Customer Reviews

Ghosts

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Voracious Reader" tells you on this site all about the details. I wanted to add, as I have for other Banville novels that I have reviewed on Amazon, samples of the prose. Yes, the Beckett-ish style in this novel, which if you have never read Banville would appear turgid and stolid, dominates even more than usual. Why? Isolating most of the story on the decidedly non-Irish sounding island of Cythera (despite the presence of a garda, Toner), the focus in "Ghosts" shimmers more like mirages or hallucinations, as you have as a reader fewer distractions within urban life as many of Banville's later novels have begun exploring. albeit tangentially.

I read this after not only "Book of Evidence"--which must be completed first, but after the last of the three novels narrated by Freddie Montgomery, "Athena." Actually, I did not miss much out of order, except the introduction of Freddie's interest in Vaublin, himself as enigmatic as his work "The Golden Age." The whole "tableaux mort" scenario that Sophie's arrival seems to portend is curiously left aside as the book continues after the initially suspenseful shipwreck of the motley crew of passengers. I wish we knew more about Felix, not to mention the appropriately monikered Croke. The characters from the ship seem almost Dickensian as well as Beckettian, but they largely remain sketched rather than filled in.

The novel does seem to slip at the point around pp. 190-200, when first the Xhosa and then Diderot appear to no convincing end, digressing from an already dissolving narrative frame. Banville by then appears to forget about any story arc, as the book slips back in time to tell of Freddie's release from prison and then only gradually saunters up to tie the initially detailed and elaborated shipwreck story into the art professor's apprenticeship tale that frames it.

A very curiously constructed novel, with its pace in the beginning paradoxically fresher and cleaner than other Banville fiction. I read the first half excited that, for once, the author had given a more transparent style and a more direct (relatively speaking, of course) depiction of the island and its denizens, temporary or more or less permanent. But again, typically, Banville slips away in the final couple of pages into a twisted bow that ties the plots together at a skewed angle.

Samples of style, which is always the reason to return to Banville; "Was it the day still going down or the morning coming up? He smiled sadly. This is what his life was like now, this faint glimmer between a past grown hazy and an unimaginable future." (10) Speaking of Vaublin's "Le monde d'or": "there is mystery here [. . .]; something is missing, something is deliberately not said. Yet I think it is this very reticence that lends his pictures their peculiar power. He is the painter of absences, of endings. His scenes all seem to hover on the point of vanishing. How clear and yet far-off and evanescent everything is, as if seen by someone on his deathbed who has lifted himself up to the window to look out a last time on a world that he is losing." (135/6).

And again, another passage from many more that I could have cited, that speaks for not only the artistic work under examination but this novel: "Evidently there is allegory here, and symbols seem to abound, yet the scene carries a weight of unaccountable significance that is disproportionate to any possible programme or hidden discourse. It is first of all a masterpiece of pure composition, of the architectonic arrangement of light and shade, of earth and sky, of presence and absence, and yet we cannot prevent ourselves asking what it is that gives the scene its air of mystery and profound and at the same time playful significance. Who are these people? we ask, for it seems to matter nto what they may be doing, but what they are." (227/8)

This novel eludes pinpointing or analysis; like the aftermath of a powerful dream or the artistic visions it encompasses, it may mean many things to many readers--the title itself is a puzzle. More open-ended than "Book," it does prepare the reader well for its sequel, "Athena," a similarly distorted but somehow clearly conveyed perspective on the contrast between inner desire and outer barrier.

Little do people know that Ghosts (1993) is the second installment of John Banville's Freddie Montgomery trilogy. The Book of Evidence (1989) begins the sequence, which consists of Freddie's grim and gruesome confession of the brutal murder of a maidservant who interrupted his escapade of stealing a painting. Serving ten years in jail, the ex-con came to a secluded island to accommodate life and live in solitude. Professor Kreutzner, an eminent historian, was the world's most prestigious authority on the painter Vaublin, whose works were abound with strange and eerily pleasing asymmetry of misplaced figures. The paintings generated inevitably over and above it an air of mystery of what it was that happened. Along with the sulky butler and assistant Licht, who cooked and typed up manuscripts, Freddie assisted the professor in his manuscripts. The work represented for Freddie the last outpost at the border of his life.

Readers who haven't read The Book of Evidence will find the narrator and the narrative ambiguous, surreptitious, and turbid. Not only did Freddie incessantly recount on events that led to his imprisonment, he delved on philosophical issues like the redemption and the accommodation of self and the conscience. Out of guilt for his crime, the narrator professed this many-world theory that a multiplicity of worlds existed in a mirrored regression in which the dead were not dead. The notion of dreams recurred throughout the narrative and thrusted the main plot. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he was recalling some riotous tumble of events in his dreams or simply telling the truth. Until the narrator officially identified him as the man who stole the painting he was fatally obsessed with, I had an idea that he, the narrator, was a ghost hovering over the professor's house and spying on its inhabitants as well as the unexpected castaways.

The plot is simple-it is nothing short of an account of a day in the island when a group of strangers boarded on a chartered boat stuck fast on the sandbank and ran ashore. The story slowly and mysteriously unraveled when the professor, taciturn and somewhat disgruntled by the intrusion, took the seven castaways in while they rested and waited for the skipper. Three of the castaways were kids (Pound, Hatch, and Alice). The adults were their sulky caretaker Sophie who was a photographer, dapper old Cooke, elegant Flora, and the leering Felix who claimed to know the professor.

The ominous and vaguely menacing mood persisted though the castaways found comfort and solitude in their transient stay on the island. Something about Flora and the room where stayed in (previously occupied by the narrator who hid from the castaways at their first arrival) always haunted me and tucked my mind. Flora threw herself in dreams and she woke from which feeling shivery and damp. What did she have to do with the Pierrot figures that gracefully drifted in ambiguous landscapes?

By the time I was a little less than halfway through the book, I realized nothing much would happen (as far as what would happen to the castaways) except for more haunting, lyrical, and imaginary prose that required readers to practice patience of a connoisseur. What the narrator said might be real or illusions, but the inclusion of a single chapter on Vaublin the painter toward the end drove the book to a tantalizing climax-and I will leave that that pleasure to the readers, of course. The painting (and Freddie's scholarly interest in it) would seamlessly sew all the threads together and the realization that it brought would only haunt the readers even more.

Ghosts is so much more engrossing than its predecessor in the series. While The Book of Evidence portrayed Freddie like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita-the morbid sensation and the insouciance, in Ghosts Banville tells a tale through Freddie and some of his allusions that actually might have become real. His presence in the house, though hidden from the castaways, were nothing short of immanent. It is through his perspective just so we know about the professor's secret scheme of painting and his not liking Felix for the same reason. 4.7 stars.

As the middle section of a trilogy, "Ghosts" is enigmatic in the extreme. The novel begins as mysteriously as it ends and will probably seem utterly befuddling to those who have not read its far superior successor "The Book of Evidence." Familiarity with the latter helps explain the narrator Freddie Montgomery's fascination with the young and beautiful Flora. After years of incarceration, Freddie strives "by harmless industry to do a repair job" on his "rotten soul," a task that includes resurrecting the female victim of his heinous crime. Accordingly, he retreats to a nameless island and lends assistance to a taciturn art professor. There he skulks in the shadows and generally avoids contact with a cast of castaways, two-dimensional characters who have, in a sense, stepped from a Dutch painting. The work by Vaublin exemplifies the novel's preoccupation with the blurred distinction between reality and pretense.

Stylistically, "Ghosts" is no departure for Banville. "For three decades," critic Robert MacFarlane aptly notes, "John Banville has been refining the exquisite, mandarin style that is his hallmark, and establishing himself as the finest writer of the confessional narrative since Nabokov." That voice, refined and digressive, the linguistic equivalent of a baroque facade to a haunted house, drives "Ghosts" and compensates in part for the novel's near absence of plot. All is quiescence, a preparation for final acts.

While reading this rum piece of poetic prose, I was time and again reminded of Thomas Carlyle's remark in Sartor Resartus on Samuel Johnson's famed desire to see a ghost. All that the great lexicographer had to do, Carlyle averred, was to look in the mirror. We are all transient ghosts passing through a fleeting world. This is one of the effects the narrator had on me - to view myself and the world through this spectral optic.

But the opposite holds true as well. There is a contrary tide. The narrator, who, whatever he was in The Book of Evidence, seems to be the Ariel in this Tempest-driven tale or tableau ( "I am there and not there....I am only a half-figure, a figure half seen....and if they try to see me straight, or turn their heads too quickly, I am gone."), is fixated on the "immanence" in the things and people here: "Nothing happens, nothing will happen, yet everything is poised, waiting, a chair in the corner crouching with its arms braced, the coiled fronds of a fern, that copper pot with the streaming sunspot on its rim. This is what holds it all together and yet apart, this sense of expectancy." The "immanence"-much described here in the analyses of Vaublin's painting-indeed, has a necessary sense of "imminence." But it is only that trembling expectancy. Again, "nothing happens." One can't help but be reminded of the visionary Emily Dickinson poem:

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons -

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -

'Tis the Seal Despair -

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -

Shadows - hold their breath -

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death -

One can go off on many tangents from the abstruse meanderings threading and unthreading their way through the brumous weather of the wind-swept isle or the frowsty rooms of the house, or the labyrinthine corridors of the narrator's mind. And what reviewer could cover them all? I have covered what seems, after a couple readings, striking to me, but one could, in sooth, continue evermore.

The narrator says, "I live here, in this lambent, salt-washed world, in these faded rooms, amid this stillness. And it lives in me." The more one reads, the more one realises how terrifically eerie and...ghostly....his (our?) existence is.

Until I read John Banville (Kepler, Book of Evidence, and now Ghosts) I would have been skeptical that any writer could pull off a book with essentially no plot...and still keep me hooked.

The man quite simply suprasses Edgar Allan Poe at his best. There isn't a character anywhere in Banville's fiction who isn't sick, but who can't also tell the reader about their inner darkness with such admirable prose.

A guilty pleasure?

"Ghosts" is one of the truly great novels -- brilliantly conceived and executed; deeply insightful; sculpted by a poet's hand. Oh, to be sure, John Banville's language can be absurd and pretentious, and I found the occasional mundane vulgarity startling, jarring, and gratuitous... but hardly ruinous. I heartily recommend this book.

Less a plot novel than The Book of Evidence (of which it is the sort-of sequel), Ghosts nevertheless has an artistry that neither BOE nor any other book I've read in recent years can touch. The imagery isn't merely beautiful; it is staggering, and the mood that Banville conjures will hold any reader with an imagination.

I don't know if this is the best introduction to Banville, but it's where I started so I guess we'll take it as it comes. I first read about him years ago as a respected Irish literary type and decided to get the vast majority of what he wrote, only finally getting around to reading them now. And he's definitely interesting.

The premise of the novel is simplistic only at the heart of it. A skiff full of a small group of people washes up on an isolated island that is inhabited by a professor and his assistant. They stay on the island in the hopes of drying off and getting back. Meanwhile, someone else seems to know the professor from back in the day. Also meanwhile, there seems to be someone else on the island narrating events and commenting on the action.

Seems easy, right? But that's just the start. Banville appears to come from the "Everything means more than one thing" school of writing, which can be maddening if you're not ready for it and exciting if you like a literary challenge. The narrative peppers itself with questions that it refuses to answer, becoming more elusive even as you try to pin it down. The characters all seem to have relationships that aren't exactly spelled out, or maybe are just reflections from another place. The narrator, who refers to himself as a little god, seems more and more interested in talking about himself than bothering with the plot. The plot itself becomes a feint for digressions, as if the other characters were only tools to set the action in motion, an excuse to stir the waters and study what patterns emerge from the murk.

In some respects it sounds like a less extreme version of Philip Dick's "Maze of Death" where characters are toyed with by a narrative that is just making them go through the motions. There are conflicts set up, but they're meaningless, merely window dressing to pass the time. The most solid character seems transparent, slipping in between lines, only really visible when you're no longer looking. It helps that Banville's prose is achingly literary and worth the price of admission. He tends to cast everything in a sinister light, even such simple acts as walking down a flight of stairs, giving the novel a vaguely creepy haze that it refuses to shake no matter how innocuous the events really seem. It always feels like something is about to happen, and the tension is pitched right at the edge. You're teased with explosions, when the only sound is the fuse burning itself out. People compare him to Beckett, and there are elements of Beckett in the prose, mostly in the dark and sly humor and the carefully controlled sentences, but he doesn't have Beckett's grand economy, his ability to use only what's absolutely necessary. To me, he reads closer to Updike, with a laser like precision that colors every scene, but without Updike's clinical detachment. These characters are alive, or remembering once being alive. He manages to create his own world here that exists separate from ours, and give us the sense that these people really have wound up getting separated from humanity and known reality.

Still, the novel works best as an examination of the narrator, who apparently committed a crime and went to jail and is now out of jail and eventually comes to the island (this part I think makes more sense if I read "Book of Evidence", which is next on the list), because Banville really has a way of getting into what makes screwed up people tick, especially who know that they're screwed up and aren't quite sure what to do about it. As the narrative gets more and more involved with that, basically shoving everyone else out of the way, it becomes fascinating just to read it for the insights and rhythms. At times this can make it read more like notes for a novel than an actual novel, as if Banville started out with one idea and partway through decided to switch tactics entirely, but it makes for constantly interesting reading. At no point do you ever feel like the author doesn't know what's going on, even if you don't. It's nice to be reassured that someone isn't making it up as they go along.

So don't go into it expecting a conventional novel with a plot and resolution. Those things are only teasing you. The plot is pointless, the action is nonexistent, even the other characters are only window-dressing. But the story seems to be suggesting that a lot can happen, when you step away from your own life and allow it to stop, and see what develops.

I read The Sea a while back and thought I would give this a try. Being just part of my backlog, I failed to realize it was the second part of a trilogy until after I finished Ghosts.

JB is incredibly gifted. One might say that the style is stream-of-consciousness. Scratch that. The author's descriptive prose, I am convinced, is directly posited from his mind telepathically to the page. The style is a bit terse for the uninitiated.

The primary character is a recently-released convict that is striving to repatriate himself in a world that is a bit larger than he recalls. The loss of friends and family over his long incarceration weighs heavily on him. He is the narrator of the book (obviously) and ends up on a sparsely populated island in a large house, taken in by a famous art professor and his furtive assistant. A group of tourists, temporarily marooned when a drunken tour guide runs their boat aground, take shelter at the house and odd circumstances of the book develop out of that occurrence.

There are no heroes in this book - the characters are believably human. The storyline actually completes the circuit. Ghosts came full circle for me - even thought it is part of a greater work.

Ghost is an odd novel. It begins on an island where seven people on a boat-ride have gotten stuck through the incompetence and drunkenness of their captain. They approach an old house to ask for a place to rest while they wait for the captain to fix the boat. There they find an odd couple, an old professor and his apparent assistant, a man named Licht. Though the two seem unfriendly, the group is admitted, and even cooked a meal. They eat, they walk the grounds, and they wait. And this is what passes for a plot for Banville, which comes as no surprise to readers of his other books. But thankfully there is more to this novel. The story is initially told by an omniscient narrator, Little god. But soon, another narrator seems to step in, someone vaguely familiar, especially when we realize he's just released from jail. It's then that the reader realizes that it's Freddie Montgomery, the murderer/narrator from Banville's previous novel, The Book of Evidence. Assuming, of course, the reader has read that book. Then the story shifts to life on the island from Freddie's perspective, as well as his observations of the visitors. Then it shifts again as we go back in time and Freddie tells us how he got to the island and came to live with the professor. Then it shifts again, stumbling towards the end with a few fragmentary chapters as we watch the visitors leave the island.

I've not read all Banville's books, but Ghost seems to me to be stereotypical of his style. The prose is so beautiful and such a joy to read, one could conceivably read him just for style alone. But it's also philosophically challenging. Much of the book is Freddie in his head, trying to dissect life and why he is the way he is. Despite being a murderer, he is extremely likable: smart, funny, self-deprecating to a fault. He knows he did wrong with his murder and is obsessed with making amends. Despite a proper plot, it's entertaining reading Freddie try to figure this all out, and often funny when he comes across other humans, who he often treats as a different species from himself. There's more here, about a painter and a painting, about life not being as it seems, about the dual nature of life... as I said, philosophically challenging. But well worth the read. Just be sure to read Book of Evidence first. And if you've never read Banville, maybe it would be better to start with a more accessible book, such as The Sea. Either way, Banville is an author worth the effort.