Ghosts

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.

As difficult a novel to describe adequately as it is to understand in one reading, this is a book I read immediately after I finished it to help 'tie-up' some loose ends; to answer a few unanswered questions. The second time around helped, but it is ultimately a story that resists any kind of definitive summation or conclusion. The content reminded me of Penelope Lively's novel "Spiderweb" but with a somewhat more sinister undertone. I especially admired Banville's modernist (more or less) prose, juxtaposed with the presentation of distinctly post-modern ideas. Once again, Banville shows himself to be one of our most valuable contemporary writers.

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 th

"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.