The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 31 July 2008
by John Banville
It was another book that opened with a phrase like Memory is a bitch. But, that sentiment is true for so many great works that delve into the complex landscape of memory, from Proust's epic to this intense novel by John Banville. We are at the seaside, an ambiguous location that is nevertheless beautifully and evocatively described by our narrator, an older man who has come here to grieve after the death of his wife. He has done more than merely visit the sites of his youthful summers by the sea with his family. He is living in the very house in which his childhood friends lived in those summers. He calls them the gods, this family of more comfortable means than his own. He plays with Chloe and Myles in the seaside sands, he has a childish crush on their mother, falls in love with Chloe, and is mystified by Rose, a sort of governess in the background. With intensity, Banville describes the boy's awakening to the mysteries around him, mainly sexual, but also to the interpersonal relations that run beneath the surface of his world.
The stories of youth are woven together with the adult's wife's death and the relentless movement of time, roughshod over our lives. The house is now hollow, occupied by our narrator, an aging colonel, and the redoubtable Miss Vavasour. Something in the writing manages to evoke an emptiness blown through by cold wet breezes from the sea. It is an elegiac novel, beautifully written, with many moving passages that touch what it is to live irrevocably within this time we are given. If the denoument feels a little forced, the mystical connection between Chloe and Myles only suddenly coming to the surface and then sinking out of sight, the rest of the novel is close to brilliant. It is a short but slow meditation on life and death, memory and time. It is intense and memorable, indeed.
(For this book, Banville was awarded the Booker Prize in 2005.)