Max Morden is an “almost old” man who, after the recent death of his wife, returns to the village where he summered as a child. Despite the controlled narration and the delight he takes in language, he is clearly in a bad way and tries the patience of those around him, saying once that “if there is a long version of shrift”, that is what he needs.
Another story about a self-described “middling man”, I found this book hard to warm up to at first. The narrator is a pedantic man, precise and playful with words, but his word games, as with other tricks the narrator employs to hide his feelings from those around him and even from himself, have the additional effect of distancing the reader. This reader, anyway. I had trouble engaging with the character or his story, picking up the book an putting it down several times before it finally caught my attention through the sheer virtuosity of the writing.
If I were teaching a course on how to use vivid, unusual imagery to describe people, places, weather, mood, etc., I would assign this book as required reading. For example, Max hears a recently switched-off car “still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint”, and “faintly from inside the house the melting-toffee tones of a palm court orchestra playing on the wireless.” I can’t remember the last time I picked up a dictionary while reading a novel, yet had to look up a dozen words here that were new to me yet wonderfully accurate for their context.
But what really won me over were the rare but devastating insights about childhood and loss and how memory works or doesn’t. Tossed in as almost casual asides, they made me read on, hungry for more.
The children, Max himself and the two children he becomes friends with, are anything but idealized. Max’s recollections openly portray their selfishness and cruelty, their curiously attractive coldness. One of the children is mute, though whether by choice or not is unclear. The uses and limitations of language, however, affect all of the characters and there is much employment of body language—scratchings and sprawlings and outstretched arms—as well as descriptions of freckles and noses and even body odours to convey what is happening. Max’s mother, afraid of the sea, would only play crocodile (as we used to call it) in a shallow pool but was dragged into deep water by her husband’s manacle-like grip on her wrists.
The sea is a continuous presence, binding the present to the past, enduring in the way that things do while people come and go. I would have said that I’ve read so many descriptions of the sea that no one could say anything new about it, yet again and again I was struck with fresh remembrance, thinking oh yes, I’ve known it like this.
At a certain point in life, it seems as though there is nothing left to do but count over the deaths of those we have loved and look forward to our own. Despite my initial difficulties, I was captivated by Max’s story as he, almost in spite of himself, began to reconnect with the past and present, this world and the people in it.