If ever a book didn’t need another review, I suppose it’s this one. Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005, how can I have anything to add to what others have already said? Well, here’s my attempt….
This was a difficult book to read. Far more challenging than SNOW, Banville’s 2020 mystery involving the death of a clergyman (Not a spoiler. Happens on page 1.). The sentences are long, highly wrought, replete with beautiful, original imagery, and oftentimes arcane vocabulary. I managed to get through it though, and was surprised, in the end, to find a twist or two. It’s really a book about memory, and family, and those we love, as well as those we fear and trust and mistrust. It’s about a young boy growing up in coastal Ireland, his early acquaintances and experiences. It’s a coming-of-age novel of sorts. It’s also a book about an older man—by fifty years, the 60-ish year-old man the young boy has become, along with the baggage he’s acquired over the years. It’s about his ambivalent feelings towards himself and those he loves, and, especially, towards the veracity of his own memory. It’s about how one thing leads to another, and how small—or not so small—things lead to horrific eventualities. It’s definitely a book worth reading. It’s sad, contemplative and important. It prompts us to look at our own lives and question their meanings, their values, their functions, their points. It asks us, in the end, whether the beauty we experience in this world is worth its concomitant pain. I’d like to read this book again sometime, to see if I react to it differently. It definitely moved me and made me question many things about myself.
I realize what I’ve written above is vague, and want to add a couple of footnotes. So, to that end, if you haven’t read the book already, this is a SPOILER alert. Max, the main character, is grappling with his wife, Anna’s, recent illness and death. At the same time, he’s trying to manage his relationship with his daughter and with related consequences of his wife’s death, the main one being whether or not to sell the summer home he inherited from his parents and where he spent much of his time as a child as well as an adult. Mixed in with all this are reflections about his parents, about how he felt about them and how they felt towards each other. And, more importantly, reflection about childhood friends he made while vacationing there, Miles and Chloe Grace, their parents and support staff. It’s quite convoluted, really, and a miasma of sorts because Banville’s main character (the narrator) freely roams from what he (I think) calls the absolute present time (his stay at the Cedars) and the recent past (Anna’s death) and the remote past–his childhood, his adolescence, during which he spend time with Chloe and Miles Grace, and, significantly their parents. It’s a sad, tragic tale very much worth reading.
Thank you, John Banville, for writing such a brave, interesting, beautiful and important work.
Julie Krantz 