The Sea
SynopsisPlot
In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.
Story
About this book
Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman, returns to the seaside town where he spent childhood summer holidays. He is grieving the recent death of his wife, and the familiar shoreline draws him back toward memories he has carried for decades. The town is also where he first met the Graces, a well-off family whose presence shaped one formative season of his boyhood.
Through the Graces, the young Max encountered love and death for the first time, both arriving abruptly. The novel moves between that summer and the present, held together by Max's interior voice, which circles moments and revisits them rather than reporting events in order. The central question is what he now understands about the past and how firmly it has marked him.
The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005. Its setting is a small Irish holiday town, the kind of place where families arrive for a few weeks each year and then disperse, leaving houses and beaches to be remembered differently by everyone who passes through. Banville writes grief as an act of careful, uneasy recollection.
