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CRITIQUE:

Anger and Resentment

Twelve months ago, Max Morden (a character who had a minor role in Banville's novel, "Athena" - though, here, his mother denies that Max is his real name, thus questioning his whole identity) lost his wife, Anna, to cancer.

It's arguable that the novel deals with the stages of grief suffered by a surviving spouse. However, Max seems to be trapped in the stage of anger and resentment:

"...how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself?"

He resents Anna for leaving him prematurely. (Surely, one of the two spouses must normally predecease the other [even if it's not known which one]? Somebody must be the survivor?)

Besides, I wouldn't describe their relationship as a particularly loving one.

There are frequent quarrels, and intimations that both spouses had had affairs (Anna with a man called Serge, and Max with one or more women he describes collectively as "Sergesses").

Anna explains, "Do not look so worried. I hated you, too, a little, we were human beings, after all."

To err or stray is, evidently, human nature.

House by the Sea

Without Anna, Max has to fill his time with some sort of substitute thought or activity (he bickers, rather than reconciles, with his daughter, Claire; he plans to write a monograph on the artist, but doesn't finish it by novel's end). He rents a room in a beach house called "The Cedars" (in a village he calls "Ballyless" [cf. "Ballymore"], where his family used to holiday when he was a child).

He recalls or invents memories of the Grace family (who also holidayed there), which involve erotic infatuations and trysts with both the mother, Connie, and the daughter, Chloe. It's not clear how much or how many of these memories is fabricated.




Living in the Past

Before her death, Anna tells Max:

"You live in the past."

However, it's the only thing they now share. Max himself says of the past:

"The past beats inside me like a second heart...

"It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned."

From a literary point of view, the past is a work of fiction, from which the writer might assemble or construct a novel.

Embarrassment and Shame

Ever class-conscious (his father left his mother and abandoned Max, when he was quite young), Max admits that he has always been ashamed of his "origins, and even still it requires only an arch glance or condescending word...to set [him] quivering inwardly in indignation and hot resentment."

Max' way of dealing with his embarrassment and shame is to assume another identity (yet another fiction):

"From earliest days I wanted to be someone else."

It's impossible to tell who this character ostensibly named Max really is. He isn't capable of being himself.

The Swell of the Sea

Ironically, marriage to Anna is not a consequence of his mother's injunction "nosce te ipsum" ("know thyself"). Instead:

"Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairgound mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight...

"Henceforth I would have to address things as they are, not as I might imagine them, for this was a new version of reality."

Without Anna, Max has no compass to guide (or correct) his memory or perception of reality. Without Anna, all is muddle.

As with the past, Banville suggests that, absent a reliable compass, the present (or what we perceive as reality) is a work of fiction, transmutation or distortion that is conveyed to the shore by the swell of the sea...and deposited on the sand like so much seaweed.


SEA SHANTIES:

Senses Working Overtime

I can see foreshore
You can hear my call
I can traipse the sand
You can touch my hand
I can smell seaweed
You can taste my seed.

The Swell of the Sea [Haiku]

I can see for sure
When conveyed to the sand by
The swell of the sea.


SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)[
Iron & Wine - "House by the Sea"



Leonard Cohen - "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye"



"I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time
Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me
It's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea
But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie
Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye"

Jethro Tull - "Living In The Past"



XTC - "Senses Working Overtime"



The Beatles - "She Said, She Said"



... (hide spoiler)]