Ghosts is a novel by Irish author John Banville

John Banville

John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...

. Published in 1993, it was the first novel by the author since the publication of The Book of Evidence

The Book of Evidence

The Book of Evidence is a 1989 novel by the Irish author John Banville. The book is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a 38-year-old scientist, who murders a servant girl during an attempt to steal a painting from a neighbour...

(1989), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...

, and features many of the same characters. The novel recalls Shakespeare's The Tempest

The Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

in many ways.

Plot summary

The novel is somewhat unconventional and non-linear in its construction. It begins with a group of travelers disembarking on a small island in the Irish Sea after their ship runs aground. There they stumble upon a house inhabited by Professor Kreutznaer, his assistant Licht, and an unnamed character who figures centrally in the novel and who is referred to only as "Little God." It is later revealed that Little God can be identified with Freddie Montgomery, the narrator of The Book of Evidence, and much of the latter half of the book focuses on his account of his experiences after having been released from prison, his reflections on the crime (the murder of a young woman) he committed that landed him there, and his continuing struggle with the ghosts of his past and the nature of his perceptions. Kreutznaer's relationship to a painting entitled "The Golden World" by a fictional Dutch artist named Vaublin plays a central role in the novel, and it is revealed that he and one of the travellers—a man named Felix—are acquainted with one another, and that Felix had been involved in art forgery. The novel ends with the travelers reembarking and leaving the island and many of the central issues and tensions addressed in the novel are left unresolved.