47 pages • 1 hour read
The Sea
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Part 2, Pages 187-264Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Pages 187-220 Summary
Max amuses himself by observing the Colonel’s daily routine and the dynamics at the guest house. He is increasingly convinced that the Colonel has feelings for Miss Vavasour and sees Max as a rival. Max sardonically describes the unappetizing dinner served by Miss Vavasour and the digestive struggles faced by himself and the Colonel, followed by an evening in the TV room where the three watch a nature documentary. A discussion of elephants leads in Max’s mind to a series of violent, murderous fantasies and a profanity-laden apostrophe to an anonymous addressee (apparently Anna or Chloe or a combination of the two). Max is shocked by his thoughts and complains of having found himself “floundering in [his] own foulness” (196).
Max realizes that the Cedars reminds him of the guesthouses where he and his mother lived after his father left them for a life in England. His mother struggled to find employment and pay for necessities, while Max felt a kind of nostalgic yearning for the various places from which his father sent them postal orders. They eventually received a letter from another woman informing them of his death.
Max discusses his increasingly heavy drinking. He attributes it to his bereavement, his lack of ambition and talent, and feeling “uncertain and astray” and in need of “oblivion” (200).
A friend of Miss Vavasour’s, Bun, comes to visit. She flirts with Max and is condescendingly pitying about his bereavement. She gets into an increasingly heated argument with Miss Vavasour. Max expects his landlady to win easily but realizes that Bun has some kind of advantage over her that is holding Miss Vavasour back. Max feels exposed as an imposter for his humble family background and the shady origins of the money he inherited through his marriage. He acknowledges that a desire to climb the social ladder was a big factor in his fascination with the Graces and recalls his nagging sense of inadequacy as he struggled to “scale those Olympian heights” (207). He recalls one lunch at the Cedars where the family laughed at him when he admitted that his family used a primus stove to cook at the chalet.
Max remembers taking Anna to meet his mother, who was disapproving of their relationship. When his mother asks why Anna uses the name Max, it becomes apparent that the novel’s narrator originally went by a different name. His mother died very suddenly shortly after their wedding. He recalls Anna commenting on how “strange” it was for his mother “to be here, like that, and then not” (211).
After Bun’s departure, Max’s thoughts return to Anna; he observes that his mental picture of her is fading and that perhaps he never knew her very deeply (215). He reflects that his relationship with Anna was a vehicle for self-transmutation and invention. Anna always encouraged him to “be himself,” and he took this to mean he could become whoever he wanted to be. He reflects on the philosophical idealist argument that things only exist inasmuch as they are known, and he reasons that he and Anna knew each other as well as two people can. He muses that the aging Bonnard continued to draw Marthe as a young woman in the bath, even in the later paintings and after her death.
Miss Vavasour tells Max that the Cedars belongs to Bun’s family. Bun’s real name is Vivienne. He asks Miss Vavasour if Miss Vavasour ever married, and she blushes and says that Vivienne was her “friend” (219).
Part 2, Pages 221-247 Summary
Max remembers spying on Mrs. Grace washing Rose’s hair. He notes how his memory tends to preserve static images, like paintings on canvas. In Max’s memory, Connie, Chloe, and Rose are preserved as a kind of triptych, as the “three graces.” Max observes that Rose’s image is the clearest because it arrived complete: the work of “another, unknown hand” (224). He crafted the images of Connie and Chloe himself and has been constantly retouching them, the result being that they are “blurred rather than sharpened” (224).
Rose was the object of the twins’ constant torment and ridicule. The narrative shifts back to the day when Max learned Rose’s “secret.” Max has an appointment with Chloe and feels disappointed and humiliated to see her driving off in the car with her father and brother. Max climbs a tree and spies on Rose, who is weeping below. Connie approaches her, and he overhears the words “love,” “foolish,” and “Mr. Grace” before the steam and noise of a passing train prevent him from seeing or hearing any more. Convinced that Rose is having an affair with Carlo Grace, Max immediately tells the twins. He had hoped that Chloe would take the situation as a joke, but instead she seems somber and angry. Max is at once aroused and disturbed by his fantasies about the robust Carlo and the youthful Rose. After his disclosure, Max finds Chloe somewhat cowed before Rose.
On their last day together, the children watch the tide rising. Rose is sleeping on the dunes, and Chloe says she hopes the governess is washed away and drowned. They break into a beach hut, and Chloe sits with the boys on either side of her. Max compares the scene to images of the Egyptian Sphynx. He ponders that he is compiling his own “Book of the Dead” (237).
The narrative shifts forward to Anna’s dying moments. As she draws her hoarse last breaths, she is clearly trying to say something. As Max struggles to understand, she seems to say, “No, that is not it at all,” which he recognizes as a quotation from Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” (238). Finally, Anna manages to force out the words “They are stopping the clocks” and “I have stopped time” before giving him what seems to be a knowing smile (240).
Back in the beach hut, Max and Chloe begin kissing and touching each other, with Chloe holding Myles’s hand all the time. When they are interrupted by Rose, Chloe storms out onto the beach and sits on the sand, where she is joined by Myles. The two sit together for a moment and then swim off into the rising tides, where they are lost and drowned. Max runs back across the dunes to tell Carlo and Connie what has happened. As Max remembers Carlo turning to him and preparing to break the news, he quotes Arial’s words to Prospero at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Was’t well done?”
Part 2, Pages 248-264 Summary
Drunk, Max calls on Anna’s ghost, asking why she has not come back to haunt him. He recalls the events of the previous day. The Colonel was due to be visited by his daughter and her family, but they let him down at the last minute with a feeble excuse. Max gets drunk at the Pier Head Pub. When they refuse to serve him further, he heads out onto the beach with a bottle. He falls and hits his head and is retrieved by the Colonel, who takes him back to the Cedars and calls him a doctor.
Max wakes up to find Claire’s fiancé, Jerome, with whom he thought she had broken up, sitting on the chair in his room. He finds out that his daughter has made arrangements for him to move in with her. She will make sure he has no further access to alcohol and support him in finishing his book. When he complains to Miss Vavasour that he is being removed from the Cedars against his will, she makes a laughing retort beginning with “Oh, Max” (260). He wonders if this lapse in formality means that he can start addressing her as Rose. He still has many questions about the twins’ drowning. She has already told him what happened to the parents after their deaths: Carlo died of an aneurysm and Connie in a car crash, not long after the twins drowned.
Rose mentions how much she misses Connie and is surprised to realize Max believed she was in love with Carlo. Looking back on Connie’s flirtatious gestures at the picnic, Max realizes they were directed at Rose, not him.
Max remembers that Anna died while he was standing outside the nursing home, getting a breath of fresh air. He recalls standing on the beach alone one day and the whole sea seeming to surge forward briefly before subsiding again. Momentarily, some great force seems to have been awakened, but the surge is “a momentous nothing,” “just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference” (264). When the nurse calls him back to his dead wife, he feels “as if [he is] walking into the sea” (264).
Part 2, Pages 187-264 Analysis
The novel’s depiction of Max settling into a life at the Cedars draws on the tradition of vintage comedies-of-manners set in “genteel” seaside guesthouses or hotels. Max’s continued judgment of his companions reinforces this sense of closely observed old-fashioned social demarcations and the tensions they create. This literary context is increasingly subverted as Max’s mood lurches between wryly amused detachment and bitter, drunken rage. While he increasingly hates and criticizes his fellows, both Miss Vavasour and, especially, the Colonel show themselves to be decent and helpful in the face of his destructive behavior.
Rose’s uneven relationship with Vivienne/Bun is characteristic of the situational class dynamics of the Cedars, as perceived by Max, but the true nature of her relationship with Bun is a direct challenge to Max’s narrative of the past. Rose’s disclosure of her sexual orientation dismantles much of the narrative of events that Max has constructed around the sexual dynamics of the Graces. In Max’s telling, Carlo Grace is a totemic alpha male, symbolic of masculine sexual power, and essential to Max’s projections of sexuality as a child. Carlo is both Max’s imagined older self and his rival; the younger Max has Oedipal fantasies about displacing him. The lesbian dynamic excludes Max (and Carlo) and challenges his male assumed centrality, even as a boy, to the sexual currents of the Graces. The delayed revelation of the identity of Rose/Miss Vavasour reinforces the novel’s investigation of individual perception and the way in which it both tells and undermines Max’s version of events. This theme of Time, Loss, and Memory develops further with the revelation that the narrator’s name is an alias, confirming the unreliability and partiality of his version of events and recalling his naming of “Ballyless” and “Ballymore” at the opening of the novel.
The pictorial and artistic quality of memory-as-composition continues to be emphasized in these pages in his recollections of Rose, the description of Rose and Connie, and his final moments with the twins. The painterly quality of recollection is underscored through the explicit analogies to works of art. Max comments in these pages on the fact that his memories tend to take the form of static tableaux rather than moving images, perhaps part of his need to control and “own” them. The stillness of these images stands in contrast to the novel’s focus on time and mortality. Anna’s last words—“They are stopping the clocks” and “I have stopped time” (240) —imply that in death, she is finally moving beyond the cycles of death and decay. It is interesting that even this apparently intensely personal and private moment is defined through literary allusion. Anna’s “No, that is not it at all” is a quotation of Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,” and her declaration that “[t]hey are stopping the clocks” recalls Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” In quoting poetry, the novel suggests that the experience of death can only be expressed indirectly and approximately, through the voices of others. It also leaves open the idea that Max has misheard, replacing his wife’s last words with those of poets. This would fit with his established tendency to intellectualize as a means to distance himself from real feelings.
With the quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest—“Was’t well done?”—as Max prepares to break the news of the twins’ deaths to Carlo, Max again filters the experience of death and bereavement through literary quotation. The line is spoken by Ariel to Prospero after Prospero’s son is rescued from the sea. It can also be interpreted as a request for approval of the play from the audience. Besides its link to the death at sea of sons (and daughters), its use by Banville is deliberately ambiguous. The quotation stands alone, unlike others that are embedded and considered in Max’s narrative, making it emblematic of existential human uncertainty, especially when taking stock of a life and its meaning. The question remains unanswered by the novel, creating a sense of incompleteness to the novel’s conclusion, which fits with its challenging treatment of The Search for Identity and the ambiguous nature of (self-)narrative.
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