John Banville's exquisite scrimshaws of style
THE SEA. By John Banville. 264pp. Picador. Pounds 16.99. - 0 330 48328 5
John Banville has long loved anagrams for their playful ability both to relay and to layer experience. At once cryptic and trivial, the anagram perfectly suits the brightly befuddled vision of his narrators, who wish themselves more mysterious than they actually are. "Lies", remarks sly Axel Vander in Shroud
(2002), "are life's almost-anagram." In Athena (1995), Freddie Montgomery finds that things have become "unfocused and confused and other near-anagrams indicating distress".
Banville's new novel, The Sea, features his most purely anagrammatical character yet: Anna, the narrator's wife, who at the novel's opening has just died of cancer. Anna is an anagram and a palindrome together: a name signifying nothing, or, more precisely, absence turned back on itself. It is no accident -nothing in Banville's novels, obsessed as they are with causality, is ever quite an accident -that when we first meet Anna she is standing at a window, "palely reflected in the glass".
The Sea, indeed, might qualify as a novel-sized anagram, since it permutes so many of Banville's distinctive tropes, traits and tics. Over the course of twelve novels, he has built up a distinctive portfolio of images, incidents and characters, so that it is now possible to describe the likely content of a new book. There will be a coastal landscape of dunes and ocean, above which seagulls will make bright turns against thunder-black skies. There will be women with big haunches, and a "clumpy" gait. Strong winds will toss rooks from the trees. A gin glass will be turned in the hand, and its contents admired for its hints of ice and flame. Light will fall into rooms in rhomboids, or ladders, or shards.
Most indispensably, there will be a nostalgic male narrator with a troubled past, a lacquered prose style, and a fondness for the weather in early autumn.
Capture, dotage or retreat will have provided this narrator with an opportunity for reassessing some earlier crime or catas- trophe. He will sit alone in a prison cell, or a ramshackle family home, or a seaside boarding house, and attempt to reckon with his history by redescribing it. Drink will give him the balance he requires when negotiating the tricky camber of the past.
The finest among Banville's narrators -Vander in Shroud, Victor Maskell in the magnificent The Untouchable (1997), shrewd Freddie in The Book of Evidence
