The Sea REVIEW
John Banville’s novel, The Sea is about memory. I wish I could say that it was a novel I will never forget. I can’t say that it was poorly written or that its theme was not interesting. For some reason, it just won no prizes with me. And yet, I should like to think about what there is in it to make one think. Max, the main character is an elderly gentleman who has recently lost his wife and just returned to the scene of a childhood memory that still haunts him. One year after his wife has died, he decides to finally go back and process the two (perhaps three) great losses of his life at the same time, his life’s first loves and his last. In doing so, he must come to terms with just exactly what memory is for it would be impossible to understand grieving without understanding memory. Maybe that is Banville’s key insight.
“I am amazed at how little has changed in the more than fifty years that have gone by since I was last here,” Max tells us of the seaside town where he spent his summers as a boy.
“Amazed, and disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me, since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past?”
This narrative of memory as rubble is something that he will often return to. What we remember of life long past and of life recent is always deconstructed, fragmentary, reconstructed, elusive, deceptive, sometimes achingly detailed, sometimes frustratingly imprecise, riddled with gaps, or downright inaccurate. Max’s observations about his memory are thus contradictory. At times, things that happened five decades earlier are clearer than things happening yesterday. At times, things that are clear in his memory are found to be invented somewhere along the way. What we “remember” – what has power to influence us emotionally as we remember it, is a different thing than the past itself. “The past beats inside me like a second heart,” Max says. As if to say “It has a life of its own.”
Banville reflects on memory through Max’s experience, noting that sometimes what we remember is simply more real than what we are remembering. His life one summer as a young adolescent boy was deeply impacted by a family by the name of Grace (Carlo, Constance, Myles, Cloe, and the teenager the Graces hired to watch their children, Rose). Max spends a good deal of the novel thinking back to those poignant moments of his summer and his life and we are reminded that the things that we remember best are sometimes still remembered poorly.
“Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one following that, I saw the black car again, recognized it at once as it went bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway line. It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the living lapse.”
One of Max’s pivotal moments takes place in the sand by the sea one day and he remembers it in detail.
“Chloe sulks. Myles goes back to delving violently in the sand with his stick. Their father folds his newspaper and squints at the sky. Rose is examining a loose button on her shirt. The little waves rise and plash, the ginger dog barks. And my life is changed forever. But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly changed until the final, most momentous change of all?”
There are “moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it” we are told. And yet, memory also plays games. It will insulate us from some things, maneuver us away from emotional danger, hypnotize us, and sometimes add details. Memory is rather like … like the sea in that way. We are not always in control of it. Max must face the fact that memories are real things and not real things. Connie Grace, he tells us was “at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood.” He notes that these people from his past who are no longer alive, still live in his memory as if they did. “She is in my memory her own avatar,” he says of Mrs. Grace.
“Which is more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory. But their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last. it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too.”
And this too is true of his deceased wife.
Max’s daughter tells him that he lives in the past, and he does.
Sometimes memory intrudes on present experience and sometimes present experience intrudes on memory. “It has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present” Max explains. Sometimes, he instructs his memory to supply details and it refuses. Sometimes he orders his memory to forget - and it rebels.
“Her hands. Her eyes. Her bitten fingernails. All this I remember, intensely remember, yet it is all disparate, I cannot assemble it into a unity.”
“The model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against a stubborn resistance. Everything was slightly out of scale …”
“But wait. This is wrong. This cannot be the day of the kiss.”
“Remarkable the clarity with which I can see us there. …”
“I was thinking of Anna [Max’s wife]. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day?”
“Memory dislikes motion,” Max insists. It captures still frames when a moving picture might have given us more. “The real past matters less than we pretend,” he eventually surrenders. What actually happened is somehow less vital and vigorous than how we remember things happening. He has a hard time reconciling. “Once out of my presence, she should by right become pure figment,” he practically sobs. But she doesn’t.
And ironically, the one person who is still alive from that summer long ago is the one who is still alive. The character from his childhood story who still lives in this seaside town is the only one that his memory seems not to molest with alteration.
“Of the three figures in that summer’s salt-beached triptych it is she, oddly, who is most sharply delineated on the wall of my memory. I think the reason for this is that the first two figures in the scene, I mean Chloe and her mother, are all my own work while Rose is by another, unknown, hand. I keep going up close to them, the two Graces, now mother now daughter, applying a dab of colour here, scumbling a detail there, and the result of all this close work is that my focus on them is blurred rather than sharpened, even when I stand back to survey my handiwork. But Rose, Rose is a completed portrait, Rose is done.”
Ultimately, Max’s return to the past almost kills him in the end. He finds himself overwhelmed by memories of what happened the summer he first fell in love and the summer he was informed by Dr. Todd that his wife was going to die.
“To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the air’s harsh damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.”
Ironically though, our memories, like the world we live in, can be either a safe place to retreat from the present, or a dangerous and dark forest that makes a person, in the words of Tennessee Williams, want to “blow their lights out.” [reference to the last lines of The Glass Menagerie]
Question for Comment: When you think of your life’s great first loves and last loves, does memory serve you, or smack you around a bit?
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