“They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under the milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waters creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes.”

Rhythm, cadence and incantation define these opening lines from John Banville’s The Sea; careful alliteration, with added consonantic and asonantic rhymes ­– every word exactingly balanced. Banville seeks out the unusual phrase, the original image…
– Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker, July 11, 2011, p. 90