Worldwide Reviews of "The Sea"

[Kate Tomkie]

Here's a few reviews of The Sea by a few well regarded periodicals. Reviewers seem to have paid particular critical attention to Banville's diction--do you think the narrator is too verbose, or are you happy with the vocabulary Banville employs? Do you agree or disagree with these reviews?

The London Times full review

"Banville has a talent for sensuous phrasing, and pungent observation of human frailty, but in other areas important for fiction — plot, character, pacing, suspense — The Sea is a crashing disappointment."

The Washington Post full review

"Banville appears to be fining down his writing to the central impulse of all his mature work, which he stated long ago in the extravagant Gothic tale Birchwood : 'We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. The first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.'"

The New York Times full review

"What's strangest about "The Sea" is that the novel somehow becomes simpler and clearer as it gets more self-conscious: a consequence, I suppose, of its author dropping the pretense of being one kind of writer and giving in to his authentic and much more complicated creative nature. This misshapen but affecting novel turns out to be about something even more familiar than the loss of innocence: it's about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife."

The Irish Times full review (requires membership)

"Readers are finding themselves quite affected by this bereft man and his memories of childhood suffering. Apparently, they're even moved. "It seems so . . . I'm astonished," says Banville, half-chuckling in a way that suggests he's only half-joking."