SOURCE: "A Whole Lot of Faking," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 8, April 22, 1993, pp. 10-1.

In the following review, Cunningham discusses the interrogative nature of Banville's Ghosts and asserts that, "It's at the centre of his power that his mood, his people's mood, the mood of his writing, is interrogative. And in best Modernist fashion, these interrogations don't have straight answers."

'The philosopher asks: Can the style of an evil man have any unity?' It's a wonderfully sharp question, marrying morals to aesthetics in a challenging new-old fashion. And it's a question, as ever with John Banville, within other questions. Who, for instance, you're made to wonder at this point in Ghosts, is actually asking? Some anonymous narrator? The author? The novel's own enigmatic 'evil man', the one who does so much of its telling and, it turns out, has a lot morally to answer for...