=2013 Books Read=

Ghosts
John Banville

What a great writer John Banville is--if only one can get oneself to read him. 

I tried half-a-dozen times to read this book before I took to it. I knew it would be good. I knew I would like it. But I kept starting it and putting it down. I read a half dozen other books instead.

What was the problem?

Reading Banville, I found, was like sailing. If you could only catch the wind right, he carried you along without you having to do another thing. The sailing was smooth and effortless. The beauty and power of his language swept you out to sea. You sat there amazed. The horizons were limitless. The journey exhilarating.

But if you couldn't catch that wind, you foundered. Everything was difficult. You were stuck close to the dock, exasperated, your skiff turning circles like a dragonfly with a broken wing, sloshed by the incoming tide.

Well, at least that's how I imagine it is with sailing. I've never been on a sailboat. In any event, it's the best description I can come up with for how I found reading Banville.

He's been compared to Joyce and Yeats, but I found him more comparable to Beckett. The bleakness. The world-weary misanthropy. The broken-down characters for whom life is just to high a hill to scale. The same humor. Yes, Banville, like Beckett, is a funny writer. If you have that sort of sense of humor. I do.

He's like Beckett, but with more plot. Though the plot in Ghosts is minimal. A group of pleasure-seekers on a small boat find themselves stranded on an island. If you're high-brow, you think Shakespeare's "The Tempest." If you're like me, you're reminded of "Gilligan's Island." They are of all different character types, the strandees. You've got the pretty young thing, the cynical photographer, the elderly duffer, a pair of buffoonish buddies, a sinister lothario. They seek temporary shelter in a big ramshackle house inhabited by a decrepit servant, an ex-convict, and a once-renowned art historian.

To say much more wouldn't be to ruin the plot, what there is of one, as to be somewhat irrelevant and off the point.

What is the point? 

It's Banville's facility with language, his ability to weave a haunting meditation on human life that is by turns extravagantly beautiful, spare and violent.  

Banville is not for everyone. No more than sailing or sushi or walking on eggshells is. But he's worth giving it the effort. Even if it means picking up his book six or seven times before you get the feel for it. If the wind catches you right, you're in for quite a ride.