Ghosts | John Banville

Ghosts | John Banville | A modern masterpiece...

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Ghosts

	Ghosts John Banville Vintage, 1994 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

Tempestuous

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.

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A modern masterpiece...

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.

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"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.

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Spirited

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.

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ghosts