, last year my family’s house in Switzerland was itself flooded and the village cut off from the outside world. At least in the latter case we had insurance.  

When we think of nature, once we stop thinking about it in a Romantic manner – as a source of sublime beauty – we get to this sense that it is indifferent and cruel. (Of course, this is part of what the Romantics meant by sublime, but there is a slightly different emphasis). Clearly we must go a little bit further still, to find some way of writing about catastrophes and human insignificance which does not rule out human agency to make some small positive contribution against them. Without hope and ensuring action against these great impersonal forces and the human forces behind them, Frisch’s book, and humanity as a whole, may find themselves ashes, not some great interplanetary species. 

Unrevealing Revelations in John Banville’s The Sea

John Banville is perhaps Ireland’s most celebrated living author, and as I wanted to read something contemporary and English-language I picked up my copy of The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 2005. With its focus on grief, mourning and aging, it seems perfect for appealing to a prize committee of well-established adults who may feel their bones creak more than they used to, while its use of an unreliable narrator looking back on his life places it alongside Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (also a Booker winner in 1989) and Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (Booker in 2011). Budding writers eyeing the prize, I hope you are taking notes.

The problem with The Sea is that it lacks that wonderful structural bifurcation of The Sense of an Ending, where the story seems finished until the narrator realises he has completely misunderstood his own past. It also, even putting aside the escapist enticements of the interwar manor house setting of The Remains of the Day, lacks a narrator with anywhere near the charm of Stevens in that book, or that tender readerly experience of sad frustration we get as we watch the old butler repeatedly missing what really matters until it is (almost) too late. Instead, what we have in The Sea is a narrator who does not even pretend to himself to be a good person, and some final revelations that really reveal nothing. It’s clever, but has very little heart. 

In The Sea, Max Morden, our art historian narrator, returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday. He carries the grief of his wife’s recent death from cancer, a certain amount of estrangement from his daughter, and another, deeper trauma from that old childhood break, where he got to know the Grace family. As he sits in his room, he writes musingly about these two pasts – the childhood past at the beach with the Graces, and the adult past with his wife Anna. The two are divided by time, but narratively glued together, as Max shifts from one to another as his memory travels. It is this split structure which gives The Sea its great curiosity.

Why write? Perhaps to cope or find order in what seems a mess, or perhaps simply to pass the time. As for us readers, we peruse these notes trying to make sense of the enigma that is the human soul. Max’s soul, that is. What we discover is essentially an exploration of the way that a man’s life can be influenced by his past. The first narrative strand, where Max is on holiday and spending time with the Graces, brings out in him a character trait – shame at his class origins – that influences the rest of his life, which we then see manifested in the second strand concerning Max’s wife Anna, and also ultimately in the narrative set at the time of his writing the notes, where we see this trait from yet another angle.

That human character is shaped by past events is something we writers are obliged to agree to before we are granted our pens – it’s practically in our contract. But here Banville makes backstory the front-story, so to speak. The influence of the Graces comes not, it seems to me, from the traumatic end of that holiday which we eventually learn about, but rather from the very fact of Max’s getting to know them over the course of the work – the accumulation of experiences of another world which ultimately sends him on a life’s journey to escape the world he was born into.

Max is lower class, while the Graces occupy a higher stratum. In a way, that’s all there is to it. Max’s relationship with his quarrelling parents falls apart and resentment towards his uneducated mother grows; he becomes an art historian, ever the refuge for the aspiring un-bourgeois; he marries a woman, at least initially it seems, for the money her father has made; and later he breaks down his relationship with his daughter, Claire, when she prefers to pursue a life that sees her helping those in poverty rather than solidifying Max’s status via continuing his work in the field of art history. A sense of social inadequacy, once present, leads the entirety of Max’s life off course.

This initial encounter with class is complicated, made rich and fragrant in the man’s memory no doubt, by its association with first love and then second, as Max grows enamoured first with Mrs Grace and then with his own coeval, her daughter Chloe. Then there is a certain fairy-tale-like undercurrent to the text thanks to Chloe having a twin, Myles, who is mute. Not for nothing does Max refer to them as “the gods” at times – they seem from another world, and gloriously strange.

Referring to the twins as such, however, also suggests a persistent problem Max has – an inability to see, which we note with a certain ironic smile given his profession. Throughout the book, he seems to prefer to view the world through the lens of his favourite artist, Pierre Bonnard. Chloe, for example, looks “remarkably like the forehead of that ghostly figure seen in profile hovering at the edge of Bonnard’s Table in Front of the Window.” That even some fifty years later he continues to think of her perhaps suggests continued infatuation, but it certainly suggests a problem with accepting how things are.

Indeed, often we have to wait to the end of a given section before Max actually reveals some useful information, about himself or his life. Take this shocking, painful, and pained admission of his wife’s frailty, which comes as a standalone paragraph after several unrelated long paragraphs on the child Max’s habit of finding bird nests – “Anna leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on to the floor, her burning brow pressed in my palm, full and frail as an ostrich egg.” Obviously, we need what comes before to see how it leads Max back to his pain, and also to give additional heft to the image of the ostrich egg. But it does mean that we spend much of the book sifting through memories, waiting for the occasional pithy statements that sometimes do not land.

(I am also not sure how honest it is as an approach, from a writing perspective. It feels a bit cheap – as if Banville had this admittedly great image of the egg, then decided to create the backstory to bring us to it. This is the cheapness of musings and memory – because they don’t really connect to anything, we can make up whatever narrative or language or image demands.)

Evasion, unseeing – Max is an unreliable narrator. We know them by now. He writes of childhood or of eggs and really he’s writing about his grief or longing. He misinterprets overheard information and he’s a flawed character, hitting his dog as a child and spouting misogynist twaddle as an adult. He hides things too, primarily his alcoholism, but in a way that the careful reader notices. All this is fine – it’s what such narrators do.  

The problem is that Banville really does nothing with any of this. Unlike Stevens at Ishiguro’s novel’s closing moments, Max does not actually learn anything about his life. The story ends with a minor factual discovery, but not growth. He may have written his pain out onto the page, but he doesn’t seem to have overcome it, or changed, or anything. The conclusion of the novel basically sees Max forced to accept certain realities he was previously disinclined to, but that again is not growth. We do not say that the suspect taken away in handcuffs has grown because she has stopped resisting – nor can we say it here.

Reader, I go into novels looking for ideas and journeys – maybe that’s my problem, but as an approach it largely clears the ground to let me enjoy a variety of things. The Sea basically has no ideas except that grief is often only approachable through evasions and that class shame can last an awfully long time. Nor does it have any journey to speak of. The traumatic event at the end of the childhood holiday seems to have had far less influence on Max’s subsequent life than his experience of embarrassment about his parents’ financial situation. As a final revelation, it reveals nothing to us.

In the same way, when Max then learns as an adult that something he had overheard at a critical moment during the final moments of his holiday with the Graces was wrong, it offers no catharsis for him or for us because that overheard information would not have stopped the traumatic event from taking place – the truth replaces the falsehood but all the bother would still have happened. Everything is disconnected, unsatisfactory. Even the sea itself is underutilised as an image!

There are readers who can drift along for page after page, enjoying a good metaphor or digression. I am not one of them – sorry. (Readers shocked at this admission should consult the name of the blog.) I can enjoy beautiful prose, and The Sea is beautiful, with plenty of phrases underlinable, but that’s not enough. These phrases ought to be connected to something, some idea or development or existence. Instead, they are like beautiful drawings on the sand, waiting to be washed away by the tide, as the memory of this book may well be for me, as soon as I start the next one.