SOURCE: "A World Elsewhere," in Washington Post Book World, December 12, 1993, p. 3.

In the following review, Norfolk calls Banville's Ghosts "a strange and austere book."

[In John Banville's Ghosts, a] drunken captain runs his boat aground, stranding seven passengers on an island. They are watched, wading ashore; Croke, "an old boy in a boater," Felix, "a thin lithe sallow man with bad teeth and hair dyed black," Flora, "a pretty young woman," Sophie, "in a black skirt with a black leather jacket" who totes cameras with the purpose of capturing what she terms "tableaux morts," and three children: Pound, Hatch, Alice.

The unmagical Prospero of this island is Professor Silas Kreutznaer, an art historian specializing in the work of "Vaublin," who is served by two lackluster Calibans: Licht, a graceless and insecure factotum, and another, who watches, comments and dribbles out the events of the life which brought him...