The Sea by John Banville

Banville certainly deserved a Booker Award -- pardon me, a Man Booker Award, though that sounds to me like some hairy-chested response to the Orange Prize -- but I'm less convinced that this was the novel that deserved it. (The Untouchable is much better; if anything I write here makes you interested in Banville, try that -- or maybe Athena or The Book of Evidence.)

Since William Dean Howells radically circumscribed the scope of "serious" fiction a century and a quarter ago, writers with literary ambition have struggled with that straitjacket. Some have broken out entirely, but many have fallen into the party line: only stories about the real lives of realistic people, closely focused on detail, can be great works of fiction. Banville seems to agree; The Sea is an intensely serious book. You can tell that it's serious in several ways: The prose is ornate, detailed, crafted to within an inch of its life. The plot bounces between three times in the narrator's life, often from paragraph to paragraph, to underline how good a writer Banville is. And, most importantly, it's about what the most obviously "serious" books are about: sex and death.

The Sea is intensely writerly -- possibly why it won a major award -- and is slow-moving. All in all, it's close to being the platonic ideal of the book non-literary readers think of when they say they don't read literary fiction. (It is fairly short, though, which keeps it from living completely up to the stereotype. And it's actually pretty good; the problem is that it's slow and a bit ponderous and not nearly as profound or wonderful as it thinks it is.) I would never inflict this on any normal reader as their first Banville novel, but those of us who have been reading him for while will appreciate it.

Max Morden is a semi-retired art critic who has returned to the Irish sea-side, site of his youthful summers, soon after the death of his wife. He remembers both his wife's dying and -- at greater length -- one particular summer with a richer family, the Graces. He fell in love with two of the female members of that family, successively, and things did not end well. (This is a literary novel, again; things typically don't end well in a literary novel.) Everything dovetails quite neatly in the end; Banville wraps his three time-lines up skillfully and makes sure they each matter to the other two.

I'd like to call a moratorium on the sex-and-death literary novel -- or, rather, I would if I thought anyone would heed me. The world needs more books in which sex is complicated and messy and fraught with trouble, but not intimately intertwined with death. Let a thousand Portnoy's Complaints flourish!

There's nothing at all wrong with The Sea, but there's not as much right with it as the Man Booker committee would have you believe. It may well have been the best book they considered that year -- the only other book on the shortlist that I've read is Kazuo Ishiguro's lousy and hole-filled Never Let Me Go -- but it's not Banville's best book at all, and not a book I expect to live for the ages.