Before I started this Year of John Banville, I was a little nervous that I would find his writing too dense for me. So far that hasn’t been the case, but Ghosts comes close to what I imagined the experience of reading Banville would be. It’s at turns baffling and esoteric yet oddly satisfying, mainly due to the beauty of Banville’s prose.
Ghosts follows Freddie Montgomery, Banville’s protagonist from The Book of Evidence, upon his release from prison. It is the second instalment of Banville’s ‘Frames’ trilogy, which he describes as “an investigation of the way in which the imagination works.”
In some ways, reading Banville can be an act of ‘giving in’ and accepting his world of surface appearances which shift and shimmer with an illusory sense of enigma.
The novel opens with a nod to The Tempest, with a shipwreck on an island, where a strange singing can be heard in the air. The castaways – ‘there are seven of them, Or better say, half a dozen or so, that gives more leeway’ – are a motley bunch of men, women and children, led by a devious figure named Felix. Having to bide time while their boat is fixed, the party take refuge in the house of reclusive art historian Professor Kreutznaer and his strange assistant, Licht.
Another man lives in the house, our narrator, and it soon becomes clear that he is Freddie Montgomery, released from prison following a ten-year stint for the murders committed in The Book of Evidence, and now living with and working for the Professor on a book about a fictional Dutch artist called Vaublin.
Freddie is particularly interested in one painting by Vaublin, called ‘The Golden World’ which is based to a large extent on and actual painting called ‘The Embarkation for Cythera’ by Watteau. The shipwrecked party bear a strong resemblance to the characters in that painting.
It is the very stillness of their world that permits them to endure; if they stir they will die, will crumble into dust and leave nothing behind save a few scraps of brittle lace, a satin bow, a shoe buckle, a broken mandolin.
It transpires that Felix and the Professor know each other and may have been involved in some kind of art forgery together, but Freddie is most interested in a sickly young woman named Flora, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl he murdered in The Book of Evidence. The question arises from the very beginning about the veracity of what Freddie is telling us. Do these shipwrecked people exist or are they ghosts in Freddie’s head, each representing various aspects of his guilt and shame? Does the Professor even exist or is the whole novel a work of forgery, a trompe l’oiel used to interrogate Freddie’s complicated imagination?
… the same thing… interested me… namely… how the present feeds on the past. How pieces of lost time surface suddenly in the murky sea of memory, bright and clear and fantastically detailed, complete little islands where it seems it might be possible to live, even if only for a moment.
Freddie himself feels like a ghost, a man on the margins unable to shake the guilt of what he has done, but at the same time knowing that he would probably do it all again.
I am harmless, I’m sure. Fairly harmless. No longer dangerous, anyway, Or not very.
Banville is very good at exploring the point where beauty and violence meet, echoing the fact that Freddie’s original crime occurred because he became so transfixed by a painting that he felt the need to steal it.
Such trickery and ambiguity could quickly grate in the hands of a lesser writer, but Banville is not that. Plot is not the main concern here. The book is divided into two main sections. The first details the arrival of the shipwrecked party to the island and the second takes the reader back in time to Freddie Montgomery’s release from prison. Anna Behrens, his one-time girlfriend but also the woman from whom he stole a painting and whose maid he murdered in the previous book, has arranged the job for him with Professor Kreutznaer. Banville details Freddie’s release, his journey to the island with his prison friend Billy, and a detour to his former home, where he may or may not have an encounter with his only son.
Ghosts is undoubtedly a confusing book, but it is not confused. The visual descriptions of the island are enchanting, the plot is obscure but intriguing and the prose is some of the best I have ever read. The aim of the novel appears to be to fashion art with words, to use sentences as a painter would brushstrokes to create an overall work of complexity and pleasure. Freddie describes Vaublin’s work as having ‘something…deliberately not being said’ with scenes that ‘all seem to hover on the point of vanishing’. The same could be said of Banville’s novel which feels both sharp and far-off at the same time.
It would be an undoubted benefit to have read The Book of Evidence before Ghosts, but it isn’t essential. The joy here is in the writing, which is masterful and in the beauty that Banville creates through Freddie’s musings on life, on guilt and on existence. The book is filled with imagery of shadows and sunlight, ghosts and dreams and Banville has created and isle that, as Caliban says in The Tempest, ‘is full of noises/ Sounds and sweet airs/ that give delight and hurt not.’
This month Kim has reviewed Birchwood and next month I will be reading Athena, the third book in the Freddie Montgomery trilogy.
