Ghosts by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The past was gathering even more thickly around me, I waded through it numbly like a greased swimmer, waiting to feel the chill and the treacherous undertow."

It was not supposed to be like this. I would have never expected that I would have to struggle to get through a John Banville's book. Yet I did. It took me three weeks to read Ghosts (1993) and the first hundred pages were the most difficult. Despite Banville's trademarks, extraordinarily accomplished prose and the underlying wisdom shining through page after page, I could not connect with the text. I did not understand the events and the characters sounded artificial to me, like empty templates, promises of something that might possibly come in the future. For instance, Alice and Flora: what are they about? Why should I care about seven castaways from a ship grounded on a coast of an island? Or about their intersecting the lives of Professor Kreutznaer and his "faithful companion" Licht?

Later, things began making a little more sense. A connection to Banville's The Book of Evidence is revealed. The motif of a (fictitious) French painter, Vaublin, and his Le monde d'or emerges. There are more extraordinary passages of prose like

"The world was luminous around him. Everything shone out of itself, shaking in its own radiance. There was movement everywhere; even the most solid objects seemed to seethe, the table under his hands, the chair on which he sat, the very walls themselves. And he too trembled, as if his whole frame had been struck like a tuning fork against the hard, bright surface of things."

or

"And somehow by being suddenly herself like this she made the things around her be there too. In her, and in what she spoke, the world, the little world in which we sat, found its grounding and was realized. It was as if she had dropped a condensed drop of colour into the water of the world and the colour had spread and the outlines of things had sprung into bright relief."

The thread of travel with Billy, first to the narrator's house, then to the ship, and eventually to the island will captivate the reader's attention. As will the cool story about a mayor of a Spanish village sitting for a painting.

Naturally, I don't regret that I persevered and finished the novel. While I am probably too obtuse to fully comprehend its meaning, I suspect that the author gives the reader a hint in the following passage:

"I would look out the window and see that little band of castaways toiling up the road to the house and a door would open into another world. Oh, a little door, hardly enough for me to squeeze through, but a door, all the same."

The charming story of the narrator's relationship with Mrs. Vanden reminds me of Cees Nooteboom, to me the best writer of literature for adults. Still, the beauty of prose remains the best aspect of Ghosts: Mr. Banville makes a worthy companion to James Joyce, Patrick White, or Vladimir Nabokov among the most accomplished masters of the English language. I still have a lot more Banville to read.

Three stars.


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