Raskolnikov on the Couch : GHOSTS, <i> By John Banville (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 245 pp.) </i>

Call me Ishmael.

No.

It’s not that Melville needs us to say “yes” right at the start, so that he and we can get on with Moby Dick. “Maybe” or “let’s see” will do; the “yes” can take its time. “I” in a first-person narrative invites us to a game and must charm, puzzle, annoy or even terrify us into wanting to play; but not immediately. What would stop things dead is a “no.” The invitation extended by the narrator of “Ghost” is all too easy for the reader to turn down.

The ghost in John Banville’s novel about the aftermath of a gratuitous crime is the criminal. He is not literally dead but his sense of self is so shattered that even serving out his punishment--10 years in jail--did not restore him. Perhaps it is because he cannot really repent; repentance belonging to a pre-therapeutic era when the chief import of a transgression was what it did to others, not its disorienting effect on oneself. The nameless narrator, an art expert who impulsively removed a valuable painting from the wall of his host’s country house and killed the maid who found him at it, is Raskolnikov on a couch. Even if jail might seem to be the narrator’s redemptive equivalent of Siberia, it wasn’t; the couch went with him.

“Ghosts” is written with the subtlety and cultural erudition that is characteristic of Banville, literary editor of the Irish Times and author of the intellectually demanding “Dr. Copernicus” and “The Book of Evidence.” It carries his trademark use of a few words-- nimbed, luminance and popliteal --that only the Oxford Dictionary could love. This is a dandified flourish, like the tip of a silk handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket; and there is nothing wrong with a flourish. The trouble with “Ghosts” is not these few words but a fair number of the others.

The first part of the narrator’s story was told in “Book of Evidence”: his intellectual’s self-estrangement, his gradual loss of human contact with his past and his family, his crime and imprisonment. In “Ghosts” these things are alluded to and in some sense relived. It is a kind of sequel but in a different mode. Where the first book was told as confessional realism, with narrative and moral suspense and a tone of cold passion, “Ghosts” moves in the fog of limbo. The narrator haunts his story instead of living it. Its setting--a derelict mansion on an island off the Irish coast--could be the land of the dead, and its characters and the sparse action they engage in skip about in sequence and logic, as if dreaming about such a land.

Released from prison, the narrator first makes an abortive effort to see his wife, who rejects him, and then visits their house in her absence. He is looking for remnants of himself before the fall; he finds none. With a letter of introduction he travels to the island, seeking a job assisting the aged Silas Kreutznaer, a world-famous but dubiously ethical art expert now in shabby seclusion. He is accepted and takes up residence.

It is a ghostly residence: Kreutznaer spends most of his time looking out of a turret window; Licht, who seems to be his servant but in fact is his landlord, lurks about sullenly. The narrator, between spells of writing a book for his employer, flits solitarily about, emerging at one point to have an enigmatic non-affair with an old woman. The cast suggests the emblematic and utterly arbitrary characters of Iris Murdoch, but without their comically perverse humanity.

A boatload of visitors wades ashore--their boat having grounded a little way out--and drifts about the premises. There is Croke, an old actor--he is dying; hence, perhaps, the pun--Sophie, a world-weary photographer; Flora, a wraith-like young woman; two obnoxious little boys, and an obnoxious little girl. There is also a cheroot-puffing, saturnine seducer named Felix, with dyed hair and a criminal record.

There are only a few events. Licht cooks and complains, Croke collapses walking on the beach, Felix has sex with Flora, who develops a sick headache. The real action takes place in the narrator’s mind. In his dead state, the visitors seem to represent an eruption of human life; he hides and then fearfully joins them. In Flora, in particular, he sees the hope of becoming human once more. It is a futile hope, proffered and then mocked by the mysterious Felix. He is the narrator’s nemesis and alter ego; he has followed him to the island and brought the others to taunt him with the suggestion that his isolation can be overcome. When he approaches them they turn as ghostly as he. They leave; Flora stays for a while but will soon leave as well. Felix, his dark double, will remain; and the narrator’s work with Kreutznaer will go on.

Partly, but not altogether, it is a matter of art being the redeemer of humanity’s darkness. The artist whom the narrator is writing about is Vaublin, a fictional contemporary of Watteau, whose reputed masterpiece is a work--reminiscent of Watteau’s Journey to Cythera--called “The Golden World.” Kreutznaer’s crime, which has placed him in a ghostly limbo similar to the narrator’s, is to have authenticated it for a commission. It is a forgery yet its magic is real. Its figures, in mythic procession from an Arcadian landscape to a waiting ship, are precisely those who have visited the narrator’s retreat: an old man, a blond woman, three children, a wraithlike girl peering from a tower. Harlequin--the grinning Felix--rides on a donkey; in the foreground stands the pale Pierrot--the narrator--holding a club that Harlequin has given him.

As symbol and idea it all fits neatly, even suggestively. Yet Banville does not manage to fuse his figures with the eternal painted ones. A painting may imply an idea but we only care about this idea through the allure of the image and the brush strokes. Banville writes well enough about art to convince us of the timeless allure of the Vaublin forgery, but he doesn’t do the same for his characters.

The denizens of the island and the visitors are flat and schematic. Their emotions and movements are geometric. None of them remotely approaches the sorrow or exuberance of a painted glance, let alone a human one. As for the narrator, his confession is a web of well thought-out moral complexity. But it is sterile and self-regarding. It illuminates nothing beyond itself, so what it illuminates is not much worth seeing. It is gymnastics performed in front of a mirror. It may call itself Ishmael but I won’t.