The Sea Book (Conservation for Kids)

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There were things of course the boy that I was then would not have allowed himself to foresee, in his eager anticipations, even if he had been able. Loss, grief, the sombre days and the sleepless nights, such surprises tend not to register on the prophetic imagination's photographic plate. And I loved the wilful ridiculousness of it all. The author must have had a great deal of fun purposely amalgamating farce and improbability with high culture. Twins Chloe and Miles (who is mute), governess Rose, Carlo the father, Conny, end up in a greek tragedy in terms of number of deaths, with Max Morden, the flawed main character in the centre. If Max was more engaging in terms of narrative voice (and didn't abuse animals) I feel I would have cared a lot more about his story. Gorgeous, but also a bit distant and done before, this book reminded me a lot of fellow booker prize winner Julian Barnes his work, just slower and more convoluted. Still that day of license and illicit invitation was not done. As Mrs. Grace, stretched there on the grassy bank, continued softly snoring, a torpor descended on the rest of us in that little dell, the invisible net of lassitude that falls over a company when one of its number detaches and drops away into sleep. ... Suddenly she was the centre of the scene, the vanishing-point upon which everything converged, suddenly it was she for whom these patterns and these shades had been arranged with such meticulous artlessness: that white cloth on the polished glass, the leaning, blue-green tree, the frilled ferns, even those little clouds, trying to seem not to move, high up in the limitless marine sky.

Banville] is prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase, so we read him slowly, relishing the stream of pleasures he affords. Everything in Banville’s books is alive. . . . He is a writer’s writer [who] can conjure with the poetry of people and places.” —The Independent (London) There is a formula, which fits painting perfectly," wrote Bonnard, "many little lies to create a great truth." Clement was the reality of my life, its bread and its wine. She made me, she invented me, she created me, she was my university, my partner, my teacher, my mother, later my child, my soul’s mate, my absolute mistress.” Now inside it the door opened and an elderly young woman appeared and stopped behind the glass and considered me warily. The prose is lyrical, often poetical. With brutal honesty, he recalls the events with a dollop of wry, dark humor in between. Since most reviewers approach the novel with an intellectual savoir fair, or academic onslaught, to keep the experience as sterile as possible, a vital component of the tale is missed - the emotional investment of both the characters and the readers.Increasingly Charles has little grumbles about the privations of his self-imposed exile, reporting spooky goings on. He half imagines there is a poltergeist, as things keep mysteriously getting smashed. In the event this turns out to be a red herring. An old girlfriend had been indulging in a spot of mischief-making. He reassures both himself and the reader that this could be due to a solitary experiment with mind-altering drugs in his youth, thus rationalising the weird "supernatural" experiences that he has. There is an ambiguous attitude to the supernatural here. Sometimes it seems as though there can be no logical explanation for the events; yet at other times a delayed reaction to LSD seems more than likely. Several of the horrific and malevolent impressions Charles reports, are bound up with his feelings about the sea. He is terrified of a monster of a creature - a thirty-foot eel-like serpent which coils up out of the sea. But is this after all merely what used to be called a "bad trip"? Which is the 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?”

This memorable summer, painted with golden sun and inky shadow, creates the first plan of the novel. Just then Max had gained this sad knowledge that there is always a lover and a loved and which role he would be playing in that act. This charming celebration of the sea shows children how extraordinary our oceans are and is a reminder that it is up to us to keep it that way - shortlisted for Best Children's Book 5+ category in the Junior Design Awards 2019. Silence. It is a special kind of language. The language of the dead, of those long gone, of the forgotten, the misunderstood, the hurt, the mad and, sometimes, the content. What do they tell me? What does silence tell me? What does it tell Max Morden? It tells him a story. The story of his life. It embraces him, caresses him, whispers to him of everyone and everything lost. He holds on to it. It is his only companion, his only friend, the lover that will never tire of him. It is his secret path to a better world. The world of the past. The smell in the hall was like the smell of my breath when I breathed and rebreathed it into my cupped hands.” Ever the director, Arrowby keeps casting himself and the people that surround him as if they were characters in one of his plays. The casting agrees with his desires but not necessarily with those of the others. Life is and is not a stage. We so want to believe that we can control it, that we can play the part of the director in our tragicomedies. The truth is that there are many players involved and they all have their own scripts in mind. Our hero spends the entire novel trying to reconcile himself to the idea. Does he? In his own words:There’s little tension in this novel, no compulsion. It all hinges on what’s essentially a moment of melodrama which didn’t ring true for me. Neither did it explain anything. There are good things, like the descriptions of his childhood crush on his friend’s mother and his dying wife and his response, though once again Banville can’t resist his misanthropic form of dark humour which consistently puts his character in the worst possible light – ironic as he’s always waxing lyrical in the book about the transfiguring nature of light. This was the first novel I read by Iris Murdoch. I have since read about a half-dozen and I still think this is my favorite. This is a Booker Prize winner. The language in this short novel is very, very rich, evocative and annoyingly, sent me to the dictionary far too many times for comfort. Banville is just showing off, descending into literary affectation perhaps. Two time-lines interweave as Max, a retired art critic, now living at The Cedars, a grand house of note from his youth, recalls those days when he lived with his family in much more modest surroundings and peered longingly into this place. Of course, it was not wealth per se that drew his 11 year old interest, but the presence of The Graces, not a religious fascination, but a family. A pan-like, goatish father, Carlo, an earth mother, Constance, white-haired (and thus summoning Children of the Damned notions) twins, a strange mute boy, Myles, who is sometimes comedic and sometimes sinister, a maybe-sociopathic girl, Chloe, and another girl, Rose, who appeared to be a mere friend, but was their governess. That this is left unclear for much of the book seems odd. Young Max enjoys the social step up he gets by hanging out with the twins, and is quite willing to go along with their cruelties to subservient locals, but is most taken with Constance Grace, pining for her in an awakening sexual way, until, of course, his heart, or some bodily part, is stolen by Chloe. There is a scent here of Gatsby-ish longing, and Max is indeed a social climber.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure."My daughter… usually has no smell at all” unlike her mother, “whose feral reek, for me the stewy fragrance of life itself, and which the strongest perfume could not quite suppress, was the thing that first drew me to her.” The consultant’s name was Mr. Todd. This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De’Ath, with that fancy medial capital and apotropaic apostrophe which fool no one. An extremely slow-moving plot is built around a mystery. The denouement comes as a huge surprise. It lead me to the conclusion that the author knew exactly how to play his readers. Like a fiddle. Happily.