The Sea - John Banville

Lots of people say this book is a slog, and I can see why – the plot is pretty insubstantial, and there is a tendency to use words I didn’t understand or unusual formulations which personally I found fascinating – “unwarm lips”, “misfortunate”.

I was reminded of Proust, Nabokov and Beckett’s Malone Dies. This is not fancy prose for the sake of itself, but produced in order to service a meditative, occasionally humorous and extremely moving evocation of grief and memory. Remarkable.

Here’s a flavour:

My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.