Reading guide: The Sea by John Banville

Max Morden

Max is a retired art historian. He has come to visit the seaside town of Ballyless, a place where his family vacationed when he was a child. Grieving the loss of his wife, Max finds himself reflecting on her final days, as well as his childhood and the experiences that shaped his life, including the summer spent in Ballyless where he met the Grace family when he was 11 years old.

Anna Morden

The wife of Max, Anna recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. Though it’s understood that their marriage was not always happy, Max was still grief-stricken after her death. Raised in a wealthy family, Anna didn’t like to talk about her illness, even keeping it from her daughter for a while.

Chloe Grace

Chloe is a twin to her mute brother Myles and is the daughter of Connie and Carlo Grace. Often described as aggressive and unruly, she fell in love with Max when they both were children.

Connie Grace

The mother of the twins, Chloe and Myles, Connie is perceived as beautiful and stylish. Before falling in love with Chloe, a young Max becomes infatuated with the older Mrs Grace. 

Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

‘The idea is to suspend us in a lyrical trance while we wait – and wait and wait – for the penny to drop. Banville can do this trick, and in the first half of The Sea he lays on the atmosphere as thickly as a smoke-and-mirrors illusionist. His descriptive passages are dense and almost numbingly gorgeous.’

Robert Allen Papinchak, The Seattle Times

‘The Sea is a stylish novel. Banville, former literary editor of the Irish Times, is a master of language skills. He offers word choices, alliterative phrases and vivid descriptions that seem to reinvent the use of the alphabet […] If this brief novel were little more than style without substance, it would not be worth much attention except as an exercise in rhetoric. Banville is too fine a writer to provide just the sizzle.’

Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

‘The novel is a mystery, and Banville solves it bit by bit […] The Sea is eerily accurate in describing how children on the cusp of adolescence perceive the world and the adults who rule it. Banville doesn’t offer us the happy Victorian fantasy that childhood is a realm of innocence and joy. Instead, the young narrator watches the grown-ups with the fanatic surveillance of a Cold War spy.’

Publishers Weekly

‘As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max’s cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max’s visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.’

Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

‘The story, such as it is, is narrated by one Max Morden (not quite, we are told quite late on, the name he was christened with), a widowed art historian, who is returning to a seaside boarding-house he once knew as a child on the cusp of adolescence. He has arrived there in order to deal with, in some roundabout way, the death of his wife from cancer. But the reason he lodges at Miss Vavasour’s comically moribund guest-house is also because, when he was young, Something Happened there, and the novel only reveals what that was at the end […] This is not so much a novel about memory as an examination of what it is to have a memory at all, to have had experiences that seem to be on the brink of slipping away.’

Banville’s prose within The Sea is often intricate and contemplative. How does his use of language and style contribute to the reflective atmosphere and emotional depth of the novel? How did the writing shape your overall reading experience?

In an interview with the Paris Review, Banville revealed that the line that strikes many readers is: ‘The past beats inside me like a second heart’. ‘I’ve written better sentences,’ Banville said, ‘but this one seems emblematic of whatever it is in the book that caught people’s imaginations and – dare I say it? – needs.’ Why might this quote resonate so strongly with readers and what does it mean to you?

Max visits Ballyless not long after the death of his wife, Anna, where many memories of his past, including those of his wife’s final days, resurface. Do you think his time spent in Ballyless was beneficial to his processing of grief, and does it lead to any personal growth of the character?

Memory is a central theme in the novel, but the veracity of Max’s account is often uncertain. ‘It has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present,’ he notes at one point. Even his name is revealed as questionable. Given such uncertainties, how much of Max’s account do you trust, and how does his unreliability shape your reading of the novel?

Banville weaves alternating timelines into the novel, from the present day in Ballyless to Max’s life with Anna to his childhood, creating a fragmented narrative. Why do you think the author might have chosen to switch between present and past so often? How do these different timelines impact one another, and how did you think they combine to create a layered view of Max’s character?

The deaths of Chloe and Myles at the end of the novel came as a surprise to many readers. Banville intertwines this event with Max’s recollections of Anna’s death, and his own near-death experience. Why do you think the author chose to conclude it in such a tragic way? How does this ending contribute to the novel’s exploration of memory, loss, and the passage of time?

The novel is rich with visual and artistic references. In an interview with the Paris Review, Banville explained that landscape holds as much significance as the characters themselves. ‘Readers ask me, “Why are you always telling us about the weather and how things look?” I say, because how things look and the beauty of how they look is just as important to me as the people who are in the foreground.’ Discuss Banville’s use of art and imagery as narrative devices in The Sea, and how it enhances the novel’s themes.

Beyond the book’s title and setting, the sea almost functions as a character in its own right, and Banville’s descriptions often give it a voice: ‘the little waves before me at the water’s edge speak with an animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe,’ he writes. What do you think his intention was in emphasising the sea, and do you see it as an overarching metaphor in the novel? 

Banville’s writing has often been compared by readers and critics to Samuel Beckett. In an interview with The European English Messenger, he said: ‘Every Irish writer has to take one of these two directions, you have to go into the Joycean direction or the Beckettian direction. And I go in a Beckettian direction.’ Do you recognise any similarities between the two authors’ work? In what ways does Banville stand apart?

The Book of Evidence by John Banville

Shroud by John Banville

The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch