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John Banville

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Ghosts Paperback – November 8, 1994

by John Banville (Author)

4.1 102 ratings

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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a brilliantly haunting novel that 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." —The Boston Globe

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

November 8, 1994
Dimensions

5.16 x 0.7 x 7.95 inches
ISBN-10

0679755128
ISBN-13

978-0679755128
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The narrator of this lyrical novel by the author of The Book of Evidence banishes himself to a deserted island inhabited by two other castaways.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

liantly 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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (November 8, 1994)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679755128
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679755128
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.7 x 7.95 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,185,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #100 in Surrealist Literary Criticism
- #51,706 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #58,449 in American Literature (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 102 ratings

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John Banville

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John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

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4.1 out of 5

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Daniel Myers

Tempestuous

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2006

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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.

10 people found this helpful

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Spirited

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2007

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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.

3 people found this helpful

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Michael S. Mahoney

Not All There

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2004

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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.

7 people found this helpful

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Fenella Copplestone

Masterly read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2014

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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;

One person found this helpful

stephen ellis

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2018

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brill

D. Stewart

Sorry John

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 12, 2013

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

One person found this helpful

mike sullivan

Tosh

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2014

Verified Purchase

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.

One person found this helpful

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