The Sea Book (Conservation for Kids)

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But smell and taste? Much harder. Think of a favourite food ( siu mai). You can see it, you can feel its texture, and hear the sound as you bite into it. But can you describe, let alone experience its taste and smell? The main character is an egotist. The press has called him a tyrant and power-crazed monster. He’s a misogynist who has used and abused women all his life. A good friend, a male, tells him “the trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women.” Charles Arrowby has retired from the theatre to a damp, drafty, but dramatic home by the sea. His plan is to live on his own, read, and eat well while he writes his memoirs. He is famous, certainly well known enough to be recognized on the street from his days acting and directing on the stage. He wants to be anonymous, but as I can tell anyone from personal experience the last place one can be anonymous is in a small town. For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. (really good olive oil is essential..." (this goes on for another 15 lines)

I’m sure whole theses have been written about Charles’ cousin, James: he’s a fellow only child, but raised in far more privileged circumstances. James is a successful retired general, a Buddhist mystic, possible spy, and may be gay. Charles was and is always competing with him, though realises James probably barely realised and certainly didn’t care. Then remember or imagine touches: the shrill blast of a strong salt sea breeze on your face, stroking the soft silky fur of a cat, the abrasion of warm, wet, sand between your toes. These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live among the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.What is John Banville’s The Sea all about? An infinite weave of contemplative and melancholic feelings of a man lost in his sufferings. It is about the impossibility of hope; the harshness of loss, and the inescapability of pain. A convulsive probe into the past, it revisits times gone by that sets it all adrift. Constant guilt for what could not have been changed, accounts of resentments, and the restraints and combat of a man to the intimacy of grief. All coupled with constant images and metaphors of a turbulent and immeasurable sea. I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. To be concealed, protected, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to be hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, shaking off the cold present and the colder future”

Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease. Honestly, I was amused to see how efforts were made to 'box' this novel into identity and gender politics by readers who were unable to identify it for what it really is: a confrontation of our destiny, our own fears of loneliness, and the old age looming in our future. The Sea” is a brilliant study of Max who, after recently losing his wife, flees to a time in his boyhood when the innocence of youth was dealt an unspeakable blow by real life. The storyline is a good one, I did not see the twist at the end the first time out. It is Banville’s writing, though, that sets this apart. He makes the sea a heavy presence, a foreboding character holding secrets, regrets, memories. I stumbled along with Max, screamed with him, and felt his anguish in my soul. We struggled to find… whatever it is we search to find in these circumstances.What has this luminous painting of a female bather to do with a book called "The Sea", you might ask? More than you might think. Pierre Bonnard, a French Post-Impressionist painter, often painted his wife Marthe. He painted this particular piece when she was in her 70s, and she had died by the time he completed it. We can see by virtue of the recognisable images of female form and bathtub, the general gist of the painting. But the image goes beyond the bounds of reality with the misshapen bathtub that accommodates impossibly long and bent limbs, the colours shimmering and waving on the organically undulating walls as though they might just disappear at any moment, a dog on what might be a mat or a square of light on the slanted floor, brushstroke after gorgeous brushstroke coming together to simulate Marthe's moment of private repose. The moment is almost certainly of a younger Marthe, though. It is the artist's memories of an earlier, more youthful moment. It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” I struggled with this for a while, mainly because I was so irritated by Charles Arrowby, the main character and unreliable narrator. Arrowby is a retired actor, director and playwright who has moved to a remote cottage by the sea and is tentatively writing his memoirs. Whole successions of characters, many of them former lovers, arrive and depart and Charles encounters his first love Hartley who has also retired to the area with her husband. Qué pequeño recipiente de tristeza somos, navegando en este apagado silencio a través de la oscuridad del otoño.” Me está ocurriendo algo curioso últimamente con los libros que leo. Entre las sucesivas lecturas voy descubriendo como un hilo invisible que las conectan de algún modo. Por no irme más atrás, en mi lectura anterior, “Los enamoramientos”, de Javier Marías, se dice: “…su presente le causaba tanto desconcierto que en él era mucho más vulnerable y lánguida que cuando se instalaba en el pasado, incluso en el instante más doloroso y final del pasado…”. Y exactamente, punto por punto, es lo que le sucede al protagonista de esta hermosa, triste y terrible historia que nos cuenta John Banville con su prosa elegante y condensada en la que no falta, como parece que en él es habitual, un uso algo pretencioso del lenguaje. “Esconderme, protegerme, guarecerme, eso es todo lo que realmente he querido siempre, amadrigarme en un lugar de calor uterino y quedarme allí encogido, oculto de la indiferente mirada del sol y de la severa erosión del aire. Por eso el pasado supone para mí un refugio, allí voy de buena gana, me froto las manos y me sacudo el frío presente y el frío futuro.” Y por esa memoria del pasado, caprichosa, esquiva, poco fiable, pero que, al mismo tiempo y de forma un tanto sorprendente, llega a ser puntillosa y detallista hasta niveles imposibles, sabremos de Max Morden, protagonista y narrador de esta historia, de su infancia, ese lugar del que nunca nos desprendemos. También sabremos de la culpa que arrastra desde entonces por algo que provocó sin intención, un malentendido que causó una catástrofe familiar y que ahora se entrelaza con el deterioro que conlleva los muchos años vividos y con el desamparo que siente tras la muerte de su mujer. “Puta, maldita puta, cómo has podido dejarme así, revolcándome en mi propia inmundicia, sin nadie que me salve de mí mismo.” Y no es esta necesidad de volver al pasado la única hebra que une a este libro con el del escritor español, mayor aun es la coincidencia entre ambos en la indagación de lo que la muerte de un ser querido provoca en nuestras vidas, en nuestra identidad, cómo puede llegar a resquebrajarse aquello que fuimos y que ya no podremos reconstruir pues ese ser que se ha ido era la pieza que todo lo sostenía. “… lo que encontré en Anna desde el principio fue una manera de realizar la fantasía de mí mismo.” Este problema de la identidad es otro de los grandes puntos de la novela, un tema siempre muy presente en las novelas de Javier Marías y que ahora también encuentro en mi lectura actual, “A contraluz”, de Rachel Cusk, la cual, a su vez, tiene una frase que bien podría ser el inicio de una novela de Marías: “…fue al oír que mi marido cantaba L'amour est un oiseau rebelle en la ducha cuando me di cuenta de que me era infiel”. El hilo haciendo de las suyas. The open doorway from which a fat slab of sunlight lay fallen at our feet. Now and then a breeze from outside would wander in absent-mindedly.”