[In the following review, Norfolk calls Banville's Ghosts "a strange and austere book."]

[In John Banville's Ghosts, a] drunken captain runs his boat aground, stranding seven passengers on an island. They are watched, wading ashore; Croke, "an old boy in a boater," Felix, "a thin lithe sallow man with bad teeth and hair dyed black," Flora, "a pretty young woman," Sophie, "in a black skirt with a black leather jacket" who totes cameras with the purpose of capturing what she terms "tableaux morts," and three children: Pound, Hatch, Alice.

The unmagical Prospero of this island is Professor Silas Kreutznaer, an art historian specializing in the work of "Vaublin," who is served by two lackluster Calibans: Licht, a graceless and insecure factotum, and another, who watches, comments and dribbles out the events of the life which brought him here. The "other" is the narrator and principal subject of this new novel from John Banville, literary editor of the Irish Times and author of The Book of Evidence and Doctor Copernicus, among other books.

This unnamed observer reports, twice-weekly, to one Sgt. Toner, which suggests some former wrongdoing. Later, we learn of a 10-year stretch in prison, and later still the nature of the crime—the murder of a young girl. The protagonist is now in retreat from his past, from the world at large, but most of all from himself. His time on the island has been spent in writing, in the maintenance of a wordless, eventless liaison with the widow of a South African colonial officer, and in gardening. The seven strangers provide unwanted new grist to this decelerated mental mill. He is propelled reluctantly into watchfulness, into engagement, and ultimately back into life.

The action of Ghosts is pitched at so low a level that a banal conversation with Flora, the young castaway, is enough to effect his conversion. The novel is grounded in mental interiors; Banville's bravura descriptions—of weather, or the island's landscape—are glimpses of a very distant Arcadia, tokens of forestalled longing. A much-anticipated meeting between the narrator and his estranged wife finally fails to happen, although we do meet his mentally retarded son, whose existence and condition had hitherto remained unguessed. The murder itself is handed to the reader thus, "Here the plot does not so much thicken as coagulate."

Banville evinces a certain discomfort with the habitual gestures of the form in which he has chosen to work. "Let us regress. Imagine the poor old globe grinding to a halt and then with a cosmic creak starting up again but in the opposite direction. Events whiz past in reverse, the little stick-figures hurrying backwards, the boat pulling itself off the sandbank with a bump and putting out stern-first to fasten the unzipped sea …" The flashback is a familiar enough workhorse in contemporary fiction and of itself does not require so fulsome a confession that artifice is at work. On the other hand, the passage itself is a beautiful piece of trickery, enjoyable in terms just as nugatory and slippery as "artifice." What exactly is it that we enjoy when we enjoy good prose?

Or art, for that matter? The painter "Jean Vaublin" is a brilliantly plausible creation, established early on in a scattering of asides, more substantially later when his masterpiece, "Le monde d'or" (the Golden World) is exhaustively described and Vaublin himself emerges as a cross between Claude and Fragonard, with perhaps a dash of Piero di Cosimo besides. And remains, naturally, wholly nonexistent, The entrance fee to "Le monde d'or," as with any work of art, is payable in empathy and belief.

"The objects that I looked at seemed insulated, as if they had been painted with a protective coating of some invisible stuff, cool and thick and smooth as enamel," remarks the protagonist before he finds the willingness to pay up. The murder itself turns on a ghastly confusion between a painting and a living, breathing human being. The ghosts of the title are the real presences behind their images, whether painted, written, or remembered. "Artifice" and "Life" form a notoriously woolly syzygy and wedding it to the human values of the novel constantly threatens to inflate the world that Banville has created. Like John Hawkes, whose The Blood Oranges this novel resembles in some ways, Banville resists by resolutely sticking to the particulars. "Details, details: pile them on," urges his narrator, who happily can lean on the skills of a prose stylist in his prime.

Ghosts is a strange and austere book. It is not an anti-novel in either the happy (Queneau) or unhappy (Robbe-Grillet) sense, but the outrageous evenness of its tone, the thoroughness of its self-inquisition, and the elaborate courtesy by which it exposes its own narrative machinery all betray a deep unease with its own "novelishness." Behind the confession, agonizing and restitution of its protagonist lie Banville's own. Is it acceptable to shape the narrative like this? asks the book's structure. Is it desirable to convince so completely? asks the characterization. Is it right to write this well? asks Banville's coruscating prose.

It is.