Book Club Discussion Questions
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
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
📖
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- How does the author develop themes of identity and belonging throughout the narrative?
- What role does the setting play in shaping the characters' decisions and relationships?
- Discuss how the ending reframes the events of the story. Were you surprised?
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.
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