The Singularities

Last updated

The Singularities is a novel by the Irish author John Banville, published in 2022. It is based on characters and themes from the author's earlier novels. Felix Mordaunt, sentenced to life for murder, has been released from prison. He goes to visit his childhood home which is now occupied by Adam and Helen Godley, a middle aged couple. Adam's late father, Adam senior, was a famous academic. He is the author of the "Brahma theory", a hypothesis of space, time and multiple universes. Adam engages William Jaybey, an academic author, to write a biography of his father; Jaybey accepts the commission though he has little regard for Professor Godley's work.

Contents

Plot summary

Felix Mordaunt has been released from prison on licence after serving 20 years for the murder of a young woman. He has changed his name from Freddie Montgomery, the villain of The Book of Evidence. [1] He decides to visit his childhood home, a country house called Coolgrange.  He committed the murder in the neighbouring house of Whitewater in the course of stealing a painting.

Coolgrange is now known as Arden House, and is occupied by a middle aged couple, Adam and Helen Godley. Adam's late father, also called Adam, was a distinguished academic. Prof. Godley was the deviser of the Brahma theory, a mathematical concept of space and time which predicted multiple universes. He published his theories in a paper entitled "On singularities and the fissuring of worldlines". The Godley family are central to Banville's earlier novel The Infinities. [2]

Mordaunt calls at Arden House and tells Helen that he was born there. She is happy to receive him, and arranges for him to lodge in the cottage of her housekeeper, Ivy Blount. The novel continues with reminiscences by Ursula, the widow of Prof. Godley.  She is visited by the spirit of Petra, her daughter who committed suicide.

The story now introduces William Jaybey (who first appeared in The Newton Letter ). [3]  Jaybey is an academic who knew Prof. Godley at the fictional University of Arcady in California. Adam Godley junior has asked Jaybey to write his father's biography, and Jaybey is now installed in Arden House where he has access to the great man's papers. Jaybey however is sceptical of Godley's work.  While exploring Arden House Jaybey comes across Ursula, who is still living there as a recluse.

Helen disliked her father-in-law who she describes as a lecher: she says he had a fling with a girl a quarter of his age, who eventually killed herself.  Jaybey is infatuated with Helen; however he is dismayed to find out that Helen has had a sexual encounter with Mordaunt.

Mordaunt is visited by Anna Behrens (a character from The Book of Evidence), an old flame who lives in the nearby Whitewater House. She kept in touch with him while he was in prison. Anna makes the surprising request that she would like Mordaunt to kill her. Mordaunt finally decides to depart alone, taking some of the Godley papers which he intends to publish himself.

Style

The Singularities is not a straightforward novel in which the plot unfolds in a logical order. Eoghan Smith [4] says it as "a work that meditates in highly sophisticated ways on the nature of reality, existence, knowledge, art, love and death". Alex Clark [5] describes it as "a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it ... a playful interrogation of the peculiar and suggestive world he has been busily creating for the past half century." Tom Ball [3] says that "there is more than a touch of surrealism".

Much of the time the style has a light touch: "a welcome sense of playfulness ... he is clearly having fun"; [6]  "He is also at his most mischievous". [4] John Self says that it "is lively on the surface, but there's a current of sadness running beneath". [6]

This novel has the mastery of expression described of his previous works (see "Style" in the main entry for Banville). John Self [6] talks of "the usual sumptuous style ... a brilliant grasp of imagery". Troy Jollimore [7] says "Such is the beauty of Banville's prose that every page of The Singularities is a perplexing and enigmatic delight". Allan Massie says he reads Banville "most of all for his uncanny ability to render mood and atmosphere into verbal pictures". [8]

Major themes

A major theme is memories and the past. Alex Clark says "Banville, as ever, is concerned with ghosts: traces left behind, lives we might have led". Characters from previous novels "pop up in the background or in memory. These characters haunt themselves, are in flight from crimes of the past.". [5]  "All his players find in the past an alternative world they can't help dwelling on". [9]

Another main theme is the illusion of reality and the distortion of the truth. Troy Jollimore says "There is a great deal of unreliable reportage and speculation." He asks whether the things that happen in the story are real or metaphorical, and talks of "a chaotic universe where nothing ... is necessarily fixed or secure". [7] Leo Robson says "Banville has found a form that mobilizes his most cherished theme – the slipperiness of reality. A world that is at once unrecognisable but familiar". [1] A subset of this theme is what Jon Day calls "scholarly skulduggery", [2] i.e. cheating in the academic world: Jaybey regards both Prof. Godley and Prof. Axel Vander (the subjects of his biographies) as frauds.

At times the novel moves into an altered historical reality. The Dutch have taken New York and renamed it New Amsterdam, and cars run on seawater through cold fusion.  "Banville has fun with this" says Alex Clark. [5]

Reception

Critics are united in their praise for the quality of Banville's prose, as illustrated above under "Style".  "There is delight in the jewelled sentences" says Allan Massie. [8] Tom Ball describes the book as "This beautifully written almost-whodunnit". [3]  There is praise too for the author's insight into the human condition through the experiences of his characters: "Banville in following them (his characters) through these dizzyingly reflective moods and milieux, has constructed a compelling underworld to run alongside our own." [5] Allan Massie talks of delight "in the perceptive flashes of understanding and misunderstanding, in the clarity of perception. He works very close to the experience of life beyond or behind the words". [8]

Some critics feel that the lack of a coherent story and the dependence on recycled characters are weaknesses. Jon Day writes: "Plot has felt increasingly like a tiresome obligation he must perform in the service of his unspooling words. The various storylines set up in The Singularities ... scarcely seem to matter. Instead they're the scaffolding from which the author can hang his sentences, which are alternately lush and dangerously overfertilised." [2] "The book is so steeped in his past work that the ideal reader is probably the author." [6]

The critical consensus is that the literary expression is powerful but the form of the book is not to everyone's taste. John Self says "He is clearly having fun – but are we?", [6] a sentiment echoed by Jon Day: "It's clear that Banville is having a great deal of fun with all of this. What's less obvious is whether we are." [2] Leo Robson concludes that "For all its virtuosity, The Singularities doesn't qualify as Banville's masterpiece or summa." [1] Tom Ball feels that "After a while you can't help but wonder whether you ... might be the begrudged guest of someone who would rather be left to their own devices." [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Baxter (author)</span> British science-fiction author (born 1957)

Stephen Baxter is an English hard science fiction author. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering.

<i>East of Eden</i> (novel) 1952 novel by John Steinbeck

East of Eden is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, published in September 1952. Many regard the work as Steinbeck's most ambitious novel, and Steinbeck himself considered it his magnum opus. Steinbeck said of East of Eden, "It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years," and later said, "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this." Steinbeck originally addressed the novel to his young sons, Thom and John. Steinbeck wanted to describe the Salinas Valley for them in detail: the sights, sounds, smells, and colors.

A parallel universe, also known as an alternate universe, parallel world, parallel dimension, alternate reality, or alternative dimension, is a hypothetical universe co-existing with one's own, typically distinct in some way. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called the "multiverse". Another common term for a parallel universe is "another dimension", stemming from the idea that if the 4th dimension is time, the 5th dimension—a direction at a right angle to the fourth—is a direction into any of the alternate spacetime realities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Banville</span> Irish writer, also writes as Benjamin Black (born 1945)

William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.

<i>The Golden Bowl</i> 1904 novel by Henry James

The Golden Bowl is a 1904 novel by Henry James. Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some critics have called the "major phase" of James's career. The Golden Bowl explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail but also with powerful insight.

<i>The Sea</i> (novel) 2005 novel by John Banville

The Sea is a 2005 novel by John Banville. His fourteenth novel, it won the 2005 Booker Prize.

Allan Johnstone Massie is a Scottish journalist, columnist, sports writer and novelist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has lived in the Scottish Borders for the last 25 years, and now lives in Selkirk.

<i>The Hanging Garden</i> (Rankin novel) 1998 novel by Ian Rankin

The Hanging Garden is a 1998 crime novel by Ian Rankin. It is the ninth of the Inspector Rebus novels. It was the second episode in the Rebus television series starring John Hannah, airing in 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Crumey</span> British writer

Andrew Crumey is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper Scotland on Sunday. His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."

<i>The Double</i> (Saramago novel) 2002 novel by José Saramago

The Double is a 2002 novel by Portuguese author José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. In Portuguese, the title is literally "The Duplicated Man." It was translated into English and published as The Double in 2004.

<i>Shroud</i> (novel) 2002 novel

Shroud is a 2002 novel by John Banville. It is the second book in the Alexander and Cass Cleave Trilogy, which also contains the novels Eclipse (2000) and Ancient Light (2012).

<i>The Infinities</i> 2009 novel by John Banville

The Infinities is a 2009 novel by John Banville.

<i>Bottoms Dream</i> 1970 novel by Arno Schmidt

Bottom's Dream is a novel published in 1970 by West German author Arno Schmidt. Schmidt began writing the novel in December 1963 while he and Hans Wollschläger were translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe into German. The novel was inspired by James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake, particularly Schmidt's use of columns, which Schmidt claimed was borrowed from the Wake.

<i>Eclipse</i> (Banville novel) 2000 novel by John Banville

Eclipse is a 2000 novel by John Banville. Its dense lyrical style and unorthodox structure have prompted some to describe it as more prose poem than novel. Along with Shroud and Ancient Light, it comprises a trilogy concerning actor Alexander Cleave and his estranged daughter Cass.

<i>The Long Earth</i> 2012 science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long Earth is the first novel in a collaborative science fiction series by British authors Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

<i>Athena</i> (novel) 1995 novel by John Banville

Athena is a 1995 novel by the Irish author John Banville, the third in a series that started with The Book of Evidence and continued with Ghosts. These three form the "Frames" trilogy, linked by the theme of paintings.

<i>Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine</i> 2017 novel by Gail Honeyman

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the 2017 debut novel by Gail Honeyman, and the winner of the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award. The story centres on Eleanor Oliphant, a social misfit with a traumatic past who becomes enamoured with a singer, whom she believes she is destined to be with. The novel deals with themes of isolation and loneliness, and depicts Eleanor's transformational journey towards a fuller understanding of self and life.

<i>The Largesse of the Sea Maiden</i> 2018 short story collection by Denis Johnson

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories is a 2018 short story collection by Denis Johnson. It was published posthumously on January 16, 2018, by Random House. It consists of five short stories, three of which were previously published in The New Yorker and Playboy. Johnson finished the collection a few weeks before his death in May 2017.

<i>Troubled Blood</i> 2020 detective novel by J. K. Rowling

Troubled Blood is the fifth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J. K. Rowling and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The novel was released on 15 September 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">He-Man as a gay icon</span>

He-Man, a fictional superhero from the sword and sorcery franchise Masters of the Universe created by Mattel, has often attracted queer interpretations and discussions over his status as a gay icon. His first appearance was in the 1982 comics included with his toy figures. The animated television series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which aired from 1983 to 1986, focused on the character and established traits that would remain consistent in future installments of the franchise.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Robson, Leo (25 October 2022). "John Banville's new novel is a universe for his past creations". New York Times.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Day, Jon (1 November 2022). "The Singularities by John Banville - a writerly return to past themes". Financial Times.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Ball, Tom (22 October 2022). "The Singularities by John Banville review - fancy a lost weekend at an Irish country pile?". The Times (London).
  4. 1 2 Smith, Eoghan (31 October 2022). "The Singularities by John Banville: a masterly raising of old ghosts". The Irish Times.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Clark, Alex (16 November 2022). "The Singularities by John Banville review - inside a murderer's underworld". The Guardian.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Self, John (13 October 2022). "The Singularities by John Banville review: what if all the characters from his earlier novels met?". The Daily Telegraph.
  7. 1 2 Jollimore, Troy (31 October 2022). "John Banville is up to some fine mischief in "The Singularities"". The Washington Post.
  8. 1 2 3 Massie, Allan (31 October 2022). "Book review: The Singularities, by John Banville". The Scotsman.
  9. ↑ THE SINGULARITIES | Kirkus Reviews.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.