I myself have lived near the edge of the sea for almost half a century, but I will never again regard the sea the same way after reading John Banville's The Sea. This is one of those rare books where you will keep coming back to its first line: "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."

The place is Ballyless, a hardscrabble coastal town with some cheap "chalets" in which dwell the lower classes, including the family of Max Gorner, the book's narrator. Nearby is a seaside cottage called The Cedars in which Max sees a young family, the Graces, move in with their twin children, Chloe and Myles, and a governess named Rosie. As Max says:

So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy [Myles] and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come.

Max is drawn to the Graces, at first to the wife, Connie, and then to Chloe. There is a glitter to their lives that is missing from his rather dysfunctional family. Their table is set with high-class gadgets that leave Max both curious and a bit anxious.

We skip forward (for the time, at least -- the story keeps returning to The Cedars for fresh insights) to Max's marriage to Annie. It is a successful marriage, with Max living the life of a dilettante, presumably working on his grand project of a book on the French painter Bonnard, but actually spending Annie's money in modest comfort. This comes to an end when she is diagnosed with cancer. Most of what we hear about Max's marriage is Annie's long slow fade-out.

After Annie's death, Max returns to The Cedars as a lodger. It is now a boarding house of sorts with Miss Vavasour, the manager, the Colonel, and himself. But we keep rubber-banding back to the Graces and to Annie's death. Banville never really lets go, like a dog relentlessly chewing a bone.

But what a bone it is! This is the first book I have read by Banville, and, God willing, it won't be the last. The Irishman is a master stylist who keeps coming back to his scenes like a pointillist painter putting new touches on his various canvases. One suddenly comes upon passages such as this:

My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.

Excuse me while I adjust my facial expression, as I seem to be gaping.

No one ever said that Banville is a cheery writer. The scene where, after his wife's death, he stands in front of the mirror shaving at The Cedars and commenting about the strangeness of his aging face, is one of the most somber scenes in recent literature. And then, at the very end of the book, there are several shocking surprises which left me stunned, but which I hesitate to divulge. In the end, it could all be summarized with Max's exclamation, at one point, "What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark."