“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” W.H.Auden

By coincidence, I read this novel immediately after Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking stream of consciousness, “Mrs. Dalloway”. Despite many differences, and being written close to a century apart, there are striking similarities: both consist largely of flashbacks and reminiscences, with nostalgia for something lost. Although both lead up to a sudden tragedy, it is described more briefly, even casually than many minor incidents and this is because the act of writing about how one observes and experiences the world, and captures thought processes in words, is more important to both authors than plot.

John Banville can “do” plot, since he also writes crime fiction under the name of Benjamin Black, regarding it as a “craft”, “cheap fiction”, but uses his own name to create, as an “artist” works like “The Sea” for which he won the 2005 Booker Prize. His prose is more conventionally structured than Woolf’s but very lyrical, even poetic, original, sharply observed with touches of black humour, and peppered with unfamiliar words like leporine, losel and mephitic as in “blue shale giving off its mephitic whiff of ash and gas”. Some I had to underline to look up later rather than disrupt the flow. Now “mephitic” means foul-smelling or noxious, so why not use a term everyone will understand? I concluded charitably that this was not a sign of pretentiousness, but a genuine fascination with rarely used words.

The novel is narrated by Max Morden, the pseudonym of a man probably in late middle age who has somehow escaped his working class roots, married a woman who inherits the fortune her father made in perhaps questionable business, and become an art historian. None of this rings quite true but what is important is Max’s grief over his wife’s recent death from cancer. Unable to find much solace in his prickly relationship with his daughter, who is also grieving, he seeks relief by taking refuge in “Ballyless”, a small Irish coastal resort. This is where his parents took him to stay every summer (until his father left the family home), and Max made the acquaintance of a more affluent family, the Graces, who rented a house called The Cedars, where rooms are now let out by the landlady, Miss Vavasour.

Aware of the difference between his parent’s cheap wooden chalet and The Cedars, Max is soon infatuated with Mrs. Grace who “walked at a languorous slouch”…and “smelled of sweat, and cold cream, and faintly of cooking fat. Just another woman, in fact, and a mother at that. Yet (to him) in all her ordinariness as remote and remotely desirable as any painted lady with unicorn and book”. He is wary of Mr. Grace who is portrayed as a kind of middle-aged Pan, and “fascinated and at the same time slightly repelled” by the children, because of their relationship as twins, intimate, “like magnets” even when at loggerheads – Myles, who is mute and irritating in his attention-seeking, and Chloe, assertive and unpredictable. Then there is the young woman Rose, employed to keep an eye on the pair.

Apart from Rose, none of these characters is very appealing but Max analyses them and himself, very expressively. You could say that this is like the earlier part of a “coming of age” novel, which carries the reader along, free of any division into chapters. It is not until less than twenty pages from the end that we reach the event, reminiscent of L.P Hartley’s “The Go-Between”, which we realise has haunted Max, all his life, perhaps even more than the death of a wife he did not feel he really ever knew.

As is often the case, the most significant event has an unreal quality,
“All that followed I see in miniature, in a sort of cameo, or one of those rounded views, looked on from above, at the off-centre of which the old painters would depict the moment of a drama in such tiny detail as hardly to be noticed between the blue and gold expanses of sea and sky. I lingered a moment on the bench, breathing.”

So, a novel to be admired for its style, the quality of the writing, the insights which express thoughts one has been unable to articulate so well oneself and the evocative power of past memories. Yet somehow, it may leave one unmoved, I think because one does not relate to the characters sufficiently, and some of the situations seem too contrived.