Ghosts

Rating:
Summary: A modern masterpiece...
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 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not All There
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not All There
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Uneventual,ominous,vaguely menacing;extremely lyrical
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 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.

Rating:
Summary: a plot? no, but...
Review: 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 can tell us about their inner darkness with such admirable prose...