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Max weaves his reminiscences of the Graces together with painful memories of life with Anna. From the time he met her, he saw his Anna as a demi-goddess. Tall and statuesque, beautiful in a fierce way and also gracious and beneficent, she conferred a little of her divinity upon him, making him feel set apart from the mortals in their company:
Ah those parties, so many of them in those days. When I think back I always see us arriving, pausing together on the threshold for a moment, my hand on the small of her back, touching through brittle silk the cool deep crevice there, her wild smell in my nostrils and the heat of her hair against my cheek. How grand we must have looked, the two of us, making our entrance, taller than everyone else, our gaze directed over their heads as if fixed on some far, fine vista that only we were privileged enough to see.
Max finds a parallel between the inseparable twins, Myles and Chloe, and himself and Anna. He and Myles are the changelings, creatures without their own voices, without names except those given them by the greater gods. In his case, he knows that he used Anna from the start to invent himself as he wanted to be.
From earliest days I wanted to be someone else… . I never had a personality, not in the way others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone… . Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight.
Of course, Max also loved Chloe once; she was a forerunner to Anna, and he speaks of losing her and Myles (I can't give away too much here) as "the departure of the gods." In losing Anna, he's again lost the object of his devotion. The gods, in their weakness, have abandoned him again. This leads him to the conclusion that death is ultimately all there is—death symbolized in the swelling sea, maternal and yet capricious, bitterly jealous and yet indifferent. There is no defeating death: it draws gods and mortals alike into its arms.
In Banville's previous novel, The Shroud, he used the Christian legend of the Shroud of Turin as a metaphor for a man who existed only as the shadow of someone long dead and unknown. In The Sea, he employs some of the same character-types and plot elements: a young man reinvents himelf, eventually becoming a wraithlike old man who is haunted by the youth he was. This time, Banville textures his story with references to pagan mythology: Miss Vavasour tends the Graces' old house like a temple virgin, Anna appears in the narrative like Athena descending into an ancient epic, and then of course there's the wine-dark sea itself, bounty and bane of ancient mariners. Max himself makes no end of drowning allusions: no wonder Banville gives him the surname "Morden" ("What sort of a name is that?" Chloe asks).
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