Ghosts
Authors: John Banville
Ghosts
John Banville
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Fiction, Literary
Fictionttt Literaryttt
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.
**
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 Library Journal
A bedraggled medley of castaways from a day outing wash ashore a remote island. Led by Felix, the unctuous, mutable "lord of the streets," they include many of the same Faustian types--the innocent girl, the moribund gentleman--who inhabit Banville's previous fiction, The Book of Evidence ( LJ 3/1/90) and Mephisto (Godine, 1989). They have, perhaps, walked "straight out of the deepest longings" of the forsaken trio already sentenced to live on that island: an art expert with dubious credentials, Professor Kreutnaer; his disgruntled, lovelorn assistant Licht; and the familiar ex-convict who is also our first-person narrator. Banville is not so much interested in the plight of the castaways, whom he arranges in a tableau vivant and then abandons, as he is in the criminal descent and groping atonement of his hapless narrator. Here Banville's quirky, Beckettian stream-of-consciousness takes off: pathetic, noble, hilarious, this narrator is an utterly original "little god." The novel, though in some ways incomplete, is an exuberant, virtuosic display.
- Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Acclaim for
John Banville’s
GHOSTS
“A dream of more than one world, more than one time.… [
Ghosts
] is a novel to be read like a poem … or perhaps even like the … biblical Book of Revelation, that prototypical vision by an island castaway.… There are both Joycean and Yeatsian atmospheres about this most ambitious [novel]; Joycean with its madcap mix of vulgar and classical, Yeatsian with its enchanted island and tower, its screaming and circling gulls, its golden world.”
—
Boston Globe
“Haunting.
Ghosts
has a melancholy power that will draw the reader back for further bids to plumb its mysteries.”
—
The New Statesman
“A glimpse inside a man’s haunted chilly soul.… There are magical evocations in these pages of the play of sun and rain on an island’s landscape.… Sights, sounds, smells and moods are all beautifully conjured, then painted over lightly with a chiaroscuro of menace.… The reader is entranced by the virtuosity of Mr. Banville’s prose.”
—
The New York Times
“Extraordinary.… [Banville] is a writer whose imagery is as gloriously pungent as his metaphysics are dense.… A display of dazzling reflections.”
—
The Village Voice
“Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people’s souls.”
—Don DeLillo
Also by
John Banville
Long Lankin
Nightspawn
Birchwood
Doctor Copernicus
Kepler
The Newton Letter
Mefisto
The Book of Evidence
Athena
The Untouchable
Eclipse
Shroud
The Sea
John Banville
GHOSTS
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book,
Long Lankin
, was published in 1970. His other books are
Nightspawn, Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter, Mefisto, The Book of Evidence
(which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize),
Ghosts, Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse
, and
Shroud.
He won the Booker Prize for his novel
The Sea
in 2005. He lives in Dublin.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1994
Copyright © 1993
by John Banville
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, London, in 1993. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Banville, John.
Ghosts: a novel/by John Banville.—1st ed.
P. CM.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81720-4
I. Title.
PR6052.A57G47 1993
823′.914—DC20 93-2948
Author photograph
©
Jerry Bauer
v3.1
to Robin Robertson
Contents
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases
Wallace Stevens
H
ERE THEY ARE
. There are seven of them. Or better say, half a dozen or so, that gives more leeway. They are struggling up the dunes, stumbling in the sand, squabbling, complaining, wanting sympathy, wanting to be elsewhere. That, most of all: to be elsewhere. There is no elsewhere, for them. Only here, in this little round.
‘List!’
‘Listing.’
‘Leaky as a –’
‘So I said, I said.’
‘Everything feels strange.’
‘That captain, so-called.’
‘I did, I said to him.’
‘Cythera, my foot.’
‘Some outing.’
‘Listen!’
Behind them the boat leans, stuck fast on a sandbank, canted drunkenly to starboard, fat-bellied, barnacled, betrayed by a freak wave or a trick of the tide and the miscalculations of a tipsy skipper. They have had to wade through the shallows to get to shore. Thus things begin. It is a morning late in
May. The sun shines merrily. How the wind blows! A little world is coming into being.
Who speaks? I do. Little god.
Licht spied them from afar, with his keen sight. It was so long since he had seen their like that for a moment he hardly knew what they were. He flew to the turret room at the top of the house where the Professor increasingly spent his time, brooding by himself or idly scanning the horizon through the brass telescope mounted on his desk. Inside the door Licht stopped, irresolute suddenly. It is always thus with him, the headlong rush and then the halt. The Professor turned up his face slowly from the big book open in front of him and stared at Licht with such glassy remoteness that Licht grew frightened and almost forgot what he had come to say. Is this what death is like, he wondered, is this how people begin to die, swimming a little farther out each time until in the end the land is out of sight for good? At last the Professor returned to himself and blinked and frowned and pursed his lips, annoyed that Licht had found him there, lost like that. Licht stood panting, with that eager, hazy smile of his.
‘What?’ the Professor said sharply. ‘What? Who are they?’
‘I don’t know,’ Licht answered breathlessly. ‘But I think they’re coming here, whoever they are.’
Poor Licht. He is anything from twenty-five to fifty. His yellow-white curls and spindly little legs give him an antique look: he seems as if he should be got up in periwig and knee-breeches. His eyes are brown and his brow is broad, with two smooth dents at the temples, as if whoever moulded him had given his big head a last, loving squeeze there between finger and thumb. He is never still. Now his foot tap-tapped on the turret floor and the fist he had thrust into his trousers pocket flexed and flexed. He pointed to the spyglass.
‘Did you see them?’ he said. ‘Sheep, I thought they were. Vertical sheep!’
He laughed, three soft, quick little gasps. The Professor turned away from him and hunched a forbidding black shoulder, his sea-captain’s swivel chair groaning under him. Licht stepped to the window and looked down.
‘They’re coming here, all right,’ he said softly. ‘Oh, I’m sure they’re coming here.’
He shook his head and frowned, trying to seem alarmed at the prospect of invasion, but had to bite his lip to keep from grinning.
Meanwhile my foundered creatures have not got far. They have not lost their sea-legs yet and the sand is soft going. There is an old boy in a boater, a pretty young woman, called Flora, of course, and a blonde woman in a black skirt and a black leather jacket with a camera slung over her shoulder. Also an assortment of children: three, to be precise. And a thin, lithe, sallow man with bad teeth and hair dyed black and a darkly watchful eye. His name is Felix. He seems to find something funny in all of this, smiling fiercely to himself and sucking on a broken eye-tooth. He urges the others on when they falter, Flora especially, inserting two long, bony fingers under her elbow. She will not look at him. She has a strange feeling, she says, it is as if she has been here before. He wrinkles his high, smooth forehead, gravely bending the full weight of his attention to her words. Perhaps, he says after a moment, perhaps she is remembering childhood outings to the seaside: the salt breeze, the sound of the waves, the cat-smell of the sand, that sun-befuddled, sparkling light that makes everything seem to fold softly into something else.