[Revised 9/16/22]

A gentleman reflects on his life, especially his youth, after the death of his wife.

He returns to the formative landscape of his childhood, a modest seaside town and inn in Ireland. It is also the site of the formative tragedy of his childhood.



In effect, we have a coming-of-age novel as reflected upon in later life. Instead of the psychological depth of Danish author Jens Grondahl reflecting on his marriage in Silence in October, we get lush descriptions and beautiful turns of phrase.

Thoughtful, slow reading; a treasure with many lines to savor. The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005 and was picked as Novel of the Year by the Irish Book Awards in 2006.



Banville, an Irish author (b. 1945), has written about 20 novels. (I've enjoyed all six that I read). The Sea is by far his best-known work with more than 100,000 ratings on GR but it's not his highest-rated work. That's probably The Untouchable, a low-key thriller about a British spy.

Top photo of an Irish inn from telegraph.co.uk
The author from bostonglobe.com

This review may contain spoilers.

Max Morden, recently widowed and father of a grown daughter, has traveled back to the sea, back to the seaside property that was the scene of a tragic event some fifty odd years ago. He would remember meeting the Grace family and becoming emotionally attached to the mother, Mrs. Grace, and to falling in love with her daughter Chloe.

This is my first Banville book and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Not because I didn't think it would be good, but by how good it was, how good the writing was. The prose was so flowing and beautiful, although slightly above my reading level. The style is so uniquely different than anything I've read before.

The Sea won the 2005 Man Booker Prize, beating Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go by one vote. I haven't read that so I won't compare. But I liked this book, I like Banville's writing, and I give it four solid stars.

A mixed bag for me. This is a remarkable and intriguing book, sure, but somehow it didn't really resonate. Language and style are very distilled, almost poetic; I even suspect that the book comes into its own when you read it aloud, it 'sounds' just beautiful. But behind this, there's an obdurate story and an ingenious construction of which I do not know what to think. The narrator, Max Morden, an elderly man has just lost his wife to cancer and flees the world, back to a place on the Irish coast where he regularly spent the summers of his youth. There he came under the spell of the wealthy family Grace - the gods, he calls them - and this acquaintance, together with a dramatic incident, will scarr him for life. In his endless monologue Morden jumps constantly through time and only piecemeal we get more information. Max appears to be a very shy and disagreable man who is angry with his wife who left him and he obviously never overcame his youth trauma. He comes back to the sea hoping to find solace in the past.
"Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world’s wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. (…) that is why the past is just such a retreat for me. I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet”
This novel is ingeniously constructed, but at no time I was really captivated by the story, it felt a little too artificial. Moreover, the melancholic yearning for a paradisiacal past and the beatific admiration for the Grace family reminded me very strongly of similar novels ( Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, Brideshead Revisited by Waugh and also The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani). Despite the stylistic merits, and some strong passages on the power of remembering and the pervasiveness of the past in the present, Banville in this book a bit overplayed his hand, I think. But I remain in doubt, there's a lot of meat on the bone, here, perhaps inciting the need for a second read. Rating 2.5 stars.

I wish to thank my wonderful friend Seemita, who is truly an amazing reviewer, for inspiring me to read this book.

"The silence about me was heavy as the sea."

Silence. It is a special kind of language. The language of the dead, of those long gone, of the forgotten, the misunderstood, the hurt, the mad and, sometimes, the content. What do they tell me? What does silence tell me? What does it tell Max Morden? It tells him a story. The story of his life. It embraces him, caresses him, whispers to him of everyone and everything lost. He holds on to it. It is his only companion, his only friend, the lover that will never tire of him. It is his secret path to a better world. The world of the past.

“To be concealed, protected, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to be hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, shaking off the cold present and the colder future”

Yet, he discovers that silence has been his companion his whole life. He knows and understands it like he has never known and understood anybody, including himself.

“I have come to realise how little I knew her. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?”

Has he walked into it for so long as to not be able to understand the world around him? Has he truly wanted to? It is often easier to let go of the truth, dispose of it like of unnecessary, heavy and unattractive object and create another version of it, "new reality"

“Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?”

Which is more real? The past or the present? And when we cannot find refuge in the past, the present is painful, the future unattainable, unimaginable, where is the sanctuary? Is it within us? What does lay within us besides ourselves? Those whom we refuse to let go of? Max believes that no one is truly gone as long as they are remembered. “And yet people do go, do vanish. That is the greatest mystery of all” Duality. Ambiguity. Isn’t it part of us all, of everything that surrounds us? We die, yet, we go on living. Time passes, nobody can escape change. “At what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?” Yet, time is still. Our memory always brings us back to what we thought we’ve left behind. “The past beats inside me like a second heart”. And the more we walk within the realms of our own minds, the more we realize that we are like the sea. Ambivalent. We are cruel and merciful, placid and tempestuous, generous and harsh, known and mysterious. But unlike it, we are boundless.

"The waves before me at the water’s edge speak with animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy, perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis…I see the black ship in the distance, looming imperceptibly nearer at every instant. I am there. I hear your siren’s song. I am there, almost there."

Our minds, our pasts, are territories we explore, yet, there is so much that is left unexplored. What do they eagerly whisper to us? What song do they sing to us? What is revealed, what is left concealed? Are we ready to take that chance? Are we ready to immerse into the depths of the dark and mysterious past, are we ready to face the cold and painful present, do we dare hope for the obscure future? Who are we, what stories do we have to tell, and to whom do we tell them? Sometimes silence is the only one that listens. Sometimes that’s enough. And sometimes it is not. ”There is a special quality to the silence at night”

Read count: 1

P.S. The whole time while reading the book and then, while writing my review, I was listening to The Cure's "Lullaby". I think it fits perfectly

The Sea is a story of a lonely man adrift in the sea of grief and trying to reevaluate the past and to reconcile himself to the present.
Bereavement… Sooner or later everyone becomes acquainted with the pain of sorrow…

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

Memory lane… Reminiscences of childhood… I think everyone possesses some childhood memories that keep haunting one from day to day…

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things – new experiences, new emotions – and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

And there is a tragic mystery hidden in the past…
Even in solitude one must never lose hope for consolation.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

Max Morden had met once gods. They came in the guise of Grace family. Father, noisy lecherous satyr. Mother, oozing sensuality indolent goddess, will become his first erotic fascination. And twins. Chloe, very mature for her age, feisty girl with rather strong personality and Myles, shy and impish boy. There was Rose yet, nanny or governess, a sad nymph holding a secret in her heart. They rented at the seaside a summer house, called The Cedars.

And now, half a century later, widowed and lonely Max is in that place again. He’s a man who never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no-one whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone as he disarmingly admits. He takes a room in the Cedars but memory plays tricks on him. Everything has changed though seems to be the same and invariant. It’s naivety to expect even prospect of return, isn’t it ?

Only the sea appears to be unchangeable.

What is he looking for here ? Alleviation, calm, death, answer, missing piece of the puzzle ?

This memorable summer, painted with golden sun and inky shadow, creates the first plan of the novel. Just then Max had gained this sad knowledge that there is always a lover and a loved and which role he would be playing in that act.

There is another plan as well also given in flashbacks. It concerns Morden’s marriage, illness and finally death of his wife. These two plans are mixing alternately with his present stay at the seaside. Such is the nature of memory that one recollection leads to another gradually unveiling more and more from our past and showing intimate image of our life. The sea then, with its tides, is a record of that process, coming to terms with loss, dismantling of memory, family, love, past .

Banville’s prose, perfectly fitting in with the gray and cold ubiquity of the sea, is elegiac and poetic. And concluding paragraph is profoundly purifying.



I do not remember well that day when the gods departed. But I know where I can find them now. They remain incessantly like insects caught in a drop of resin, like the blades of grass trapped in the amber. They possessed for good this mythical land, that distant Arcadia of my childhood. And I believe that still have the key to that land.

The Sea really bugged me. I've never read another John Banville novel, so I don't know whether this one is typical of his writing in general, but nothing irritates me more these days than a writer who has considerable gifts at his command who writes novels that function as elegant window displays for the considerable gifts at his command. The plot of the book, such as it is, finds middle-aged Max Morden retiring to a rented house by the sea, near the "chalets" where he spent his boyhood summers, to mourn his wife's death and think about the past. The first person account intercuts Max's memories of his wife's final months with his memories of a "significant" summer he spent by the sea, during which he became fascinated with the Graces, a family a rung or two higher on the social ladder than Max himself. I put "significant" in quotation marks, because I can't for the life of me figure out what's significant about Max's relationship with the Graces, other than the opportunity it affords Banville to display his considerable gifts, and -- what's worse -- I can't even fathom what's significant about his wife's death other than the opportunity it affords Banville . . . well, you get the idea. The premise of the novel seems to be "Hey, look at me, everybody, I'm the 'heir to Nabokov.' The back of the book says so. And besides, my book is filled with Beautiful Prose." The linking of Banville's name with Nabokov on the back of the book does Banville a considerable disservice. I kept expecting withering satire and a devastating prose style (Banville is good, but he's not that good), and all I got was the narrator's tendency to pepper his recollections with big, bloated words.

"Character-driven" novels are not of themselves a bad thing. Perhaps my favorite novel of the last thirty years (Gilead) relies more on character than on plot. If you're going to rely on character, however, you'd better make sure your characters are at least one, and preferably all, of the following: a) sympathetic; b) compelling; c) more than merely a place marker for inflated, if not particularly profound, ruminations on the Big Questions.

One of Banville's passages may illustrate what bothers me most about this book. In the passage, Morden describes the photographs his terminally ill amateur-photographer wife has taken of fellow hospital patients -- all of whom have, apparently cheerfully, consented to expose their scars, wounds, and afflictions for the sake of . . . photographic immortality? . . . the gratification of their exhibitionist desires? . . . the betterment of mankind? I got stuck, as I read this passage, trying to figure out why the people in the photographs had agreed to present their private suffering in so public a fashion. Then I realized they were props, placed on stage to be rearranged and remarked upon, to give the leading man something to do while he wows us with his method acting. Oh, come on, one might object, isn't Yorick's skull a prop? Of course, but it's not merely a prop. We admire Hamlet's ability to make him live again, but that's just it. He makes him live again. Nobody really lives in Banville's novel, including his narrator, and perhaps that's not surprising in a novel that is mostly about death. What's more surprising, though, is that, for all his lovely style, Banville leaves us with very little impression that anyone in this book ever really has lived.

In the book's final passages, Max Morden likens the moment of his wife's death to a moment in his childhood when he had been lifted up by a suddenly surging sea, carried toward shore a bit, and then set down again. It was, he says, "as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference." That's what it feels like to read

When my wife died suddenly in 1998 from a cerebral aneurysm, one of the things that I did in the wake of her death was to begin to reconnect with people and places that had meaning both for us as a couple and for me alone. In many cases, I ended up returning to places from my own childhood and reconnecting with people whom I had not contacted for years. Both the process itself and the actual reconnections to past places and friends helped me cope with the loss. It also activated memories that I had either forgotten or had feared I would be unable to recall.

John Bayville’s The Sea is a story that mirrors in some measure my own journey in grief. For Max Morden, the journey to his past was certainly more focused. Following his wife’s death after a long illness, he returned to the seaside town where his family had vacationed in his youth. And his reawakening memories swirled around a family, the Graces, he had met during a single summer when he was around 11 years old. For Max, mystery and tragedy were deeply embedded in his youthful past.

While there are clear differences in Max’s and my returns to our pasts, Max’s emotional responses to working through grief were similar. At one point, toward the end of the novel, Max reflects:

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I did know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralyzed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

That feeling I know well.

I more generally read fiction to open up new horizons for me, new worlds—to help me see and understand with the eyes of others the world around me. The Sea, however, was a far more personal adventure: in a sense, it was a return to old worlds along already trodden roads. I understood much of Max’s inner turmoil and disengagement from the people around him because it all rang true for me in my circumstances.

Apart the story thread, Banville’s language is elegant and often lyrical. Here Max describes a moment when he and the Graces are at the beach:

The sand around me with the sun strong on it gave off its mysterious, catty smell. Out on the bay a white sail shivered and flipped to leeward and for a second the world tilted. Someone away down the beach was calling to someone else. Children. Bathers. A wire-haired ginger dog. The sail turned to windward again and I heard distinctly from across the water the ruffle and snap of the canvas. Then the breeze dropped and for a moment all went still.

Banville fills his novel with the kinds of descriptions that pull the reader directly into the story, seeing, hearing and smelling with the protagonist.

Banville, as Ted Gioia emphasizes in his review of The Sea, also builds his story with words that will send most readers to a dictionary: assegais, horrent, cinereal, knobkerrie, prelapsarian and mephitic (Gioia's selection). It is that use of an elegantly mature vocabulary that seems to off put many readers. He is clearly in his selection of words not an Ernest Hemingway. But he is a different type of stylist than Hemingway. While Hemingway in his classic novels and short stories uses a sparse, tightly-constructed prose that hints at greater depth and meaning (his so-called “iceberg theory”), Banville brings everything to the surface, leaving the reader submerged in a world of profound emotion and surprise tightly controlled by the author. Reading The Sea is not effortless.

In the face of so many sublime reviews of this book I come up short. After the loss of his wife, Max comes adrift and seeks some kind of fertilization from visiting the seaside town of holidays in his childhood. Nice immersion in people and memories, but ultimately the book came off as too bland as Max had too little at stake, too little impetus to reshape his vision of the world, and not enough angst to take real risks.

3.5 Stars

I was really excited to read this book, but sadly, it never lived up to my expectations.

John Banville is an extraordinary writer. So many of his sentences I reread, they were just so perfect.

“Amazed and disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me, since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past.”
“ The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

For me, the flow of the story was ruined by all the superfluous, unknown words that he inflicted on me- so many I had to look up and many I just ignored.

The basic plot: Max Morden has just lost his wife and is in a state of abject grief. He decides to go back to the place by the sea that his family used to go when he was a child. It was there he met the Grace family and 50 years later he is still trying to come to terms with a tragedy that occurred.

Our narrator is Max and he is very honest with us his readers. I felt sorry for him and the intensity of his grief but he does not paint himself as a sympathetic person. He admits to hurting his dog as a child cause he liked to see him react to pain. There are other instances of his unkindness and even brutality.

This book is about one’s memories- Max explores his childhood memories and memories with his wife when she was ill. Banville was at his best when describing the utter feelings of hopelessness when your spouse became terminal.

“ But then , at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?”

All the pieces come together nicely at the end which makes this book a solid 3.5 stars for me.

Published: 2005

This is a small but dense, beautifully written book about a man who lost his wife and reminisces about her and a boyhood lost love. The mood is nostalgic and heavy, it somehow reminded me of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, even though The Sea is a completely different thing and the writing is so much better, beautifully crafted (I think the translation also helped). Thank you, Susana!

3.5 out of 5 stars. I may bump this up as I think some more about the book. It was beautifully written.

Follows a middle-aged Irishman as he visits the seaside town where he spent summer vacations as a child. His visit dredges up old memories from his childhood and the summer days he spent with a brother and sister from a more well-to-do family.

This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. I've read many Booker prize winners/nominees and this definitely has the same feel as those.