Book Review:
The Sea

Author: John Banville
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
Page Count: 195 Pages

By Mark Ralls

(UMC.org)—The season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, the day when Christians are invited to reflect on our mortality. Christians all over the world attend Ash Wednesday services where the sign of the cross is cast in ashes on our foreheads. We hear these words and receive them as the truth of our human existence: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

The Sea makes for timely reading around this day of somber reflection. This Booker prize-winning novel from acclaimed Irish writer, John Banville, is a meditation on mortality and memory. A grieving widower named Max Morden returns to the seaside resort of his youth. There he mourns his wife’s tortuous death from stomach cancer, and he remembers the summer of his coming-of-age fifty years earlier. As the recent past mingles with distant memory, Max faces the harsh reality that the finality death ultimately overcomes the fleeting powers of memory:

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along [in the memory of others] for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop….True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, a sprinkling of atoms in the air of the room where we breathed our last, yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead.”

When Max arrives at the Cedars boarding house, he attempts to collect the “dust of the dead” through the shifting tides of his memories. “Really,” Max muses, “one might live one’s life over, if only one could make as sufficient effort of recollection.” The memory he most longs to recapture occurred long ago when a socially superior, but deeply troubled, family captured his imagination. They seemed to him a collection of “gods,” introducing him to his both his sexual awakening and his first encounter with death. Max’s recollections of that monumental summer become intermingled with the memories of his married life and the terrible disease that took his wife. As such, The Sea is a meditative novel about the passing of our days and all the awakenings and losses that accompany every human life.

The great strength of this novel lies in the beautiful imagery of Max’s mind. For instance, he recalls the shy excitement of a first kiss with near perfect accuracy: “Chloe and I turned our heads simultaneously and, devout as holy drinkers, dipped our faces toward each other until our mouths met.” With a minimalist plot and thin character development, Banville must rely on his talent for such poetic phrasing and sensuous metaphor to keep the readers attention.

As Max broods over the ghosts of his past, the seductive power of his memories pull him under, like the undertow of the sea, until he finally becomes a mere ghost himself. Waning in the face of death, he concludes that, “all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

In this sad novel, the sea itself becomes a metaphor for both loss and death. Banville completes his meditation with one final memory from his childhood. He is standing waist-deep in the ocean, and “the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps…and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way toward the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed, nothing had happened…just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.”

If the final word about you and me is that everything we are and were evaporates into the “dust of the dead” then Banville is justified in his nihilism. Yet on Ash Wednesday, the ashes placed on our forehead form the shape of a cross. This is to help us remember that with the love of God in Christ—a love that ultimately took the form of a cross—there is hope…not in the power of human memory but in the promise of divine grace.

Rev. Mark Ralls is pastor of Epworth United Methodist Church in Concord, North Carolina and co-author of the Beginnings: An Introduction to Christian Faith from Abingdon Press.

This feature was developed by UMC.org, the official online ministry of the United Methodist Church.

Study Questions

• In Max’s first encounter with Mr. Grace, he receives a wink from the older man: “It was jaunty, intimate, and faintly satanic.” How does this brief exchange symbolize the person Mr. Grace turns out to be? How does Mr. Grace embody inappropriate behavior that borders on evil? What examples do you find?
• Early in the novel, Max says that the past “beats inside me like a second heart.” In what ways is Max haunted by the past?
• Part of what makes Banville such a gifted writer is his descriptive power. Pick out your favorite description in the book. Why did you select it? Share some of the images the word or phrase evokes in you.
  Leo Tolstory has the famous observation that all happy families are the same. Unhappy families are all different. Would you consider the Mordens and the Graces to be happy or unhappy families? If you chose the latter, how are they different from one another in their unhappiness?
• Myles is an unfortunate child. He is either unable or unwilling to speak. His twin sister Chloe is also quite troubled. She can turn cruel in the blink of an eye. What do you think is the reason for their bizarre behavior? If you had an opportunity to help them, what would you do? What could you do?
• Max is an ephemeral character that inspires ambivalence. What about him inspires your sympathy? What frustrates you about him? What do you dislike about him?
• What do you think happens to Max after the novel ends? Is he able to re-engage life? Or does he remain lost at sea?

Group Activities

As a group, visit some of the oldest members of your church—those who are either homebound are living in a nursing home. How would you compare their lives to that of Max? In what ways are they dominated by their memories of the past? In what ways are they influenced by their approaching death? Reflect on how your church can better support them. Reflect on the wisdom these aging persons have to share with us.

Resources
Alfred A. Knopf Web site
Biography of John Banville
Booker Prize goes to Banville's "The Sea"