Never quite touching is also how Banville's characters relate to each other.

Conversations in The Sea are exercises in people failing to communicate.

Interlocutors move silently towards and away from one another, as in a heavily blocked mime show, or as if they were travelling through some invisible gelatinous medium. There are interruptions, almost-articulations, tailings off.

Gestures fall short of communication, or positively corrupt meaning. Banvillian spouses in particular, tend to spend a lot of time in silence with one another; not in the mute familiar intimacy of the long-distance marriage, but in an entrenched state of separation. A paradigm of the Banville family relationship is shown here in Mrs Grace's attitude towards her son, Myles, whom she treats "with a sort of trailing vagueness. At moments as she weaved abstractedly through her day . . . she would stop and seem to notice him with not quite recognition, and would frown and smile at the same time, in a rueful, helpless fashion".

Banville has long been interested in "vagueness". It is possible, stylistically speaking, to be exactingly vague, and he has over three decades developed a repertoire of words which evoke vagueness with controlled precision (this is in part the influence of Anglo-Irish, a language which he has described as "at once wonderfully expressive and, so to speak, poetically imprecise"). "Some" is one of these words; light is like "some fine, shining fluid" in Ghosts (1993), a hammer in The Book of Evidence is "like a bone from the thigh of some swift animal". In an interview, Banville has described his vision of the novel form as "some enormous intricate thing dancing, in sadness, brief happiness, pain".

Indeed, another of his favourite words is "thing"; an idea unfolds "like some glistening, ravishing thing" in Dr Copernicus (1976), while in Ghosts fear comes like a "terrifying swarm of giant flying things", and "a great, fat, wallowing thing". The result is the creation of an atmosphere of indeterminacy, which has provided the context for Banville's investigations into motive and motivelessness. This is especially true in The Book of Evidence, where Freddie, the murderous narrator, writing from his prison cell, sets out to contest the legal rationalism which, in his words, "assumes a free subject, with a discernible motive, and an apparent penitence". The mood of imprecise causelessness which Banville's style evokes is the perfect stylistic analogue for Freddie's pernicious gospel of drift and unimpeachability.

In The Sea, however, vagueness serves no higher intellectual purpose. The languorous ambience of Max's prose, indeed the entire structure of the novel, seems to exist only to permit Banville his exquisite scrimshaws of style. One reads the novel by turns admiring the polish of the language, and frustrated by a sense of authorial self indulgence and safety -the familiar images and performances, the gelid plot, the inconsequentiality of it all.

The stasis of The Sea is thrown into relief by comparison with Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1978), a novel towards which Banville executes a complicated curtsey of homage. In that book, Charles Arrowby, an actor, retreats to a house by the sea, there to vanquish his previously obsessive self-regard, and to take stock by writing a memoir. Where Murdoch sets out with a clear conceptual ambition -to examine one of the cruxes of ethics: that before one can become good, one might first have to imagine oneself good -Banville simply passes the time. Murdoch's novel has the strong intent of the swimmer, Banville's the indolence of the sunbather, lolling his head this way and that, admiring his even tan.