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... Read Full Review

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... Read Full Review

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... Read Full Review

"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.