Product Description

In this brilliantly haunting new novel, John Banville forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence. "A surreal and exquisitely lyrical new novel by one of the great stylists writing in English today."--Boston Globe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #342378 in Books
• Published on: 1994-11-08
• Released on: 1994-11-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The narrator of this lyrical novel by the author of The Book of Evidence banishes himself to a deserted island inhabited by two other castaways.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A bedraggled medley of castaways from a day outing wash ashore a remote island. Led by Felix, the unctuous, mutable "lord of the streets," they include many of the same Faustian types--the innocent girl, the moribund gentleman--who inhabit Banville's previous fiction, The Book of Evidence ( LJ 3/1/90) and Mephisto (Godine, 1989). They have, perhaps, walked "straight out of the deepest longings" of the forsaken trio already sentenced to live on that island: an art expert with dubious credentials, Professor Kreutnaer; his disgruntled, lovelorn assistant Licht; and the familiar ex-convict who is also our first-person narrator. Banville is not so much interested in the plight of the castaways, whom he arranges in a tableau vivant and then abandons, as he is in the criminal descent and groping atonement of his hapless narrator. Here Banville's quirky, Beckettian stream-of-consciousness takes off: pathetic, noble, hilarious, this narrator is an utterly original "little god." The novel, though in some ways incomplete, is an exuberant, virtuosic display.
- Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In this moody, restless novel, filled with dreams, longings, and imaginings, it's hard to tell who is real, who is a ghost, and who is a figure from a painting. The action, though there is little of it, begins when the shipwrecked occupants of a pleasure boat make their way to a big beach house for comfort, food, and rest. An odd group stumbles through the sand toward the house--the beautiful Flora; the three ungainly children, Hatch, Pound, and Alice; the cynical photographer, Sophie; dapper old Croke, in his panama and striped blazer; and sleazy, leering Felix. The group is watched and awaited by the house's occupants: Professor Kreutznaer, interrupted in his life's work, studying and writing about the artist Vaublin; his aide--both cook and typist--the dreamer Licht; and the book's narrator, an ex-con who came to the island for solitude and the opportunity to work with the professor on his book and found also the opportunity to examine his life as well as the lives of others. Imagistic, poetic prose from the author of The Book of Evidence (1990), among others. Eloise Kinney

Customer Reviews

Uneventual,ominous,vaguely menacing;extremely lyrical
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.

"Evidently there is allegory here"...
"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.

Not All There
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.