Banville is Dullsville

At times the image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus, and a surge of yearning would engorge the very root of my being. One greenish twilight after rain, with a wedge of wet sunlight in the window and an impossibly unseasonal thrush piping outside in the dripping lupins, I lay face down on my bed in such an intense suffusion of unassuageable desire - it hovered, this desire, like a nimbus about the image of my beloved, enfolding her everywhere and nowhere focused - that I broke into sobs, lavish, loud and thrillingly beyond all control.

If you enjoyed reading this sentence, read this book: The Sea by John Banville, one of the six finalists for the 2005 Booker Prize. For everyone else it's enough to note that it's terribly sad, terribly implausible, terribly overwritten and in fact just plain terrible.


The other Booker finalists:

Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
Julian Barnes Arthur & George
Zadie Smith On Beauty
Ali Smith The Accidental
Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way

Winner (GBP50K) published on October 10th.