The Singularities by John Banville

Published by Knopf on October 25, 2022

John Banville (at least when he writes under his own name) is among the greatest of the Irish prose stylists. He’s also a thinker who brings an element of playfulness to deep thought. Banville’s thoughts in The Singularities turn to the nature of reality, a question that joins philosophy and science. The novel seems to suggest that reality is what we make it. If that’s true, we should make it carefully.

Two narrative voices in The Singularities alternate and sometimes merge. One voice belongs to Professor Jaybee, who has been engaged to write a biography of the mathematician Adam Godley, creator of the Brahma Theory, a “dazzling re-statement of the fundamental nature of reality.” One component of the theory holds that any attempt to understand the universe contributes to its destruction. People literally deconstruct the universe by trying to comprehend its reality. That discovery gave birth to a ban on scientific inquiry, a shuttering of the science and math departments in universities. The theory also seems to have affected reality in an undefined way. New York is again New Amsterdam. The plague may have returned to Venice. A Manhattan and an Old Fashioned are now the same drink.

The other narrative voice tells the story in the third person. That narrator describes itself as a minor god or godlet, a child of Zeus. An omniscient entity is well positioned to follow a murderer once known as Freddie who took the name Felix Mordaunt after his release from prison. Yet the two narrators are not so different; when characters speak to the godlet, they seem to be looking at Jaybee. The only character who can see the godlet is a dog.

In postmodern fiction, anything goes — the more confusing, the better. One might assume that the godlet is John Banville, but who knows? Given the initials that combine in Jaybee’s name, a reader might also conclude that Jaybee is Banville. Perhaps the point is that every character in a novel is really the author, for characters do not exist until the author creates them. Or perhaps the nature of reality is that, at some level, we are all the same person traveling the same course we have traveled throughout the infinity of time, even if we believe ourselves to be individuals with free will and uncertain futures. “For nothing exists by itself, in isolation; there is only the continuum, in which everything presses into, bites into and extends from, everything else.”

Speaking of confusion, the novel warps the literary illusion of reality by bringing together characters and settings from Banville’s earlier work. Freddie murdered a maid in The Book of Evidence. He visits a resort that was featured in The Sea. The Godleys, Ivy Blount, and Duffy the cowman appeared in The Infinities. I’m sure there are other examples (I haven’t read everything Banville has written); those were the easiest for me to spot.

The confusion of reality and illusion is evident when Jaybee believes he sees Godley’s dead daughter Petra, or her ghost, and when Godley in his old age travels to Venice and wonders whether a woman named Cissy actually exists, whether Cissy is a projection of Petra, whether he is actually in Venice or inhabiting a dream. When Godley wakes from dreams, the real world he encounters seems like another dream. Perhaps the reality we all believe we experience is nothing but a dream. Perhaps being awake is just “another kind of sleep.” On the other hand, another character tells Jaybee that the letter in which Godley expressed those thoughts is just another of his lies. Reality, illusion, fiction, truth, lie — all inseparable and indistinguishable. Or not.

The Singularities is more a challenging work of philosophy than a traditional novel. Before letting it go, Banville begins to construct a plot with Felix’s release from prison and his travel to the house where he lived while growing up, in a place that is now unrecognizable to him because time has passed and reality has changed. Jaybee’s agreement to investigate and write about Godley’s life seems to furnish the second plot element. He meets characters who knew Godley, including his widow, whose dementia has altered her reality.

Jaybee apparently finishes a chapter of the biography; Banville sticks it into the middle of The Singularities. After that, any attempt at plotting is all but abandoned, as the story follows tangents related to Godley, all but forgetting Felix’s role in the novel.

So what’s left? Astonishing prose is the reward for sticking with the novel. One of the narrators of The Singularities describes an evening in New Amsterdam: “We had booze, broads, a barroom fight and a night in the cells, and in the morning a crapulous and shamefaced court appearance, followed by summary deportation and a thunderous warning never to show our faces in town again. No, of course we didn’t; honestly, you’d believe anything.” It is worth suffering the confusion of reading The Singularities just to encounter such passages. Some readers might find it worth reading twice to gain a more nuanced understanding of the points Banville is making, although it might be necessary to read or reread everything Banville has written to appreciate the novel in full. Lacking that kind of ambition, once was enough for me, coupled with my dim memories of the other Banville novels I’ve read. I wouldn’t rate The Singularities as my favorite of those (The Book of Evidence probably earns that honor), but I enjoyed nearly every page.

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Snow by John Banville

Published by Hanover Square Press on October 6, 2020

Most of Snow takes place in 1957, although an epilog recounts a meeting between two characters ten years later. Snow is the first of a two-book deal featuring St. John Strafford, a Protestant detective in Catholic Ireland. The same character appeared in The Secret Guests, a novel set during World War II that John Banville published under his penname Benjamin Black. Apparently, Banville has decided that he no longer needs to publish crime novels under a penname, or perhaps his publisher told him that his books will sell better if he publishes them under his real name.

Strafford is assigned to investigate the death of a priest named Father Tom in a prosperous Protestant home where Father Tom was a frequent guest. The killer cut off Father Tom’s junk, perhaps making the motive for the crime obvious, priests being notorious for misusing their junk.

Since the house was locked on the night of the priest’s death, suspects are limited to family members and the stable boy. The semi-doddering patriarch has a new wife, the first one having died in a fall on the same staircase where Father Tom was murdered. Most of the story’s modest intrigue comes from the interaction of the family members. Banville also tries to generate interest with the church’s desire to avoid publicizing the circumstances of the priest’s death and the discomfort that Strafford is made to feel as a member of a religious minority in Ireland.

Banville gained fame as a prose stylist. Reading the well-crafted language of a Banville novel is always pleasant, but he clearly doesn’t make the same effort in genre novels that he once devoted to literary fiction. His genre prose isn’t as dense or as lyrical as his literary prose. Nor does Banville’s genre work have the depth of his earlier books. While crime is a theme in some of Banville’s literary novels, including his most celebrated work, The Book of Evidence, his genre crime novels lack the heft of his best work.

The difference is evident in Snow. The novel follows the formula of a mystery novel by asking the reader to decide which of several suspects might be the murderer. While the clues seem to point in the direction of one or two characters, Banville employs the misdirection that characterizes the genre, only revealing the full truth of the crime in the epilog. The revelation doesn’t come as much of a surprise, giving the sense that Banville just isn’t trying very hard. The plot is certainly no better than average for a genre crime novel.

A writer can’t be faulted for writing books that sell, and crime fiction typically outsells literary fiction, but the best writers in the crime genre fuse the strongest qualities of literary fiction and genre fiction. Banville hasn’t done that.

I’m giving Snow a cautious recommendation because Banville holds the reader’s interest with a mildly entertaining if undemanding story. Readers who are looking for something more from a writer who was once regarded as a rising literary giant will likely be disappointed.

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Long Lankin by John Banville

First published in 1970; revised edition published by Vintage on July 2, 2013

Originally published in a slightly different form in 1970, the current incarnation of John Banville's first book collects nine of Banville's short stories. Banville's skillfully crafted sentences are pregnant with meaning, his language is rich and evocative, but even more can be mined from the silences between sentences, the words left unspoken. In "Wild Wood," for instance, three boys in the woods talk about a woman who was murdered. The meat of this story is left untold; Banville leaves it to the reader to fill in the empty space. Similarly, most of the action in "Summer Voices" revolves around an old (possibly crazed) man who shows the body of a drowning victim to two children, a brother and sister. The real story, however, involves the relationship between the siblings, an innocence lost before their encounter with the dead body.

Nature, and particularly the sea (an instrument of death in "Summer Voices"), are recurring symbols in the stories. The sea surrounds the protagonist in "Island," a writer who, full of ambition when he leaves Ireland, grows stagnant while living on a Greek island. Or so says the woman he's with, the woman he's about to leave because she's too easy to understand.

Religion and death, estranged families and madness are recurring themes. "A Death" refers both to a death in the family and to the death of love. An old man at a funeral, ranting of evil and desolation and godless times, sparks the renewal of a discussion a couple must have had countless times before. Peter and Muriel, the lead characters in "Lovers," visit Peter's father before they leave town to start a new life -- a man who, having seen everything in his life slip away, is eager to meet his own death, but only after making sure that his son's hopes will also die. In "De Rerum Natura," a demented old man, bald with bandy legs like "an ancient mischievous baby," is attuned to the life that surrounds him, including the pigeons in the bedroom and the rats in the kitchen, but cannot make the same connection with the son who shudders at his "malevolent, insidious gaiety." But how much of the father lurks in the son?

One of the most thought-provoking stories (again, because of how much is left unsaid) is "Nightwind." A failed writer hosts a party where a murderer lurks on the premises and a friend makes a pass at his wife. The writer talks about the unhappy citizens of "the new Ireland" who are "trying to find what it is we've lost" but it is the writer's own losses -- of pride and ambition and his child -- that dominate his thoughts.

A couple of stories, I must confess, I didn't fully appreciate: "The Visit" concerns a girl whose mother died in childbirth. She waits to meet the father she's never seen, but her attitude changes after she talks with a strange little man on a bicycle. Julie, a student in "Sanctuary," discusses her fears of moving away as she prepares to leave her professor, Helen, with whom she has been spending the summer. Julie's fears are compounded by a visit from a black-clad stranger who seems to know Helen and who has come to say goodbye. Even the stories about which I was less enthused, however, provide early evidence of Banville's uncommon ability to conceal layers of meaning within simple stories.

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A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 5, 2011

Richard "Diamond Dick" Jewell, a wealthy businessman, stable owner, newspaper publisher, and orphanage sponsor, is dead at his desk, his head blown off. He is found "clutching a shotgun in his bloodless hands," an obvious attempt to disguise a murder as suicide. Detective Inspector Hackett is joined at the crime scene by his friend Dr. Quirke, filling in for the government's pathologist, who has been rendered unavailable by a heart attack. The initial suspects include Jewell's sophisticated French wife, Françoise d'Aubigny, who doesn't seem overly distressed at his demise; Maguire, the yard manager who was convicted of a violent crime many years earlier; the arrogant Carlton Sumner, a rival businessman with whom Jewell had recently quarreled; and Sumner's son Teddy. Jewell and Carlton Sumner are also linked by Sumner's maid, Marie Bergin, who once worked for Jewell. Another link -- one that appears to join all the suspects -- is St. Christopher's orphanage. Quirke is also linked to St. Christopher's, having resided there during some of his childhood.

Quirke is quite taken with Françoise, particularly when she invites him to lunch to discuss her husband's death. The lunch is probably inappropriate given Quirke's romantic (or at least physical) involvement with Isabel Galloway; it's even less appropriate that he later becomes intimate with Françoise. It's sometimes difficult to understand what motivates Quirke -- why, for instance, would he accept an invitation from Giselle, Françoise's nine-year-old daughter, to see her bedroom during Richard's wake? -- other than to note that Quirke often views the world through an alcohol-induced haze and seems to move passively through his life without giving anything (except the mystery at hand) a great deal of thought.

A subplot has Quirke's assistant, Sinclair (an ambitious lad who wants Quirke's job), spending time with (if not quite dating) Sinclair's daughter Phoebe (whose status as his daughter Quirke long denied before acknowledging its reality). Sinclair happens to be a friend of Jewell's sister Dannie, a relationship that leads Dannie and Phoebe to meet and bond. Sinclair has a knack for collecting damaged women who want to use him as a therapist (and nothing else) -- the price he regretfully pays for being a nice guy. At a later point in the story, Sinclair plays a deeper role in the mystery after receiving anti-Semitic threats (and worse).

Benjamin Black (the pen name of Irish novelist John Banville) writes in an elegant style that befits a literary mystery. There are shades of noir in the story but Black gives his characters greater depth than is typical of noir fiction. The plot is tight and easy to follow but the solution to the mystery is less than obvious. Black supplies a nice bit of misdirection toward the end. On the other hand, this isn't a traditional mystery, in which the reader can play detective, picking out clues and trying to puzzle out the solution alongside the fictional crime-solver. There are subtle clues to the killer's motivation, but a reader who guesses the killer's identity will, I think, be doing just that: guessing.

While not a conventional mystery, the story is nonetheless strong, notable for its collection of troubled characters more than its plot. The story moves at a comfortable pace, neither frenzied nor languid. Black creates dramatic tension in small ways; scenes of violence, for the most part, take place offstage, leaving details to the reader's imagination. Black leaves no loose ends; the story proceeds to a skillful conclusion.  This fine novel made me a fan of Quirke; now I need to find time to read the first three books in the series.

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