Agustí Villaronga (In a Glass Cage) continues his exploration of the shattering effects of war on the innocent and the conflict between religion and sexuality in The Sea. In 1936, three children, in a violent and atrocious environment brought on by the Spanish Civil War, watch in horror as one of their playmates avenges his father's murder by killing the exe­cutioner's son. Distraught by his deed, the boy kills himself. This act haunts the remain­ing children — Francisca, Ramallo, and Tur — for the rest of their lives.

Several years later, they are reunited in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Francisca, now a nun, attends the sick and dying. Tur, "afraid of turning into someone bad that God will abandon," has become a religious fanatic, driven to self-flagellation for his unnatural attraction to Ramallo. And Ramallo boasts of his sexual exploits with women to the other boys in the ward, but is actually being kept by an older man and is controlled by his own amoral impulses. Like a scream caught in the throat, The Sea is a quiet, surreal vision of pent up sexuality, religious fanaticism, and the horrors of the body.