The Sea Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, and our BookBrowse Review of The Sea.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

About This Book

In this hypnotic tour de force of mood, language, and psychological revelation, the Irish novelist tells the story of a bereaved man desperately sorting through the strands of his memory—the memories of his recent loss and those of the losses that came before it. Those various strands are by now so intertwined and tightly knotted that Max Morden doesn't know which of them causes him the greatest pain. But as Banville's sinuous narrative plays out, it becomes apparent that Morden is in danger of being strangled by his memories, especially by the ones he has invented. If one theme is most prominent in The Sea, it's the treachery of memory and the fluidity of the boundary that separates recollection from fabrication.

In his late middle age, Morden is a sometime art historian desultorily at work on a book on the French painter Bonnard. His wife, Anna, has recently died of cancer, and although their marriage was based on an unspoken contract of mutual ignorance ("The truth is, we did not wish to know each other. More, what we wished was exactly that, not to know each other," p. 159), he is now half-deranged by grief. His grief has brought him back to the seaside village of Ballyless, where he used to spend summers as a child and where, some fifty years before, he became involved with a family named the Graces. Max's parents were poor, but the Graces were wealthy. They rented an entire house, had their own motor car—with a touring map of France negligently displayed on the shelf under the rear window—and treated each other with faintly sardonic indulgence. Max fell in love with them.

Or, rather, he fell in love with two of them. The first object of his desire was Connie Grace, a lush, overpoweringly sensual woman who greeted her children's new friend by offering him an apple. Max's contact with her was limited to heartbroken yearning and guilty spying. Fulfillment came from her daughter Chloe. She was his own age, and she was blonde, imperious, and more than a little cruel. She came with her own attendant spirit, her mute twin Myles. Chloe gave Max his first kiss. She introduced him to the rapturous humiliation of the lover whose love is never fully returned. And finally, she brought him his first experience of death, an experience so catastrophic that everything he feels now may only be an echo of it.

The layers of Max's past do not rest neatly on top of each other like geological strata but rather shift and overlap like ocean currents. They coexist with the ebb and flux of a present in which he drinks too much, fends off his daughter's attempts at caring for him, and observes the other occupants of his rooming house, the same house where the Graces once stayed. Banville's accomplishment is to orchestrate these currents of memory and perception as deftly as more conventional novelists arrange plot twists, using them to reveal his narrator and lay bare the deceptions that lie at the heart of his consciousness, and perhaps of all consciousness. The result is a work of symphonic power whose structural inventiveness coexists with an oceanic depth of feeling, and whose prose demands to be read out loud.

Reader's Guide

1. The Sea is made up of three temporal layers: the distant past of Max's childhood, the recent past of his wife's illness and death, and the present of his return to Ballyless. Instead of keeping these layers distinctly separated, Banville segues among them or splices them together, sometimes within a single sentence. Why might he have chosen to do this, and what methods does he use to keep the reader oriented in his novel's time scheme?
    
2. Morden frequently refers to the Graces as gods, and of course the original Graces were figures in classical mythology. What about these people makes them godlike? Does each of them possess some attribute that corresponds, for instance, to Zeus's thunderbolt or Athena's wisdom? What distinguishes the Graces from Max's own unhappily human family? Are they still godlike at the novel's end?
    
3. When Max first encounters the Graces, he hears from the upstairs of their house the sound of a girl laughing while being chased. What other scenes in the book feature chases, some playful, some not? Is Morden being chased? Or is he a pursuer? If so, who or what might he be pursuing?
    

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.