“The Sea” by John Banville

John Banville’s 2005 novel “The Sea” is not an easy read. Not emotionally. Not mentally. But, like grief itself, it is best approached with the right tools and an openness to fully experiencing it. In the case of this brilliantly weighty novel, one of those tools is probably a dictionary (having dictionary.com open on your phone will do).

“They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes… I would not swim again, after that day.” 

“The Sea” is a first-person story told by Max Morden, an aging widower and art historian who has exiled himself to the small seaside Irish town where he spent his childhood summers. As Morden confronts the recent death of his wife from cancer, the novel unfolds with all the meandering detours of memory. This is not a linear story, but rather an astounding representation of the grieving mind: As the narrator slides between his current situation and vivid (but ultimately unreliable) flashbacks, we see a montage of the universal human experience. 

John Banville
Credit: Jindřich Nosek (NoJin)

While poetic, Banville maintains a conversational tone in this work, which deepens its sense of intimacy. The vocabulary is daunting but not unbelievable, and the result is the impression that we are being gifted with a rare and candid insight into all the pain and beauty that constitute love, life and loss. 

As much an examination of memory as grief, “The Sea” offers recollections that ebb and flow like a tide in which elation, numbness, confusion and regret mingle like grains of sand kicked up in the surf. Between childhood retrospection and the mundane emptiness of getting on with life after loss, Morden offers glimpses of his wife’s last days, which run like an undercurrent throughout the novel. He shuts them out abruptly at times, but inevitably returns to remembrance. 

“She said so many strange things nowadays, as if she were already somewhere else, beyond me, where even words had a different meaning. She moved her head on the pillow and smiled at me. Her face, worn almost to the bone, had taken on a frightful beauty. ‘You are not even allowed to hate me a little, any more,’ she said, ‘like you used to.’ She looked out at the trees a while and then turned back to me again and smiled again and patted my hand. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said. ‘I hated you, too, a little. We were human beings, after all.’ By then the past tense was the one she cared to employ.” 

There’s little consolation here – this is not the testament of a man persevering in the face of terrible suffering. There’s no other side on which our narrator has emerged to greet life anew. This is the drowning ugliness of the grief process gorgeously and violently written. 

There is a metaphor commonly used in grief therapy (and attributed online to Reddit user GSnow) that likens bereavement to waves in the ocean: In the beginning, they tower and come relentlessly, one after another, and it’s all you can do to stay afloat. After some time, the waves don’t come as often, and after still more time, they become smaller and more manageable. But they never stop coming. 

Whether you’re caught in the ferocious swells of new grief, or floating in the calmer waters some distance out from the wreck, “The Sea” offers the wisdom to find both beauty and desolation in the voyage, the courage to tell our own stories, and the conviction that they’re worth sharing. And that is all any of us can hope for.