I just sprinted through Ghosts by John Banville, the second in a trilogy starring Freddie our reluctant murderer. Reluctant...well sorta, kinda. Smile Our Freddie is a tortured soul for a certainty and this entry is a bit of a halfway house for him and perhaps his kind. Doppelgangers, art forgeries, references to other Banville characters flit through the pages bringing a smile of recognition to Banville readers, and bear us along on a grand ride.

Pick it up, but if so, buy all three. I can guarantee you won't be sorry.

The Book of Evidence
Ghosts
Athena ( )

Little do people know that Ghosts (1993) is the second installment of John Banville's Freddie Montgomery trilogy. The Book of Evidence (1989) begins the sequence, which consists of Freddie's grim and gruesome confession of the brutal murder of a maidservant who interrupted his escapade of stealing a painting. Serving ten years in jail, the ex-con came to a secluded island to accommodate life and live in solitude. Professor Kreutzner, an eminent historian, was the world's most prestigious authority on the painter Vaublin, whose works were abound with strange and eerily pleasing asymmetry of misplaced figures. The paintings generated inevitably over and above it an air of mystery of what it was that happened. Along with the sulky butler and assistant Licht, who cooked and typed up manuscripts, Freddie assisted the professor in his manuscripts. The work represented for Freddie the last outpost at the border of his life.
Readers who haven't read The Book of Evidence will find the narrator and the narrative ambiguous, surreptitious, and turbid. Not only did Freddie incessantly recount on events that led to his imprisonment, he delved on philosophical issues like the redemption and the accommodation of self and the conscience. Out of guilt for his crime, the narrator professed this many-world theory that a multiplicity of worlds existed in a mirrored regression in which the dead were not dead. The notion of dreams recurred throughout the narrative and thrusted the main plot. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he was recalling some riotous tumble of events in his dreams or simply telling the truth. Until the narrator officially identified him as the man who stole the painting he was fatally obsessed with, I had an idea that he, the narrator, was a ghost hovering over the professor's house and spying on its inhabitants as well as the unexpected castaways.

The plot is simple-it is nothing short of an account of a day in the island when a group of strangers boarded on a chartered boat stuck fast on the sandbank and ran ashore. The story slowly and mysteriously unraveled when the professor, taciturn and somewhat disgruntled by the intrusion, took the seven castaways in while they rested and waited for the skipper. Three of the castaways were kids (Pound, Hatch, and Alice). The adults were their sulky caretaker Sophie who was a photographer, dapper old Cooke, elegant Flora, and the leering Felix who claimed to know the professor.

The ominous and vaguely menacing mood persisted though the castaways found comfort and solitude in their transient stay on the island. Something about Flora and the room where stayed in (previously occupied by the narrator who hid from the castaways at their first arrival) always haunted me and tucked my mind. Flora threw herself in dreams and she woke from which feeling shivery and damp. What did she have to do with the Pierrot figures that gracefully drifted in ambiguous landscapes?

By the time I was a little less than halfway through the book, I realized nothing much would happen (as far as what would happen to the castaways) except for more haunting, lyrical, and imaginary prose that required readers to practice patience of a connoisseur. What the narrator said might be real or illusions, but the inclusion of a single chapter on Vaublin the painter toward the end drove the book to a tantalizing climax-and I will leave that that pleasure to the readers, of course. The painting (and Freddie's scholarly interest in it) would seamlessly sew all the threads together and the realization that it brought would only haunt the readers even more.

Ghosts is so much more engrossing than its predecessor in the series. While The Book of Evidence portrayed Freddie like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita-the morbid sensation and the insouciance, in Ghosts Banville tells a tale through Freddie and some of his allusions that actually might have become real. His presence in the house, though hidden from the castaways, were nothing short of immanent. It is through his perspective just so we know about the professor's secret scheme of painting and his not liking Felix for the same reason. ( )