I learned a lot from John Banville's latest novel, The Sea. For instance, I can rattle off five new terms for bodily excretions, including "particles of nether-do"; I can diagnose a case of "grog blossoms"; and I'm aware that "ichor" refers not only to the liquid flowing through the veins of the gods but to that watery stuff that leaks out of a paper cut. I also know that "strangury" is a mystical-sounding word for slow urination (yes, this is a book about growing old).

Such discoveries mostly delight me, but others find Banville's writing pretentious and remote. "Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus," writes Jessica Winters of the Village Voice, "has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters … but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody." It is true that if he paid a fine for every time he broke the writer's rule of ordinary language, Banville would have to mortgage his Booker Prize. It's unfair to say, though, that he dotes on words at the expense of human feeling. In fact, it's the preening language of The Sea that most reveals its hero, a man both vain and emotionally broken.

Max Morden is an art historian of no particular genius. ("As for us middling men," he says, "there is no word sufficiently modest that yet will be adequate to describe what we do and how we do it.") For years he's been "mired" in a monograph on the French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), famous for his many portraits of his wife Marthe in the tub: "Brides-in-the-Bath," Max's wife Anna calls him. At their oceanside home, Anna herself spends long hours in the bath, soothing the pain of her cancer. Max sometimes worries she'll drown accidentally: "I would creep down the stairs and stand on the return, not making a sound, seeming suspended there, as if I were the one under water." Guiltily, he half wishes she'd go on and get it over with, for both their sakes. When she does at last die, in the hospital, he finds himself drowning in grief, past and present.

Led by a dream, Max leaves his present home and wanders back to Ballyless, the seaside town where he spent boyhood holidays. He moves into a local boarding house, the Cedars, which was once the private residence of his close friends, the Graces. Their presence lives on in the ministrations of the landlady, the elegant Rose Vavasour, whom Max remembers as their governess. Miss Vavasour has just one other tenant, Colonel Blunden, a lonely soul with a military haircut and a love of peppery condiments. Max is skeptical about the Colonel's cartoonish habits and half-wonders if the soldier identity is a ruse, a façade.

Max has good reason to be skeptical about the hapless Colonel, since he's been reshaping his own identity for his entire life. As a child, staying with his working class parents in their rather primitive "chalet" at Ballyless, he felt ashamed of their ordinariness, consciously distancing himself from them: "I did not hate them, I loved them, probably. Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents." Then his father left the family and his mother sank into maudlin despair. Max spent a miserable adolescence shut away with her in a depressing series of claustrophobic flats, waiting on his father's monthly posts.

It was the prosperous family Grace that claimed Max's early devotion and affection. In their upper-class vacation home they seemed like gods descended to earth, more living and solid than ordinary humans. First to arrive in his consciousness were the parents: Carlo Grace (father of the gods), satyrlike and mocking, and Connie Grace, an enveloping earth-mother who fed Max's first erotic fantasies. Through a mythopoeic shift of affections, he one day ceased to love the mother and fell madly in love with the daughter, a nymphlike ten-year-old named Chloe with a portentous green tinge to her teeth. Chloe's twin brother Myles was an otherworldly creature. His webbed toes made him seem a kind of godling, and he never spoke a word, either because he wouldn't or couldn't. Max imagines that Myles whispered with Chloe at night, the two of them enjoying their private joke on the world: they seemed like two halves of one person.

Max weaves his reminiscences of the Graces together with painful memories of life with Anna. From the time he met her, he saw his Anna as a demi-goddess. Tall and statuesque, beautiful in a fierce way and also gracious and beneficent, she conferred a little of her divinity upon him, making him feel set apart from the mortals in their company:

Ah those parties, so many of them in those days. When I think back I always see us arriving, pausing together on the threshold for a moment, my hand on the small of her back, touching through brittle silk the cool deep crevice there, her wild smell in my nostrils and the heat of her hair against my cheek. How grand we must have looked, the two of us, making our entrance, taller than everyone else, our gaze directed over their heads as if fixed on some far, fine vista that only we were privileged enough to see.

Max finds a parallel between the inseparable twins, Myles and Chloe, and himself and Anna. He and Myles are the changelings, creatures without their own voices, without names except those given them by the greater gods. In his case, he knows that he used Anna from the start to invent himself as he wanted to be.

From earliest days I wanted to be someone else… . I never had a personality, not in the way others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone… . Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight.

Of course, Max also loved Chloe once; she was a forerunner to Anna, and he speaks of losing her and Myles (I can't give away too much here) as "the departure of the gods." In losing Anna, he's again lost the object of his devotion. The gods, in their weakness, have abandoned him again. This leads him to the conclusion that death is ultimately all there is—death symbolized in the swelling sea, maternal and yet capricious, bitterly jealous and yet indifferent. There is no defeating death: it draws gods and mortals alike into its arms.

In Banville's previous novel, The Shroud, he used the Christian legend of the Shroud of Turin as a metaphor for a man who existed only as the shadow of someone long dead and unknown. In The Sea, he employs some of the same character-types and plot elements: a young man reinvents himelf, eventually becoming a wraithlike old man who is haunted by the youth he was. This time, Banville textures his story with references to pagan mythology: Miss Vavasour tends the Graces' old house like a temple virgin, Anna appears in the narrative like Athena descending into an ancient epic, and then of course there's the wine-dark sea itself, bounty and bane of ancient mariners. Max himself makes no end of drowning allusions: no wonder Banville gives him the surname "Morden" ("What sort of a name is that?" Chloe asks).

I do think that Banville may be straining a bit. When a writer constantly invokes the transcendent to picture the ordinary, won't something eventually be lost? Either the myths will lose their power, or the daily perils of human life will seem (perhaps ridiculously?) overblown. After all, how much symbolic weight can a paper-cut bear?

It's hard to argue, though, with Banville's gorgeous prose, so beautifully anchored in layers of mystery and metaphor. And whatever critics may say about overwrought language or lofty erudition, The Sea gives us a very human, very fragile hero. Max's emotions penetrate the narrative, first leaking out in a poetic drip (one might almost call it a case of literary strangury), then swelling into a steady rush of pain and grief. A compassionate reader will overlook any artifice here and recognize a drowning soul—someone who has clung far too closely to those he once loved as gods, only to be shipwrecked and alone at the end.

Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist living in Alabama.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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