The Sea

“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 the rain and lapping at the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.

Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.”

The opening lines of the novel describe the unusually high tide on the day when the twins died. The sea is presented as threatening (malignantly agleam) and somehow monstrous (bulging like a blister). It is also dirty, leaving a “fringe of soiled yellow foam” behind it. The remembered surge of the sea is also a metaphor for the sudden and overwhelming reawakening of old memories. The rusted old wreck on the shore looks as if it is about to sail again, and the narrator feels as if “someone has just walked over [his] grave.” The broken punctuation and repetition reflect the emotional state of the first-person narrator.

“It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the town. I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away. The town is Ballymore, this village is Ballyless, ridiculously, perhaps, but I do not care.”

The narrator reflects on the transience of some things and the endurance of others. He attaches names to the places in his story in a flippant, careless manner. This highlights the conscious unreliability of his narrative as a whole.

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

Max inhabits the past and present at the same time. The narrative moves freely between his childhood, his life with Anna, her final illness, and his present at the Cedars. The symbol of the “heart” connotes love.