Irish novelist John Banville's "The Sea," published this year in the British Isles, was to appear in America next year, but when it won the Man Booker Prize last month, Knopf rushed it to our shores.

		"THE SEA" By John Banville Knopf ($23)

But, that's unimportant. Banville, 59, is a significant novelist in the British Isles, where serious fiction is a serious matter, prize or no prize.

His 14th novel is a meditation on loss -- of youth, love and, in his hero's case, relevance.

Max Morden is a middle-aged widower struggling a year after his wife's death with loneliness and instability.

Without Anna, whose wealth supported his indifferent career as an art writer, Morden is "at sea," adrift and determined to suffer as a victim.

He flees to the Irish coastal resort of his youth where he found, briefly, the first stirrings of love. He takes a room in a summer lodging once rented by the family of his first love, Chloe.

Almost as a rehearsal for the loss of his wife, Chloe was taken from him. Back at the place of his loss of innocence, Morden obsesses over the twin tragedies.

Banville delves into the psyche of a soul unwilling to give up the past because he's emotionally unable to move on.

This novel is so confined and static, despite its passages of lyric language, that it can't grasp the larger subject of the power of loss to transform its characters.

Morden is unchanged and worse, without understanding. Unlike the ebb and flow of the ocean, "The Sea" is as placid as glass.