Picador, 2005. 264 p.

The last two Banvilles I read – see here and here – had both been on my shelves for years and while never less than elegantly written were a touch distanced and unengaging but this one won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 so I thought that maybe he’d become a little more accessible.

The Sea can be summed up in one sentence. A man whose wife has died of cancer reminisces about his childhood and first loves and goes back to visit his old holiday haunts. There is of course more to it than this but that is the essence.

Banville has his narrative mouthpiece, Max Morden, adopt a meandering style, not quite stream of consciousness but with some sudden jumps in time and place. This all looks natural on the page, as if written effortlessly, but must have taken a high degree of crafting.

The typical Banville traits are all present, the literariness, the elegance, the beautifully constructed sentences flowing with sub-clauses, the use of unusual or high flown vocabulary (velutinous for velvety, for example) the revelation, very late, of a useful piece of information which helps to make the connection between the novel’s various strands. This last is something of a tease, however, (if not a cheat) and could be taken to exemplify a failure to provide sufficient foreshadowing.

The characters are all well rounded (and they can be irritating) but sometimes it seems as if they are being lined up one after another to have their little foibles exposed before the narrative flows elsewhere.

There is no plot as such but Banville’s prose carries the reader through. I do like him as a stylist. Overall, however, the effect is curiously flat and enervating. There can’t have been much competition for the Booker in 2005. Or was it just Banville’s turn?

Surprisingly for a writer who normally seems very meticulous there was one “lay of the land” (it wasn’t a song – see lay 10a ) and a “liquified.”

Secker and Warburg, 1995. 233p

An ex-convict calling himself Morrow is asked to a house to give his opinion as to the authenticity of eight paintings of classical scenes belonging to a Mr Morden. In the course of one of his subsequent visits he meets a woman whom he only ever names as A, whose sexuality turns out to be complex and masochistic and to whom the narrative is addressed. However, on occasion “€œMorrow” seems to address, rather than A, the reader directly.

The novel mainly charts the progress of the couple’€™s strange relationship as well as the other complications in Morrow’€™s life; a distant cousin he calls Aunt Corky, a gang boss known as Mr Da, a police inspector named Hackett. All this is delivered in a series of long rambling sentences replete with sub-clauses and digressions and, for the first few chapters, very little dialogue. As well as this taste for prolixity the narrator also has an extensive vocabulary -€“ a typical Banville trait. In the background there is a series of murders by a killer dubbed “€œThe Vampire”€ which are referred to throughout the book but of which no more than that is made.

The nine (longish) chapters are interleaved with descriptions of what I presume are meant to be seven of the paintings. The individual artists concerned are given as Johann Livelb, L. van Hobelijn, Giovanni Belli, Job van Hellin, L.E.van Ohlbijn, J. van Hollbein and Jan Vibell. The eighth, mentioned in the fourth last page, is Birth of Athena by Jean Vaublin. A passing knowledge of Greek mythology might be a help in disentangling all of this. Curiously the (unattributed as far as I can see) cover picture of a man-like creature with strong upper arms and back but bearing a bull’€™s head – quite the most unprepossessing on my shelves I might say – does not seem to relate to any of these.

There is no sense throughout the book of linkages between the various strands until four pages from the end where some, if not all, is revealed and a measure of sympathy induced.

Athena is an extremely literary diversion. For those who want a bit of plot in their fiction it is somewhat lacking. As a portrait of a dysfunctional relationship and an exercise in unreliable narration it is, however, accomplished, but perhaps too over-elaborate and ultimately unengaging.