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CRITIQUE:

The Return of a Questionable Narrator

"Ghosts" is a worthy sequel to "The Book of Evidence".

John Banville evidently decided that he hadn't finished with the character, Freddie Montgomery, and the intrigues that might surround him in the parallel worlds in which he lived. Indeed, Banville would use his character as the basis of another work ("Athena") in what became "Frames" or the "Freddie Montgomery Trilogy".

Freddie, who is the unnamed narrator of "Ghosts", has just completed a ten year prison sentence for the crimes committed in "The Book of Evidence". While in jail, he has studied enough art to allow him to pass himself off as an art historian. Anna Behrens, the daughter of the millionaire businessman and art collector, Helmut Behrens, from the first book, supposedly writes a letter of introduction (1), which facilitates a meeting between Freddie and Professor Silas Kreutznaer (the family name of Robinson Crusoe), at which the Professor decides to appoint Freddie as his

The Professor and Banvilligan's Island

The Professor lives on an island, apparently off the coast of Ireland, in a mansion owned by his Man Friday, Licht (the German word for light), who has up until this point performed the role that Freddie has now obtained, thus making for an uneasy rivalry between the light and dark of the two men (they would become "a pair of ragged old rats scrabbling in the dirt and showing each other our sharpest teeth").

The Professor is "a legend in the world of art, foremost authority on [Jean] Vaublin,...consultant for the great galleries of the world and valued adviser to private collectors on however many continents there are...It used to be said that a Thyssen or a Helmut Behrens would not lift a finger in the auction room without first consulting Kreutznaer." (2)

Who is the Most (or Least) Reliable?

Freddie suggests that he has once met the Professor at the Behrens' residence, where they discussed the painter, which the Professor denies - well, he is "firmly sceptical":

"No, no...you have mistaken me for someone else."

It's not clear, initially, whether we can, or are to, believe Freddie or the Professor. Who is the most - or least - reliable?

"The first thing that struck me about him was how plausible he appeared, how authentic, at least when looked at from a distance..."

His authenticity seems to be more apparent (e.g., ghostlike?) than real. (It sounds like Freddie is trying to verify or authenticate a suspect work of art. Or is he trying to project his own guilt onto the Professor?)


Quentin Varin's "De graflegging van Christus"

A Study of Jean Vaublin

The Professor apparently abandons the writing of his study of the artist, Jean Vaublin (possibly modelled on and delegates it to Freddie, who sees something of himself and his surroundings in the painter's works:

"He is the master of darkness, as others are of light; even his brightest sunlight seems shadowed, tinged with umber from these thick trees, this ochred ground, these unfathomable spaces leading into night. There is a mystery here...something is missing, something is deliberately not being said. Yet I think it is this very reticence that lends his pictures their peculiar power. He is the painter of absences, of endings. His scenes all seem to hover on the point of vanishing. How clear and yet far-off and evanescent everything is, as if seen by someone on his death-bed who has lifted himself up to the window at twilight to look out a last time on a world that he is losing."

Freddie admires a painting called "Le Monde d'Or" ("The Golden World"), which he describes in the third section of the novel, which appears to be an extract from his study.

The Castaways

Shortly after Freddie's arrival on the island, a tourist boat is shipwrecked off the island, and half a dozen young castaways make their way safely to the Professor's mansion. This aspect of the plot is likened to "The Tempest". However, from the description of the painting, I wonder whether Banville and Freddie have simply made the subjects in the painting come to life a second time in Freddie's imagination.

One of the castaways, Felix, also claims to be acquainted with the Professor, and expresses the view that he is a fraud, and possibly even responsible for helping his accomplices sell a counterfeit Vaublin (verified by the Professor) to Helmut Behrens at a vast overvalue. Once again, it's not clear whether Felix is a real person, or just a manifestation of Freddie's dark side (yet another ghost?). The dark side is his capacity for evil or sin, his crime, his guilt, what remains of his past.

"The Confines of My Sequestered World"

Freddie's consciousness has been permanently affected by his time in prison. His way of seeing has been altered. He has a heightened sense of light and dark, which form two parts of his consciousness:

"I was terrified someone would see me there, I mean someone from the old life who would recognise me. And then, my horizons had been limited for so long: high walls make the gaze turn inward. For years I had only been able to see beyond the confines of my sequestered world by looking up. I was the boy at the bottom of the well, peering aloft in awe at the daytime stars. In captivity I had got to know the sky in all its moods, the great, stealthy drifts of light, the pales and slow darkenings, the twilight shoals..."

These Parallel, Inverted Worlds

Freddie construes this light and darkness in terms of parallel worlds:

"Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other. I am at once here and there, then and now, as if by magic. I think of the stillness that lives in the depths of mirrors. It is not our world that is reflected there. It is another place entirely, another universe, cunningly made to mimic ours. Anything is possible there; even the dead may come back to life. Flaws develop in the glass, patches of silvering fall away and reveal the inhabitants of that parallel, inverted world going about their lives all unawares. And sometimes the glass turns to air and they step through it without a sound and walk into my world."

"A Figure Half Seen"

He is only partly present, somewhere or something midway between life (light) and death (darkness), a ghost:

"I am there and not there...Without me there would be no moment, no separable event, only the brute, blind drift of things...Though I am one of them, I am only a half figure, a figure half-seen, standing in the doorway, or sitting at a corner of the scrubbed pine table with a cracked mug at my elbow, and if they try to see me straight, or turn their heads too quickly, I am gone."

"My Dark Other"

It's his dark other that has made him one of the ghosts of the title:

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence..."

"Now and then I pause and sit motionless for a moment, a watchman testing the night. I have a gratifying sense of myself as a sentinel, a guardian, a protector against that prowler, my dark other, whom I imagine stalking back and forth out there in the dark..."

"...I would flow out of myself somehow and be as a phantom, a patch of moving dark against the lighter darkness all around me..."

"Am I the ghost at their banquet?"

"Fibs Are More Fun"

This is ostensibly Freddie's interpretation of himself. Is it honest? Is it truthful? Is it reliable? Is Freddie no more than a schizophrenic? Is he delusional? Is he lying?

"Lying makes a dull world more interesting. To lie is to create. Besides, fibs are more fun, and liars, I am convinced, live longer. Yes, yes, I am an enthusiastic advocate of the whopper."

"People find me strange. Well, I find myself strange. I am not convincing, somehow, even to myself. The man who wishes to move the crowd must be an actor who impersonates himself. Is that it, is that really it? Have I cracked it? And there I was all that time thinking it was others I must imagine into life. Well well. (To act is to be, to rehearse is to become...) This has the feel of a great discovery. I'm sure it must be a delusion."

A Pair of Scoundrels

Is Freddie a scoundrel prone to self-abasement? He certainly recognises that he's a scoundrel. And he seeks to abase himself in front of the Professor, whom he equally recognises as (perhaps a superior) charlatan.

"It is not given to every man to know without a shadow of a doubt that he is a scoundrel. (It takes more courage than you think to name yourself as you should be named...I want to abase myself before him..."

Once again, for all of the precision of his prose, Banville hints or implies, without being explicit or conclusive. It is this very reticence that lends his fictions their peculiar power.


FOOTNOTES:

(1) It's not clear whether, or why, Anna would take this action after the crimes Freddie committed at her family's home. No matter how you assess Freddie's reliability in the first novel, there is a question whether he totally fabricated or fantasised his relationship with Anna Behrens, and the youthful menage a trois with his wife.

(2) Banville also foreshadows a link between the Professor and Victor Maskell (the character based on who is Keeper of the Queen's Pictures in "The Untouchable". Apparently, the Professor and Maskell co-wrote "that controversial monograph on Poussin".


SOUNDTRACK:
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Gilligan's Island - Theme Song



Little Roger & the Goosebumps - "Stairway to Gilligan's Island"



Weird Al Yankovic - "Isle Thing"



Japan - "Ghosts"




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