Ghosts
John Banville’s Ghosts centers around Freddie Montgomery; a man recently released from jail for murder, charting his move to a remote island. There, he is supposed to assist Professor Kreutznaer in his work on the enigmatic painter Vaublin, acting as ‘ghostwriter’.
At the beginning of the book (but later events chronologically), we see the arrival on the island of a group of day-trippers whose boat has run aground. Meanwhile, Freddie hides and looks on, commenting on the actions of these castaways. Nothing much happens and, presumably, the boat is refloated and they return to the mainland. Essentially plotless, it's difficult to follow any narrative whatsoever in Ghosts, let alone extract meaning. Although the title may be a clue. Maybe not.
Ghosts doesn’t actually contain any spirit sightings, outside of an ambiguous encounter between Freddie and his son. Banville’s are hauntings in which the ghost does not materialize—the idea of the ghost is more important than the entity itself. His characters are haunted by something different, something internal.
The key (to deciphering the title) might be in the characters who, generally lacking solidity, seem to float around independently like ghosts. Relationships seem to be fleeting. The characters lightly touch but everything is vague. The narrator confesses that his interest is neither in the living nor the dead, but in beings vaguely described by him as “something in between; some third thing”. He experiences states of being suspended between sleep and wakefulness, liberated from the constraints of time and space, ready to drift away and dissolve. He calls this experience “a different way of being alive”. There is an aura of mystery in the arrival of the day-trippers, whose arrival was unplanned and unintended. They remark on feeling strange on the island but at the same time have an intuition of having been there before and indeed behave as if their arrival on the island was not accidental. There is a sense that at any moment the castaways might vanish.
Or, possibly, the key is in the character of Felix, a red-haired trickster with overtly demonic characteristics, who appears to orchestrate the entire visit. Freddie is disturbed by Felix’s arrival because he disrupts the isolated bubble that Freddie has constructed for himself on the island, reminding him of his murderous past. Yet, there’s no indication that Felix is an apparition - merely a figure that haunts Freddie by conjuring memories and visions of a troubled past.
The closest we get to the appearance of an apparition comes in Freddie’s encounter with his son, Van. Like a dream, Freddie seems to appear at his house - or what used to be his house - without realizing how. All of a sudden he’s just there. Then, after a strange conversation with a passing stranger who tells a fantastic story of Freddie’s own family, he breaks into the empty building and encounters Van, who, as he later says, has been dead for several years. Only in a story to his friend we learn Freddie committed a second ‘murder’: that of his son. It’s unclear if this is reality or a fabricated story to a) seem tough in the eyes of his friend or b) a way of dealing with the guilt of leaving Van to live his life fatherless. This meeting is the solitary moment where a ghost visitation seems ‘real’. We know very little about Freddy’s son and he doesn’t give us much of anything by way of dialogue to help us. He also seems to appear out of nowhere and is gone just as quickly. Freddy’s story about his son’s death isn’t necessarily reliable, but the scene certainly feels like a ghostly visitation.
Freddie’s untrustworthiness manifests itself through his reaction to Billy’s confession that all the stories of his life he had shared with Freddie were merely baseless fantasies. This scene functions as a mise-en-abyme of Freddie’s own way of being. Freddie’s reaction to the confession is revealing: he would rather not know the plain truth, preferring lies for their potential to open up new directions, complicate things and thicken the texture of life. So, one feels that even Freddie’s stories are flimsy at best and we should take them with a grain of salt, as the saying goes.
Perhaps, it is actually Freddie who is the ghost. Although apparently present in the house throughout the visit, Freddie never interacts with the other characters and is only addressed for the first time by one of the castaways after everyone else departs, when Flora unexpectedly comes out of her usual ghostly lethargy. However, their interaction is meaningless and vapid. In fact, Freddie expresses his disinterest in what she’s saying and that “...she was simply there, an incarnation of herself…”. In other words, Flora’s existence remains uncertain. At least for him. Or vise-versa. It’s Freddie who watches from afar, who moves about the house without being seen. This interaction, in hindsight, throws some light on the relationship between the characters and the novel’s represented world. The characters’ strange “way of being alive” can be best understood if one accepts that there is some other force at work here. The people on the island are most likely no more than figments of Freddie's imagination, half-formed products of his memories, dreams and fantasies.
