“The Singularities” by John Banville:
Reading Booker winner John Banville is like watching a magician at work. Banville is such a talented master in his craft, such a highly intelligent, sophisticated, artful, poetic, philosophical narrator and perceiver of the world which he seemingly effortless describes in such luscious elegance of prose and style that reading him is pure joy and bliss, sentence for captivating sentence, paragraph for aesthetic paragraph. Not often do I come upon a writer or a novel which gives me such pleasure.
The book is difficult to summarize. Banville revisits characters and themes from his past works like The Book of Evidence or The Infinities and crafts an artful, witty and mesmerizingly atmospheric philosophical narrative.
If you know John Banville then you know not to expect much in the way of a plot, story as such plays mostly only second part. What is very prominent, though is style. And what style that is!
Banville is more interested in the time and space between events, in insight rather than action. His idea of representation is a portrait of the world as is, of the things and their essence. He achieves this by rumination on or around these things, these ideas, the world, with a descriptive power rarely encountered, Henry James comes to mind and Thomas Mann. He is as much in search of the truth about things as he is concerned in the multiple ways we deliberately bend the truth to our wish and will.
Banville’s shapely sentences give enormous, almost painterly pleasure when, for example a full paragraph gets devoted to the description of a fly, the surface of a table or a chair, he excels in atmospheric depictions of plays of light, shadows and reflections. Here is a man in sophisticated command of the language, a true artist of his craft who breathes life into inanimate objects, thus making their thingness transcendentally meaningful. Even chairs, tables or mountains have a heart that beats and a soul that remembers, so illustrating Adam Godley the elder’s Brahma Theory, that a great world spirit moves through all things.
His metaphors are exquisite and surprising. When for example, he compares an old woman’s memory, Ursula, Adam’s dottering widow in this case, as a crate of Meissen figurines someone clumsily dropped and they are all now smashed to pieces and the pieces in a hopeless jumble on the floor.
The pace of the book is leisurely at times, but it’s always pleasurable to follow the winding path of this sophisticated narration which sometimes meanders off into fields of science, physics, metaphysics, art, literature, philosophy, history and mythology. As in The Infinities the main narrator is the godlet Hermes, the messenger god of the ancient Greeks, and with a wink, could be just a representation of Banville himself.
Much of the action occurs at an Irish country home known as Arden House where we meet Freddie Montgomery again who, under the newly adopted name of Felix Mordaunt, returns to this house he believes is the place where he grew up. Freddie is a convicted murderer who has been paroled after serving 25 years of a life sentence and was first introduced in Banville’s 1989 novel, The Book Of Evidence.
The inhabitants of Arden House include Adam, head of household and his wife, Helen, who is still haunted by the death of an infant son, there is the senior Godley’s second wife, Ursula, who passes her days slowly dying alone in an attic room, and then there is William Jaybey who, on the request and invitation of Adam Godley, has agreed to take on the project of producing a biography of Godley’s father.
The Singularities delves into exploring the complex relationships among these characters, along with a strange woman, Anna Behrens, who once was a lover of both Godley the elder and Mordaunt and now reunites with the latter for the purpose of presenting him with a request.
Godley the elder once formulated the “Brahma theory”, which has overturned physics both classical and quantum and left us in a world where the very fabric of reality has been rent apart. The Brahma theory “showed that every increase in our knowledge of the nature of reality acts directly upon that reality, and that each glowing new discovery we make brings about an equal and opposite darkening.” Mankind became too smart for its own good.
The mind creates the universe and when the mind is altered so is the universe. In this it is much like writing, the act that creates the already-created world, making the writer a god, of sorts. Banville no doubt, is such a god.
