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Ghosts (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

A drunken captain sails his pleasure craft onto a sandbank, leaving his seven passengers stranded on an island off the Irish coast. There, until the tide rises, they remain, the guests (so to speak) of the enigmatic Professor Silas Kreutznaer (an art expert), his typist and seeming servant, the strangely named Licht, and the even more strangely unnamed narrator, an ex-convict presently engaged in ghost-writing the professor’s study of an eighteenth century Dutch painter whose name may or may not be Vaublin and with whom one of the castaways, Felix, has some unexplained connection. However, these and other similar mysteries, loosely psychological in nature, coexist rather uneasily with other, far more literary ones. If the castaways are in a sense of “real,” assuming a certain suspension of disbelief, then how is it that they seem to have stepped not so much off a stranded boat than out of Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST and Daniel Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE, to mention just two of the novel’s many intertextual “clues”?

The narrator too seems to have stepped out of another literary work, in this case Banville’s own novel, THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, where it was his love of a painting that led him to murder and now to the professor and thus to Vaublin, whose “masterpiece” (though it may be a fake), LE MONDE D’OR, bears a strange resemblance to the characters and action of the larger novel. Dizzying in its plot, teasing in its implications, GHOSTS manages to be both unsettling and thoroughly enjoyable. A perfectly wrought literary puzzle, it is also a novel that hauntingly lingers in the mind, asking “if this is a fake, what then could be the real thing.” What indeed?

Sources for Further Study

Australian Book Review. XXXI, May, 1993, p.53.

Booklist. XC, November 15, 1993, p.601.

Chicago Tribune. December 12, 1993, XIV, p.1.

Library Journal. CXVIII, September 15, 1993, p.102.

Ghosts I BANVILLE 359

London Review of Books. XV, April 22, 1993, p.10

Los Angeles Times Book Review. November 7, 1993, p.3.

New Statesman and Society. VI, April 16, 1993, p.41.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVIII, November 28, 1993, p.1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXL, August 23, 1993, p.57.

The Times Literary Supplement. April 9, 1993, p.20.

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