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.

Six Years of Mostly About Stories

I started Mostly About Stories towards the end of January, 2019, which makes it about six years old and provides the excuse for this post. I’ll cover some things I did this year, some writing I’ve done, and the statistics.

If you want to know what I’ve read and enjoyed this year, you can check out the updated All Posts page.

Personal

This past year I moved to Germany, where hopefully, employers willing, I will remain for the next year or two. For various reasons, primarily interrail tickets and the German Deutschlandticket, which gives me unlimited travel on all non-long-distance public transport at a very reasonable price, I have been quite busy travelling about. I’ve seen the Black Forest, Berlin, Hamburg and Luebeck, Copenhagen, Vienna, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Amsterdam, Tessel, Norderney, Utrecht, Maastricht, Aachen and Muenster. Of these, I do regret that after visiting Heidegger’s cottage in Todtnauberg the blog post on him never materialised. Another time. 

Compared to Russia, Germany is not very exciting. Still, I cannot say I’m not glad to be in a location where war seems unthinkable. While my German is reasonably good and improving daily, it’s challenging to integrate fully where I am, though I am working on it. Mostly, I end up with my co-workers. I would say the atrophy of my Russian has been halted by having many colleagues from that part of the world, while my Ukrainian has improved, now I have a friend here so crazy about a certain vision of her country that she has a trident stuck on her arm. Progress on my Polish is not good enough for my girlfriend, especially when I am learning Ukrainian over it, which even Ukrainians like to tell me is useless to me. Still, we get there too, slowly.

When I wrote my Three Years of Mostly About Stories post, I was struggling with combining work and reading, to say nothing of the writing I wasn’t doing. The company I was with didn’t know what to do with me, my immigration status in Russia felt precarious, and I was living under the shadow of a war that, it turned out, really was imminent.

Now I can say with some confidence that things have never been so good. I have a flat within walking distance of work, with green spaces nearby, and friends around. I actually have friends, where moving to Moscow was merely entering a vortex of potentiality. Work is fine – I am finishing up a graduate scheme so I get to try a variety of things to really work out what it is I want to be doing – and I get paid well. As noted, I’ve done lots of travelling. But the main thing is that I have finally sorted out the writing.

Writing

Mostly About Stories is a bit of fun and I hope readers treat it as such. The real thing is to become a writer of great fiction. To do that, I must first become a writer of fiction. At school I wrote a novel, which after paying an editor to go through, was picked up by an agent. I then, being about sixteen, got bored, feeling I was improving so fast that there was no point bothering with that old work. This was a mistake, obviously, but whatever. At university, I used to reach a boil of inspiration where suddenly things would spill over and I’d spend a weekend neglecting my studies and spewing out a short story. These I was proud of, and ultimately self-published on Amazon for a few friends to buy. A little later, I took it down.

Even with those bright spots, I struggled to write. I wrote and was immediately disheartened by the words, which meant I ended up producing blank pages rather than drafts that could later be improved. War and Peace, a novel I hold in high esteem, and which seems supremely natural, was actually redrafted and line-edited something like ten times. Perhaps only Goethe could get perfection the first time round, but plenty of people have produced things which in the end were even better, and all because they did not give up on what they started. This was not me: I produced neither perfection nor imperfection, unless we count the blank page perfection, and I am not into that kind of game.

After graduating, I did write the odd story, but given I spent vast amounts of time unemployed thanks to a certain autocrat, I was not making the most of my time. Writers get better by writing, they often say. There might be more to it than that, but it’s a good starting point, and one I wasn’t much aligned with. For various reasons, but primarily this incessant self-criticism, I got nowhere. It was also a little disturbing that I had no “ideas” for a novel. Any amateur will find it’s fairly easy to come up with great ideas – the family saga, the modernised War and Peace, etc – but it soon becomes apparent that these overarching ideas must be broken down into little ideas, little narratives, or they will not be possible to write at all. It wouldn’t even be akin to building the skeleton of a house – it would be like putting up the walls without the corners, and watching them fall over at the first gust. It’s the little ideas, the observations that sparkle on each page, that make a novel great – great ideas for overarching stories are easy, as ultimately there’s less originality there than you might think.

Anyway, this idea that is absolutely central to my idea of my own self – that I am a writer, must be a writer – was finding little justification in reality. Until this year, round about the half way part.

I resolved it in two ways. The first solution arose last summer, when for the first time I had an idea for a “novel”. Something more modest and practical than the ideas above. On its own, that was no salvation. But I was also helped by technology. I went and bought a small folding phone stand and a Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike with my laptop, where I could always tab-out to something else, with a phone if you are in the writing app it’s harder to leave. This simple technological adjustment made it possible to write by lowering the barrier of entry and raising the barrier to exit. Rather than forcing myself with great effort to sit down in front of my computer, only to write a few words that disgusted me, and then immediately switch to some tab or video that would entertain me, here I could write with almost no effort at all. From bed, on a cramped train, lying on a sofa, and so on. Because phones have smaller screens, there was also only so much neurotic re-reading I could do. I just had to accept what I’d written, and move on.

The result was a novel. 114’000 words – some good, some definitely not – with a beginning, middle, end, and characters who were, at least when you squinted, recognisably human. Also, gladly, it was not a work that was “semi-autobiographical”, a phrase that always makes my stomach churn. This was and is, absolutely, something to be proud of. I had made something come into existence that only I could have done.

But once it was done, in this first draft, I realised I still could not write anything else. Inspiration is great, but clearly unreliable. At a given moment, I’ve got a couple of things I want to write, but not necessarily so desperately that I must write them. Not enough to go back to that same method, anyway.

A second revolution was needed, one that was far simpler. I adjusted my routine. I am something of a control-maniac, and one of the joys of my life in Germany is that I have my own flat and life here. Initially, I planned each day to get up a little before 8, then from 8:05 to 8:25 I did my morning routine (shower, bathroom, clothes, etc), before leaving at around 8:27 to ensure I arrived at work at 8:57 and in time for any 9:00 meetings. I had imagined that, when I came home each day, I could then have “half” of the day to myself. This was delusional. I was not tired, but I was tired enough that this was not leading to the results I wanted. Yes, I might read, but certainly I was not going to sit down and write.

I have always had struggles with sleeping, though not proper insomnia or anything that might lead to wacky fiction. In the autumn I was waking up regularly at say six and unable to get back to sleep easily, so I decided one day to have a go just getting up then. Combined with my morning cup of matcha, I found I had something functional. I still got ready to leave at 8:27 and kept my alarms in place, but instead those alarms were not reminding me to leave bed, but rather to finish up my writing. Now, I woke up around six forty with no alarm (having also moved my bedtime an hour earlier), got up, made my matcha, and sat down to write. I then wrote until the alarms forced me to get ready for work.

So far this method has been in operation for a few months. Not every day has been a success, but I would say the clear majority of mornings find me doing this. No matter how rubbish the words are, I get them down, between 500 and 1000 of them. I then head away to work, knowing that however badly I spend the rest of my time, my day has been no failure.

These are promising developments in the life of a writer. It is impossible for me to say whether the quality has improved, or will improve, with this system. We might also question whether writing in this way forces me to produce things that are less cohesive compared to the several thousand words I might write in a single day when the inspiration pressure cooker was exploding back at Cambridge. But at least I am writing. I have no particular desire to be published at this stage, so I am happy just to get drafts on the page, for further editing and examination down the line. I have a well-paying bourgeois job – I’m no starving writer desperately trying to see things in the papers. This gives me the luxury of writing as much as I want and whatever I want, before I actually start trying to make money off it.

Mostly About Stories is just a blog about the books that I’ve been reading, and will not contain my fiction as a matter of principle, though thematic interests may be shared between work “off the blog” and the work that does go on the blog. Thinking aloud is nice, but so is thinking on paper. Borges used to ask why he should write a book of five hundred pages when he could write a book review for this imaginary book and get it all down in five. I am no Borges, but writing the review first, then the novel itself, may not be a bad way to go in terms of learning thematic focus.

While I do not want to share my fiction on the blog (ewww…), readers who think they might be interested in reading and providing feedback should certainly get in touch.

Stats

There’s inevitably little visibility on the amount of views that literature blogs get, and I cannot see much harm in sharing my own. Last year I had a significant increase in views. I have no idea why but I cannot complain. I’ve also had interesting comments. Really that’s all I can ask for. If you are reading, thanks.

Conclusion

Anyway, it appears to have been a good year. I have entered 2025 reading more, writing more, and getting better at the things that matter. Now all I need is a permanent position at work, and things will be sehr gut indeed.

Vasily Grossman – Life and Fate

Life and Fate is so good I almost can’t write about it. Despite its concentration camps, its scenes in the Gulag and the death camps, the interrogations in Lubyanka and all the deaths coming so early for characters we want to live forever, the tears that came to my eyes while reading were tears of joy – and when I punched the air it was not with rage but as a spontaneous expression of awe at the work’s titanic mastery. In quite important ways, it does more than War and Peace. But Life and Fate is not an epic like that work; rather, it is its negative.

An epic creates myths; Grossman destroys them. Tolstoy’s work created ideas of Napoleon and the War of 1812 which remain sticky to this day even as he tried to destroy the idea of the “Great Man” shaping history. The central ideologies of the mid-20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, also aimed at mythmaking – the Thousand Year Reich, the October Revolution. Life and Fate annihilates these myths while still retaining the hallmarks of the epic form – a vast canvas, a willingness to philosophise, and the detached tone of a writer who sits beside God. It’s probably one of the best books I have read – or ever will.

This idea of Life and Fate as an anti-epic, or perhaps alternatively as an epic of humanism, is one way to approach the book. I wrote about Grossman’s earlier Stalingrad, which I read immediately before Life and Fate (together they must be a little longer than Tolstoy’s book), within the context of truth-telling. But if that book, written under Stalin’s last years, attempted to push truth through the gaps in the censors’ red ink, Life and Fate instead tells it straight out. The reading experience is vastly improved as a result, with characters humanised by their ability to experience such feelings as doubt or a desire for infidelity. But we might also say that if we were dutiful Soviet citizens we needed both works to experience their full impact – Stalingrad to begin weakening our trust in the regime’s narrative, and Life and Fate to replace its totalising narrative with many individual ones.

The two works share a core cast of characters, centring around the Shaposhnikov family. There are limited physical overlaps in this work as it begins with them scattered where in Stalingrad they were initially together, but there are enough connections – even if it is just a character thinking of another – to make us feel as if we are observing a shared world. In a world at war, after all, people cannot be together. In my post on Stalingrad I called that work panoramic, with its vision stretching to miners in the Urals and the full range of Soviet citizens inhabiting the city of Stalingrad itself. Yet immediately upon reading Life and Fate I felt embarrassed at giving it that designation. To say something is panoramic is almost to close the book and say that we don’t need any more voices – it’s a statement that mutes others.

In Life and Fate we hear many of these voices that are lost. There’s Karimov, a Tatar intellectual who cries over the murder of so many of his people’s brightest stars in the early years of the Soviet Union; there’s Kristya, the Ukrainian peasant woman who lost her family during the Holodomor yet saves the Russian soldier Semyonov from starvation; there’s Abarchuk, trapped in the Gulag. Grossman, with a bravery that is hard to appreciate from here, names everything evil that he can. Whether Gulag or death camp (and he was among the first to reach Treblinka), mass deportation (of the Crimean Tatars and others), the arbitrary famines during collectivisation, the mass murders of innocents in 1937, or just the lies of Russian nationalism and the pervasive Soviet anti-Semitism, in Life and Fate we have a kind of record of it. Akhmatova, in her Requiem, regretted that she could not name all the victims of The Terror by name. Grossman, it feels, gets pretty damn close.

In Stalingrad, the Germans were portrayed in a way that left the perceptive reader aware that Grossman’s criticisms against them could easily be reflected back to the Soviets. Here, we are explicit. SS Officer Liss tells the captured old revolutionary Mostovskoy that they are basically one in the same. Later we might find another parallel – Mostovskoy expects to be tortured during questioning, but it is commissar Krymov who is tortured instead – and by his own people in Moscow. Through the story of Viktor Shturm, the novel’s Jewish hero, we see the arbitrariness of state power. At first he is praised for his scientific discoveries, but then the political mood changes and Shturm finds himself cast out of his job. A few weeks later and Stalin decides he doesn’t want to be behind on building a nuclear bomb and Shturm’s fortunes are restored yet again.

Yet if this work were only negative, only critical, it would be miserable. Dismissing that world – the world of the Soviet Union in the years of the war against Hitler – too readily is itself an evil. A lot of people died to defeat Hitler, far more than perhaps needed to, but in many cases those people volunteered quite readily to defend their homelands against invasion. During the war they displayed great strength and fortitude. There were heroes among them, even if their state was not always playing the role of hero. Grossman’s love for the defenders of Stalingrad is real. The defence of the city itself was, at least in part, truly epic. But where Stalingrad ends with a celebration of that very heroism, Life and Fate as usual goes further. One of the most chilling parts of the book is the growing menace we perceive as the Soviet authorities realise they have the Germans on the back foot. It is at that point that the state decides it is time to exact its revenge, and all those fates which had seemed so positive are turned to ashes under the Stalinist, KGB gaze.

In such a nuanced view of the war, Grossman differs significantly from Tolstoy, who is both mentor and rival in Grossman’s two novels. One thing I noticed rereading it at the beginning of last year was how naïve, how sentimental War and Peace seems, how disgusting even the light nationalism of its later parts is. The Russian soul is not the hero of Life and Fate, unless that soul means the desire for a people to defend its homes. In War and Peace, ultimately, we have some delightful aristocrats who are trying to work out how to live, with the war just providing some novel opportunities for engaging with a problem which is ultimately mainly a concern for a man or woman of money, leisure, and time for reflection.

Life and Fate is concerned with a much more pressing matter, one that comes long before we can start thinking about how to live in the Tolstoyan sense. That concern is how to survive, how to live under totalitarianism pressure, how to protect the self from a state and society that are attempting at every stage to enchain or annihilate it. This is not a concern that is any less relevant now, even if many of us are less at risk of getting shot. Simply put, it is about human dignity and its preservation.

This is something we like to say, or used to like to say, about the great writers of Russia’s nineteenth century. Tolstoy celebrates the peasant, but ended up in later years having vitriol for the aristocrat or bourgeois. The Ukrainian Gogol celebrated the little man, but only so long as he was Russian. Against Dostoevsky we can let Karimov speak, who says “I’m a Tartar who was born in Russia and I cannot pardon a Russian writer his hatred of Poles and Yids.” Dostoevsky might tell us interesting things about people, but dignity is not part of it. Who then do we have?

The answer, for Grossman, is Chekhov, whose understated style we also see in Life and Fate with its short chapters and almost entirely dislocated impressionistic stories. Here is why, according to another one of the characters:

“Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness – with people of every estate, every class, every age… More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people – a Russian democrat. He said – and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings!” People were themselves before they were their identities, regardless of these identities – ethnic, religious, material. Of all the Russian writers Chekhov is the one whose project to care and depict was not led off course by ideas about how the world should be. Or, as he famously said himself “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

The spirit of Chekhov infuses this book, and it is because of this spirit that Life and Fate feels impossibly modern in the same way that Chekhov himself does. We judge the characters – Grossman doesn’t do that, he just depicts them. Grossman instead judges the powers and ideas that put characters into the positions they are in, where they show their best and worst sides. Because the book is dedicated to social justice in the most serious sense of that phrase, and because the world it shows is so manifestly unjust, we can’t help but agree with him about what’s going wrong, while still standing in awe at all of the people and faces he somehow manages to fit in.

In a time of war, in the very same places as described in Life and Fate, and with the same peoples in the trenches but now on different sides, this book is more important than ever. Written in Russian by a Jewish writer from Ukraine, with its central hero a Jewish man from Ukraine, this is a great novel of tolerance, of pluralism, of dignity. In the war we have now, where nationalist tempers are high on both sides, nuance denied, and memory readily distorted for political aims, Grossman’s book, more than any other I have read, shows the kind of spirit we all need to have to build a lasting peace, for all the people who live in these lands.   

But first, I suppose, there’s more killing.