I read The Sea a while back and thought I would give this a try. Being just part of my backlog, I failed to realize it was the second part of a trilogy until after I finished Ghosts.
JB is incredibly gifted. One might say that the style is stream-of-consciousness. Scratch that. The author's descriptive prose, I am convinced, is directly posited from his mind telepathically to the page. The style is a bit terse for the uninitiated.
The primary character is a recently-released convict that is striving to repatriate himself in a world that is a bit larger than he recalls. The loss of friends and family over his long incarceration weighs heavily on him. He is the narrator of the book (obviously) and ends up on a sparsely populated island in a large house, taken in by a famous art professor and his furtive assistant. A group of tourists, temporarily marooned when a drunken tour guide runs their boat aground, take shelter at the house and odd circumstances of the book develop out of that occurrence.
There are no heroes in this book - the characters are believably human. The storyline actually completes the circuit. Ghosts came full circle for me - even thought it is part of a greater work.
JB is incredibly gifted. One might say that the style is stream-of-consciousness. Scratch that. The author's descriptive prose, I am convinced, is directly posited from his mind telepathically to the page. The style is a bit terse for the uninitiated.
The primary character is a recently-released convict that is striving to repatriate himself in a world that is a bit larger than he recalls. The loss of friends and family over his long incarceration weighs heavily on him. He is the narrator of the book (obviously) and ends up on a sparsely populated island in a large house, taken in by a famous art professor and his furtive assistant. A group of tourists, temporarily marooned when a drunken tour guide runs their boat aground, take shelter at the house and odd circumstances of the book develop out of that occurrence.
There are no heroes in this book - the characters are believably human. The storyline actually completes the circuit. Ghosts came full circle for me - even thought it is part of a greater work.
