[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] What connects the study of art, the death of a spouse after a battle with cancer, an eccentric old colonel, and childhood memories of holidays in a remote Irish seaside village? To be honest, I was left wondering this for much of John Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea.

Narrated by grieving art historian, Max Morden, who, after the death of his wife sets off on a pilgrimage to the village where he and his family used to go for summer holidays when he was a child, the novel flits between the present and the past, amassing incidents as a child might collect shells walking along a beach. Poetic and lyrical, the narrative roams over the protagonist's memories of the recent and distant past, worrying at the fragments and fissures he finds, until at last it stumbles to an uneasy resolution.

Loosely, this is a novel about the stories we construct from past events and our attempts to weave these into a sense of self. It is beautifully, if occasionally too self-consciously, written and worthy of praise; yet it left me slightly dissatisfied. The sense of mundanity that suffuses the narrative, itself one of the triumphs of the book - at times you have the feeling that we could be reading about any childhood seaside holiday, anyone's battle with cancer - is also one of its pitfalls. If this could be anyone's story, why should it be told at all? The Sea didn't quite answer this for me, but perhaps you'll feel differently.

[ Favourite quote ] 'Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.'

[ book info ] Banville, John: The Sea. Picador, London, ISBN: 0-330-48329-3.