As for the novel's characters, they're little developed. There's the overblown father, Mr. Grace, the motherly mother (for whom the narrator as a boy develops an erotic attraction), the casually cruel children (the dominant girl and her deaf-mute brother), and their governess, who we're destined to learn more about later. Then there's the narrator's dying wife (unlike him, stubbornly independent) and his unmarriageable daughter. None are portrayed full-length, but presumably the world of ghosts, artistic and literary, that inhabit the speaker's mind are intended to make up for them.
The style is suitably mannerist for a failed art-critic, and the colors it characteristically evokes -- pewter, umber, pale lavender, burgundy, "the deepest imperial purple" -- are also appropriate enough. But the cult of obscure words such as "caducous," "mephitic," "crepitant," though certainly intended as geriatric pontification, is sleep-inducing nonetheless.
But at his best John Banville is a supremely fine novelist. The Untouchable is for me one of the really great books, endlessly re-readable, and his historical novels on Copernicus and Kepler (there's another on Newton) are also fascinating.
What The Sea lacks is energy. This was a danger implicit in the original conception, and in the event the narrator's near-aim-lessness also characterizes the book itself. In this novel Banville the master-stylist sets himself a difficult literary task -- how to make old age interesting -- and fails to find an answer. Maybe the sad truth is that there isn't one, unless, as Shakespeare does with Lear, you turn your character into a monster and let him discover a new purpose in raging against a world he used to love.
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