Banville’s The Sea is about a man’s untrustworthy memories—less about his dying wife and more about his sexual awakening when he was about eleven years old. Looking back, Max Morden realizes that his observations of the Grace family’s beach picnics “changed his life forever.” After fifty years, he returned to the beach resort of Ballyless, Ireland, where he met the Grace family, who he had yet to understand in some profound way.
Morden thought the Graces were gods of some kind, and he was only a mere mortal. Attending his first picnic with them, he marvels at their picnic gear: the striped canvas awning, folding chairs, table, a large straw hamper filled with tins of sandwiches, biscuits, vacuum flasks, and real teacups and saucers. He remembers being aroused by Constance Grace’s adult tanned body, her black swimsuit, and fascinated by her inner thighs.
As the summer progresses, Morden becomes friends with Chloe Grace, also eleven, and they have an innocent romance. But the summer turns solemn when Morden mistakenly thinks that Rose Vavasour, the Grace’s children’s nanny, is having an affair with Carlo Grace. When he confides this to Chloe, who confides this to her twin brother Myles, the results are implausible and catastrophic. The two walk into the sea holding hands and drown.y drowning in the sea. Morden watches helplessly. Afterward, he has a dull sense of responsibility but is perplexed and uncomprehending. The name Morden means “murder” in German.
Now watch them helplessly. Sixty-one and mourning the death of his wife, Anna, Morden returns to Ballyless to come to terms with the twins’ death. There he meets Rose Vavasour, who tells him it was not Carlo she loved but Constance. “Oh, no,” she said, “never him.” “And I thought, too, of the day of the picnic and her sitting behind me on the grass and looking where I was avidly looking and seeing what was not meant for me at all.”
Morden is stunned and realizes his mistake and its consequences. He barely recovers his composure, but upon returning home, his wife dies. Walking into the hospital, Morden feels deathly, as if he is “walking into the sea.”
Featured Image: Constance Grace (Natascha McElhone) on the beach. Carlo Grace and the twins Chloe and Miles are in the background.
See John Banville. The Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005; Stephen Brown. The Sea (2013). The screenplay by John Banville is based on his novel.