A short reader’s report on John Banville’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel THE SEA (2005). The dust jacket bears this commendation: “John Banville is the heir to Nabokov.” It’s a story of a middle-aged Irishman, who has recently lost his wife to an incurable disease, and who returns to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a boy. I won’t tell too much for fear of spoiling the pleasure of those who might wish to read the book. However, there are some obvious allusions to VN’s oeuvre in the book. For example, to LOLITA:

 

I looked in at the windows, too, especially the bedroom ones upstairs, and was rewarded one day – how my heart hammered! – by a glimpse behind a shadowed pane of what seemed a nude thigh that could only be hers. Then the adored flesh moved and turned into the hairy shoulder of her husband, at stool, for all I knew, and reaching for the lavatory roll. [p. 56-57]

 

The protagonist has a daughter of whose plain looks he talks with a Shade-like acceptance. There is a lesbian governess in the story and a Swan fountain pen, as in SPEAK, MEMORY, and an unconsummated and tragic teenage love, as in LOLITA again. I must admit, though, I’m not sure there is a pattern; those allusions seem random to me. A case of cryptomnesia perhaps.

 

Incidentally, April 13, 2006, is another Irishman’s centenary.

 

Hibernically,

Sergey Karpukhin