The Sea by John Banville

This won the 2005 Man Booker prize, and I understand why.

Banville has a way with wordcraft. His prose sparkles and winks at you; the sentences slide and slither through one another and you begin to feel as though you are buoyant on them, and they are carrying you downstream, onto the Irish coastline on which The Sea is set.

Max returns to this piece of coast that he used to holiday at as a boy, now a much older man. Having suffered a terrible loss, he is escaping to his past – although what he finds when he probes the depths of his own memory is just as traumatic as what he is hiding from. The Grace family shape themselves from Max’s memory and we meet the children: beautiful, cruel Chloe Grace and her mute twin, Myles. The three of them are fast friends; Max is aware even at that stage that Chloe and Myles are of a higher ‘class’ than he, and wears their stature like a flag.

Through Max’s exploration of himself, past and present, we are taken on a journey of the mind more than anything else. How does he come to terms with all that transpires? How does he fit into the grand scheme of everything? Questions of blame and guilt arise, and Max is forced to scratch at memory-scabs that he thought had long scarred and healed.

As mentioned above, Banville’s writing is a sensuous delight. At times I felt overwhelmed by the richness of a sentence, I had to go back and take it in portions. It is just like a delicious dessert – your senses are stimulated to such a degree that you may start to feel slightly ill. The Daily Telegraph's blurb says: “they are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences.” And perhaps that is a better simile.

Firmin by Sam Savage

Firmin is a rat. He is also a bourgeois romantic, a Ginger Rogers fan, and – that most woeful of creatures – a reader.

How did this come to be? Well, when you’re the runt of a family with twelve unsympathetic brothers and sisters, fighting for food is difficult (and often, fruitless). Gnawing on your bed, however, is easy. And if your bed just happens to be the shredded pages of Finnegan’s Wake, you might find yourself swapping gnawing for reading; tasting for understanding – and one hunger is born from another.

Firmin’s appetite for literature is insatiable, and soon he ventures out from the dusty bookshop basement in which he was born, and into the bookshop proper. The more books his hungry eyes consume, the more he feels ‘human at heart’, leading him to attempt meaningful connection with humans, despite the fact that he cannot talk, and most people consider him a small, scary vermin. (I only just noticed the resonance between ‘vermin’ and ‘Firmin’. Durr!)

I guess this set-up gives a certain whimsical, Young Adult genre impression; but Firmin is far from it. It’s an adult book about a genius rat, trapped in the confines of his species, and his self-realisation and self-loathing, his failure and his loneliness. Plus, there are sexy bits*. And sweary bits.

I read an interview with Sam Savage in which he said “the voice came first” – he was typing away, and out came Firmin’s “voice”. Oddly, for me, this was where the book fell down. I never heard Firmin’s voice. I couldn’t distinguish it as characteristic, and it left me feeling that the book, while interesting and sweetly quirky, was... incomplete. Unpolished.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it – I particularly liked the seedy underbelly of Boston that is glimpsed, and the exploration of rat-psyche. Here’s a funny factoid: apparently the book is hugely popular in Italy, where it was renamed Firmino. I like that much better!

*NB: when I say ‘sexy’ here, I mean ‘to do with sex’. Not ‘arousing’!!!!