John Banville’s New Novel Is a Universe for His Past Creations

THE SINGULARITIES, by John Banville

The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious magnificence that it’s all too simple to view his work as an aesthetic venture, an train in pleasure giving. This impression was little doubt bolstered by his Booker Prize-winning novel “The Sea” (2005), which is uncharacteristic in its simplicity and openness. However what drives Banville — and his relentless hunt for the best adjective and simile and cadence — is a want to the touch one thing elusive and never fairly nameable whereas offering a parallel or overlapping commentary on that doomed however by no means pointless effort.

Though he’s usually in comparison with Nabokov, with explicit reference to his arch and swaggering narrators, and an emphasis on doubles, Banville’s most necessary money owed are to literary-minded German thinkers (Nietzsche, Heidegger), philosophically inclined German writers (Kleist, Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal) and others in that line of descent, notably Beckett and Wallace Stevens, from whom Banville borrowed an epigraph as way back as 1976, for “Physician Copernicus,” and a title, “The Blue Guitar,” as not too long ago as 2015.

“The Singularities,” Banville’s exhilarating new novel, gives itself fairly overtly as a rumination on, or rummage round, concepts about illustration. Like a lot of his finest work, it goals to each scrutinize and confront one of many central challenges of the human endeavor: the way to create an correct portrait of issues. It has two, very completely different, know-it-all narrators. One is a god or “godlet,” a never-identified son of Zeus, who has entry to human thought and takes the reins for 10 of the 17 chapters. The opposite is the educational Jaybey (a homophone for his creator’s initials), who’s writing a biography of the late mathematician Adam Godley and has been invited to look at his papers on the Godleys’ property in County Wexford, Eire.

In Banville’s model of historical past, Godley’s Brahma concept proved the existence of infinite universes and instantly produced an interference impact on the planet. Just like the blue guitar in Stevens’s poem, which adjustments “issues as they’re,” the invention doesn’t solely mirror actuality however has a direct affect on it. New York, for instance, is known as New Amsterdam once more. Chilly fusion is feasible, so automotive engines and different machines run on salt water. What confuses issues, for the characters and infrequently the reader, is that the overhaul has not been complete. The not too long ago launched convict Freddie Montgomery, who confessed to a homicide in Banville’s 1989 novel “The Ebook of Proof,” turns up at his childhood dwelling, solely to search out that it’s now (and maybe at all times has been) the Godley residence. However Montgomery’s standing as a villain in Irish society hasn’t modified, and he’s compelled to undertake a pseudonym, Felix Mordaunt.