Excessive Candour
The Matter of Ben

Like its protagonist, who is not quite a ghost, The Ghost in Love, which is not quite about a ghost, comes to us surrounded by previous selves. Ben Gould is not quite Snow White, though his previous selves (way more than seven of them) are colors of him; and The Ghost in Love does not quite take the same ground as The Graveyard Book—Neil Gaiman's simultaneously published suite of closely interlocked tales about a young boy brought up by ghosts who seem to gain density from the ontological primacy of his live self—though both books clearly occupy shared and sharing territory. To put it as simply as Jonathan Carroll is likely to allow one to put anything: Both Ben Gould and The Ghost in Love are stories shaped by deep conversations with the pasts that accompany them. The writing seems quiet, but the sounding is incessant. In the end, Ben is moved to come through, though not exactly into a silence beyond words; in the end, maybe we are too.

Ben Gould should be dead, and—for an instant stuck sideways into the story of the world—he may have been. Before The Ghost in Love begins, Ben had been walking home with a dog he'd picked up from the pound to give his live-in lover, German Landis; he had slipped and hit his head on a curb. Blood had flooded his brain. He became instantly dead; or he did not so become. We enter the present time of the novel, and find that we are in Slick Fantasy country (not by any means the only land we'll be visiting). The ghost we meet on page one is Ben's, which has been seconded here in error after its host's (avatar's? eidolon's? Entity Toolbox's?) seeming demise. So the ghost is stuck in the real (the Angel of Death says it was computer virus, but is lying). Her response (the ghost turns out to be a woman named Ling) is to fall in love with the intensely attractive (and exceedingly likable) German, who has just broken up with Ben, and it is here we encounter a real difficulty with The Ghost in Love: As the climax of the tale depends on both Ben and German being so fundamentally decent and ontologically dense and meant for love and each other that it is difficult to work out any reason for their separating (Carroll is certainly unable to provide one), the reader is constantly harassed by reminders of a plot device laid into the book for no other reason than to make possible the inevitable Reunion Cute. (Ben and German do get together again!) The dog itself—which was called Methuselah in the pound, but is now known as Pilot: We sure pick up Styx pretty soonish—is a talking dog. Though live humans cannot speak Dog, ghosts, in Slick Fantasy fashion, do. This leads to some sidekick spats, but Pilot and Ling share one thing: they can no more understand the breakup between the mortal humans they love so deeply than we can.

So far altogether too neat. The Slick Fantasy routines, the foreordained idiot plot, the unnamed city it all takes place in somewhere sometime in the American Northeast, the earnest chuntering of the cast: It all reads like Peter S. Beagle in the Years of Plague between The Last Unicorn (1968) and the superb The Innkeeper's Song (1993). Readers who stopped before page 50 might have missed a few clues that something else was happening, though they could be forgiven their insensitivity to a text so seemingly bent on narrowing itself down into a plot-driven simplistic. But something else does happen. It is not perhaps very easy to describe. The easiest way to begin might be to suggest that there is a Sitting Duck feel about the false breakup everyone woofs over in Beaglerese; and about the ghost who complains about her false secondment to the Angel of Death in a diner; and about several other Slick Fantasy riffs; and about the bum who turns into an inexorable unkillable smiling killer out of maybe Peter Straub; and about the seemingly lazy hints of Our Town Sehnsucht (Thornton Wilder, first performed 1938): that maybe we are being prepared for something: that maybe these tropes and topoi are being set up to be broken.

I suppose the main clue is that nothing stays still. As soon as a Slick Fantasy convention about who ghosts can talk to is laid down, it is demolished. New characters, new creatures, new solaces and threats, new worlds follow each other pell-mell. Interjaculations between the text and echoed and echoing influences—some of them, like Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002), seemingly influenced by books seemingly influenced by the earlier work of Carroll himself—jostle and dance briefly in the sun of the tellling, which constantly sets on them: Beagle, Gaiman, Auster, Lewis Carroll, The Sixth Sense (1999) directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Steve Erickson (and Macdonald Harris and James P. Blaylock and anyone else who has ever treated Hollywood as an arena of avatars in longing) and P.L. Travers—there are moments when the ground shifts under one's feet as alarmingly as in the great early Mary Poppins stories.

Love us or leave us

About the middle of the book, "The deeper Ben and Ling" enter a forest questing for a primal scene from Ben's childhood that might explain the disintegration of everything around them: of stable characters; of consistent events; of storyable versions of the self they can recognize in the mirror; and (though The Ghost in Love is not self-reflexive in this sense) of the disintegration of the tale itself. It is an Into-the-Woods moment typical of the more profound fairy tale (hence Stephen Sondheim's use of the phrase in his great musical), and is also found in many examples of the Posthumous Fantasy: tales whose protagonists must come posthumously to terms with their lives by visiting the chaos of their pasts, and there encountering various iterations of themselves who inhabit different arenas in the ago of memory. The mission of the protagonist of a Posthumous Fantasy is to reconcile all these different versions and to return whole from the Woods; perhap ready now for Heaven.

So The Ghost in Love is a Posthumous Fantasy whose protagonist is not dead; but it is one all the same. Slowly but surely, we and the cast are made to understand that the upset of the novel directly reflects Ben's own profound upset, for he is "a person having a summit meeting with himself." Two levels of explanation of the meaning of things are woven together. The first, which Carroll lays into the text without perhaps fully expecting us to believe it, is the suggestion that human evolution has reached a point where we need no longer accept the storyline of Death Foretold (which is to say mortality), and that a new race of humans, like Ben and some similar figures who inhabit the edges of the tale, have evolved to the point of being able to edit the storyline, new gods manipulating an old godgame whose players are their own previous selves. "No outside control or influence," says Stanley the Angel of Death:

no coaching from the sidelines, no deus ex machina interference, nothing. At last: mankind grows up and moves out of the parents' house. Frankly after all these millennia, we didn't know if it would ever happen. But now it has and you're one of the first to do it, Ben.

We are the Singularity we fear. Love us or leave us.

The second motivation for a tale so disruptive of fixity is perhaps, in the end, more persuasive. A while ago, trying to get at the mysterious heart of Robert Aickman (I thought I heard his voice once or twice in The Ghost in Love), I suggested that for him the self was a kind of chivalry; a Round Table of partials. But

if a man fails to preside over the squabble of his interior life—just as King Arthur presides over his knightly heroes—then he will be haunted; for when the archetypes appropriate to young adulthood fail to integrate into a mature selfhood, they then tend to manifest themselves in the form of ghosts.

Aickman's tales almost invariably end at the point of disintegration. The Ghost in Love seems to move in the same direction, but this time the final sharding of the self is halted in order that phoenix-like (one of the streets mentioned is called Underhill) a king may be born.

As Ben and German (once they get themselves onto the same page together, their Reunion Cute takes nanoseconds to accomplish) enter the climax of things, we begin to see that—as in any genuine fantasy, where what resembles a thing is that thing—nothing is metaphor in the end. Some of the partials (or ghosts) of the full Ben may have seemed at points to resemble Ben in the way the cast of Our Town resembles the dreamer: but Ben is not dreaming.

It takes a while to understand that it is all real, that everything storyable in The Ghost in Love, a novel which is all story, is the case. The disintegration of the sing-along of tropes in the first half of the novel, and the concurrent fissiparation of Ben into jangling parodies of the chivalry to come, are all one story. Nothing is metaphor; everything is happening. And there is a final moment of relief, a contagion of knights dancing at the end: that magic instant when the mounts of self break into a canter like surf.