The Sea by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Depths of Vocabulary

John Banville loves words just as they are. Words like losel, and finical, gleet, scurf, bosky, cinerial, and merd that will really screw up your spell-checker. It's part of his masterful charm. Add his ability to put these words together in velvet sentences, and combine sentences into exquisite narrative, and voila: a writer worth his salt...as it were, especially with a title like The Sea. Inspired by Henry James? Very possibly, particularly by The Turn of the Screw and its permanent mystery. Nonetheless, uniquely and unmistakeably Banville.

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