Are we approaching the singularity of John Banville?
Reading John Banville is like being in the presence of a fathomlessly talented, witty, and intelligent magician — someone so captivatingly masterful at their craft, you suspect that they could make you disappear. If you want to know what I mean, read Banville’s new novel, “The Singularities,” which proves the 76-year-old Irish author deserves a summons from Stockholm.
The new novel brings together characters from several of Banville’s previous books as if it were an All-Star Game. It begins when Freddie Montgomery, the mathematician turned murderer-thief from “The Book of Evidence” (1989), now released from prison and calling himself Felix Mordaunt, stays with the Godley family from “The Infinities” (2009), on their estate in southern Ireland, where Mordaunt apparently spent his youth and has scores to settle. There, the son of the late, world-famous mathematician Adam Godley, Adam junior, dwells with his restless (and tipsy) wife, Helen, and has commissioned a biography of his father by the washedup academic William Jaybey, who also comes to live on the estate — and hints he’s the narrator of Banville’s novella “The Newton Letter” (1982). “The Singularities” is mostly told by a “little god,” the same narrator as “Ghosts” (1991), and references at least a half-dozen other Banville books. Hints, winks, nods, and allusions abound, creating, to borrow the author’s phrase, “an otherworld of mirrors and mazes.”
As you can imagine, “The Singularities” is a difficult book to summarize. Partly this is because Banville is more interested in the time and space between events, in insight rather than action. For example, when Jaybey begins his story of how he became involved with the biography project, he muses, in a sort of writerly procrastination, “To arrive at the beginning I could go back all the way to the moment of my conception but even that wouldn’t be far enough. I should need to trace my origins and the origins of everything I am and do to a pinch of the primordial dust of some stupendously distant, long-ago disintegrated star, or even further back again, back all the way to the infinitesimal instant when the touchpaper was applied and
THE SINGULARITIES
By John Banville Knopf, 320 pages, $30
the originary fireworks show got underway with a cataclysmic bang the reverberations of which can still be detected by astronomically costly instruments developed specially to perform this single and surely nugatory task.”
This is not the kind of literature you skim. It demands your full attention. Indulge a stray thought, and you’ll miss it — not only what’s going on, but the gift, the beauty. Because time and again Banville stuns with sentences so dazzling they’re like a lightning-quick boxer’s jab — I blink, and read the line again.
In addition to a universal perspective that towers over his peers, Banville also manages to make selfreflection profound, such as when Mordaunt thinks, “Often it seems to me I didn’t grow up at all, that the years simply accrued around me, like the rings in the trunk of a tree, and that at the core the original sapling is still there, dewily aquiver and springing with fatuous life.”
Though some readers might squirm under the weight of those words, Banville’s language actually re-enchants the otherwise dull world. Indeed, his sentences push against the numinous; several passages portray the spiritual tug his characters sense as they go along with their day. When Godley’s dead sister Petra visits their infirm mother, for instance, “Something ripples in the room, something shimmers, as if the air had developed a vertical, softly running fold, like the fold in a gauze curtain blown against by a breeze from an open window, a window open to the south.”
These moments aren’t simply flourishes of a master, but are thematic, reflecting the Brahma Theory that made Adam Godley senior famous; never quite specified, it seems Godley somehow proved “the infinite has its limits, and furthermore that our infinity is only one among an infinity of infinities.” At least that’s how Jaybey understands it. The second part of the novel is an excerpt from Jaybey’s biography-inprogress, complete with half-page footnotes. He dances around exactly what the Brahma Theory is, as he’s more interested in writing about its origins, as well as Godley’s personal life — he was an incorrigible lecher. But the Brahma Theory’s tidal wave impact closed mathematics and science departments of academic institutions worldwide, causing millions of professors to lose their jobs. That is, it was the theory to end all theories.
Mysteries remain even at the end, and “The Singularities” may require multiple readings to understand. But that’s desirable; as Banville recently wrote in The New York Review, “Art, and great art especially, to an extent always withholds itself, conceals itself, in the plainest of plan sight” and “this withdrawnness is one of the qualities, perhaps the most important one, that contribute to the work’s inexhaustibility.” Inexhaustible itself, “The Singularities” is not reading to find out what happens, nor even for the beauty of its sentences; it’s reading for transcendence. If read properly, it’s an act of contemplation. Philosophical narrative, I want to call it, though the genre’s otherwise known as literary fiction. And here it is at its finest.