Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Ghosts

“I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-colored sky, and everything lifts, and sky and water merge invisibly. that is where I seem to the most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being”--Freddy

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”--The Tempest

Ghosts (1993) is Frames: The Freddie Montgomery Trilogy (#2) by John Banville. I was not particularly engaged in it for either plot or characters, but if you are a lover of High Literary Fiction and language, this could be the book for you. The main character is not named, but we soon realize it is Freddie, post ten years in prison, now living on an island. And prose so classical/mythical/philosophical/reflective, I realized that his story was in part being told through the lens of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so I stopped and listened to a production of that so it would breathe through me as I read Banville's tale.

As with The Tempest--with Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, Ariel-- Ghosts protagonist Montgomery is joined by a cast of chracters on the island, including Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his companion, Licht. There’s alternating feats of Ariel fantasy--I must believe in unicorns!--and the threat of Calibanish violence. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” The range of art, from comedy to tragedy.

The play and the novel deal with themes of vengeance and forgiveness, art and imagination. It is sometimes seen as Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre, one of his last and one of his more lyrical plays. Language-loving.

Ghosts was published when Banville--a perennial Nobel Prize nominee--was 48, at the peak of his powers, maybe, though it's been a long peak!--so not a likely end-of-my-art auto-fiction, and still, it is tempting to think of both Freddie and Banville as Prospero, renouncing his “art”:

“But this rough magic I here abjure, and, when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.”

In Ghosts, like The Tempest, there are themes of art, fancy (fiction), wistful restitution for past regrets:“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” And in Ghosts there are of course the ghosts of old stories, of the past, where memory gets mixed up with imagination/dreams. What is more “real” for us as we age: stories, or “actual” lived experience? Is what we have seen on the stage and experienced in life “real” or "the stuff as dreams are made on"? Story and time and memory and dreams are all mixed up together: “So. Lie there, my art.”

I read this because I am teaching a course in Fall 2024 on Ghosts, but though it is rich with ideas and language, I didn't love it, maybe 3 stars worth; it isn’t all that engaging (to me) as story, though it gets more engaging when you pair it with The Tempest, for sure. For the general reader (and me) it will likely seem abstract and ethereal, and not as fun as The Tempest. 3.5, acknowledging the great Shakespearean language and Tempest homage in it.