Ghosts by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cosmic Intersections

The world isn’t what goes around inside our heads, but what our heads go around inside. Context is contents. And I don’t mean air, sights, and smells as context. I mean other heads. It is these other heads that supply us with language, opinion, and prejudice, lots of prejudice, which are the elements of the world we inhabit. These other heads are even embedded in the things that surround us - like in a simple cup of tea: “Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure.”

Trying to clarify what goes on inside our heads by isolating ourselves - on a small, sparsely populated Irish island for example - is, therefore, not an inherently irrational therapeutic idea - in principle. We then only have to cope mostly with memories (supplied of course by others), and dreams of other heads in other places. But what happens when more new heads, or even an old one, start invading? And what happens to the invaders’ heads? “Here is the moment where worlds collide... Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other.” Hanging around crazy people will make you crazy.

But here’s the thing: it’s not possible to sort our own head without another one to help, who nonetheless is unwelcome because annoying, and possibly crazy. We need another head to be inserted into our own to remember our crimes; or more generally to interrupt our thinking lest we enter an endless loop of memories, dreams, and regrets. When these helpful others are absent or when they die, it’s not enough to live on mere memories. These heads become ghosts - part of ourselves, yet also independent. “I am certain there is no other form of afterlife for them than this, that they should live in us, and through us. It is our duty.”

Ghosts have a clear function. The law calls this function restitution; psychiatric medicine calls it integration; art crticism, verification. They amount to the sane thing: sorting the contents of one’s head, that is to say the context of one’s head. Never an easy job; rarely a faultless one. But when they do their job, ghosts have a dramatic effect. They make it clear “that something had happened, that something had shifted, that things would never be again as they had been before.” This is about as close to solving the various mysteries Banville presents as one is likely to achieve.

And, as usual, Banville also presents the reader with his unique taste in vocabulary. Borborygmic, oneiric, brumous, mephitic, eructations, benison, plumbeous, tombal, balneation are new to me. But these are mysteries which are easier to resolve.

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