By Eva Ciabattoni

Irish writer John Banville made the short list for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989 but lost to Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day.” This year, Ishiguro stayed on the short list, while Banville claimed top honors for “The Sea” (Picador, 2005), a novel that weaves the coming of age with the coming of death of art historian Max Morden.

“The Sea” is a tale of the ordinary - the slow death to cancer of Morden’s wife, Anna - extraordinarily told. The sea that washes the beach near the village of Ballyless, to which a dream directs Morden after Anna’s death, is at once backdrop, metaphor and a character in the story. Its moods, colors and textures accompany teenage Max as he struggles to gain membership in the baffling world of adults - “The beach at the foot of the hill was a fawn shimmer under indigo. At the seaside, all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.”

On the day Anna dies, Max recalls a childhood sea - “The sky was hazed over and not a breeze stirred the surface of the sea, at the margin of which small waves were breaking in a listless line, over and over, like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress.” And the sea, in the opening line of the first page, sets up the strange happening that is central to the book - “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” - the event that Max must return to in memory as he comes to terms with his wife’s death and his own mortality.

Morden confronts the dichotomy that the things most precious and momentous to an individual are to the sea as metaphor, nothing at all. The sea, from whose tug the first aspiring land creature freed itself on stumpy legs, will eventually reclaim its own, indifferent waves washing away any trace of the evidence of our existence or importance. Even truth is as changeable as the waves slipping and crashing along the shore, as Max finds out about a sweaty-palmed moment misunderstood for decades.

Morden as narrator tells his story in two parts uninterrupted by chapter breaks. The seeming randomness of the telling as Max dips into the past from what become longer and longer glances at the unbearable present disguises a masterly structure. Banville gives the reader a wink to that effect when he has Morden say, “the corrugated-iron picture house, which all along has been surreptitiously erecting itself … out of the numerous sly references I have sprinkled through these pages.”

Mastery in any field comes from knowing the rules well enough to understand which ones can be broken, when and how. In an age dominated by the marketing of single-read drivel that feeds publishers’ bottom lines and empties readers’ souls, an age where self-styled book doctors dole out formulaic advice about how to hook busy agents who have no time to read past page one, this quiet, unruly book is a triumph.