Ghosts (Vintage International)

Reviewers and critics and even the book's jacket talk of the menace and unsettling dread of Banville's "Ghosts." The patience of the story's dystopian landscape, the absorbancy of the narrator's compound eyes, the oddly limited prescience of the main character's mind -- they all do lend the tale a touch of the tragic, a hint of horror, a whisper of wickedness.But (much like the birds in this book, which wheel and whoop and sometimes thud into invisible panes of glass) those disconcerting elements are mostly fleeting, and always rather ineffectual, even if they are full of import. It is certainly a weirdly allegorical world Banville has made here, and it is built upon the (certainly biased) observations of our strange, god-like narrator, who (almost lovingly) describes his island world and its accidental denizens with a prose that is so delicate and elegant that it could quite possibly be genius.For those unfamiliar with his previous novel, "The Book of Evidence," this story will be confusing, indeed, in spite of its brilliant craftsmanship. Details about the narrator -- who he is, where he comes from, what brings him to think and feel the way he does -- are all only marginally touched upon, and then only in the last quarter of the story, and then only in hesitant, dreamlike stanzas that evoke more philosophical flotsam and jetsam than concrete reality.What shreds of a story that there are concern an art historian who lives on an island with a sort of manservant named Licht. A boat runs aground, spilling out a handful of raucous castaways onto an otherwise tranquil scene. The narrator -- a flitting, insinuating presence, at times substantial, at times as solid as a thought -- is both outside of and within these people and their lives. In a solid way, the narrator is "helping" the professor write the definitive account of the painter Vaublin (referring many times to a very specific and very important painting). Beyond that, he seems to be caught in an act of perpetual rationalization.Banville, with these mugging moppets (a sullen photographer named Sophie, a lecherous scarecrow named Felix, a half-stuffed strawman named Croke, a dainty-n-fainty princess named Flora) gives us an abstract and almost dizzying look at the raw construction of one man's reality. It could be said that most literature (in its classical sense) is really only about two things: the nature of life or the meaning of life. Banville manages to inextricably meld the two subject matters until what's left is a pastiche of images and non-happenings that offer as much elucidation as they do obfuscation. His metaphors are sometimes overly plentiful (the water, the sky, and -- as mentioned before -- the birds, birds, birds), but they are usually just signposts for much subtler totems. There are no easy answers here.The narrator, who frets over Vaublin's work with as much penitent focus as he does over his own past, seems to have entered a world of half-truths, made out of philosophies only half-understood. You are likely to come away from the book with the same level of comprehension.But in lieu of grasping this book's deepest currents and finest details, there is Banville's comforting way with words, the way he weaves with insinuating ease a consoling craftiness. You may not totally "get" the point, but never will you feel like the point is beyond getting and -- beside that -- never will the elusiveness of that knowledge be anything but a tantalizing tease, something to overcome.There may be guilt, shame, fear, failures, and unsated longings in this book, and there may indeed be (as some have said) an alluring tang of malignity to the words, but I submit that has more to do with how one interprets Banville's quiet and well-glassed world than with that world itself. It is an eerily quiet and credibly contained place, but it is also -- if anything -- a mindscape. Just like thoughts, just like ideas, just like phobias and regrets, these people and their actions are truly ghosts, reminiscent of a long-gone past, but haunting (and haunted by) a future that -- in the pen of Banville -- is gorgeous, tragic, and less real than the phantoms that fill it.

GHOSTS is the sequel to THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, which is the tortured confession of an articulate, self-aware, and self-loathing murderer. In GHOSTS, this same murderer, who is a connoisseur of eighteenth century European art, has served his prison time and alighted on a remote island, where he works as an assistant to a hermitic, but once esteemed, art authenticator. GHOSTS does not have much of a plot. Instead, it is a literary novel in which this tormented murderer and narrator ruminates about his guilt and potential for awful aggression after a motley assortment of day-tripping tourists sojourns at house where he rooms and starts his mind whirring.GHOSTS is primarily about its beautiful sentences, poetic observations, and profound self-hatred. Here, I arbitrarily turn to pages 188-189, where there is such standard Banvillian fare as:o “This lovely world, and we the only blot on the landscape. We, or just me? Sometimes I think I can feel the world recoiling from me, as if from the touch of some uncanny, cold and sticky thing.”o “The houses shone whitely in the failing light and smoke swirled up from chimney-pots, mussel-blue against the paler blue of evening, and beyond the harbor wall the thick sea heaved like a jumble of big, empty iron boxes bobbing and jostling.”o “We sat… in a low room with fake rafters… and smoked yellow walls… horse brasses, plastic ivy, and astonished stuffed fish in a glass case.”Two of the marooned tourists suggest, on a psychological level, possibilities to the narrator. The first of these is the beautiful young Flora, who seems to represent the life and experiences that were lost by the young woman that the narrator murdered. The second is the menacing and predatory Felix, a man who bears a resemblance to the narrator. Felix seems to represent what the narrator fears he would become if he redirected his self-hatred and used it to get his way in the world. Altogether, the narrator’s ruminations about Flora and Felix form the warp and woof of GHOSTS, which depicts the minds-set of a man who fears what he might do if he reengages.The narrator, BTW, discusses the work of his favorite painter in GHOSTS. His observations, which certainly also apply to Banville’s literary style, include: “… throughout his work… something is missing, something is deliberately not being 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…”Not for everyone.

John Banville is a spell-binding writer, however unpromising the underlying story.You are drawn into the psyche of characters you would find repulsive in real life;

brill

Uninteresting to the point of boredom. Could'nt see the point of it at all, sadly. Literate andwell written it might interest others however.

Could not understand the plot or characters, after four chapters of mind numbing tosh I gave up. I read for enjoyment. Mr Banville seems to use fifty words where five would do in every paragraph.