John Banville's The Singularities
The original Haarlem Globetrotters...
A new book dropping from John Banville’s pen ought to be, used to be, a momentous occasion. But literary culture is not really in that tenor anymore.
Banville is an Irish master, who opened a copy of Joyce’s Dubliners when he was just a lad, and from there took on the mission.
(The above is hagiography and should not be cited. Anyone who cites Silent Friends for anything is a FOOL.)
Banville happens to be one of those authors I check out from the local library only periodically, every few years, and his work never disappoints. Your host had first heard about him way back in 2005, when people complained that his “mousy,” artisanal novel The Sea won the Booker prize. He had also begun his Benjamin Black project, a pseudonym for writing hard-boiled crime novels, the first of which was Christine Falls, which I also enjoyed.
But this spotty coverage of Banville’s ouvre admittedly leaves me ill-prepared for unpacking The Singularities, published last year. Apparently there are characters and scenarios appearing and referenced to in this work that refer to Banville’s previous novels, all the way back to the 80s. But that didn’t really matter for me.
Frankly, this was like a perfect novel. Banville is excellent at writing a smooth and beautiful style, and creating a personality that can justify its utterances. This prose employs rhythm consistently, and an expansive vocabulary, the author’s trademark.
Here is just a snatch, from an early description of the first character we meet, “Felix Mordaunt,” meandering on the grounds. “…as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields, not swaddled in this blood-warm oubliette like a zygote lodged in the wall of the womb…”
Substack’s word processor doesn’t even think stravaging is a real word!
The Singularities follows Mordaunt (a shady guy, and the amoral hero of The Book of Evidence) out of prison, and entering the country house of Adam Godley and his wife Helen, claiming a familial connection to the estate and asking to stay in the maid’s house (her name is Ivy Blount, pronounced like “blunt”).
These events are being related to us by William Jeybey, who’s been tasked by Adam Godley to write a definitive biography of his father, a famous physicist who formulated the Brahman Theory. Whatever it is, it is the new physics, and has upended the previous physics in a rather nihilistic fashion.
Indeed, SF’s attention was piqued by Banville’s latest precisely because of this sci-fi tack, and moreover these summaries of quantum physics, promised in the very title. Perhaps these characters (and JB has a way with crafting these interesting hot messes of people) are crossing paths in a meta-fictional but not metaphysical splitting wave function.
The Brahman Theory has frightening voluntaristic implications. That is, it didn’t begin its deleterious effects on the universe till after a scientist discovered it, somehow. These effects incude a “regression” on technology. It’s a “depleted and irredeemably dingy world.” Cars are running on sea water. It may be a future world, but it has the milieu and conditions of an upstairs-downstairs comedy in a big country house.
I will share an extended passage, from a scene in which Adam Godley the younger presents Jeybey with some archival material. These extended lines will show how JB’s musical writing carries a drift of images and associations.
I could see that young Adam — I shall have to stop calling him that, the fellow is pushing fifty — was somewhat cast down by the muted response, which was as much as I could give to the storehouse of treasures he had thrown open to me. True, even the most jaded researcher will experience a shivery frisson when he first lays hold of a document on to which the heel of his subject’s writing hand has sweated; to such a one a smudge of cigarette ash or the mandala print of the base of a tea mug is as a bloodstain to a bloodhound. And speaking of blood, one rainy and otherwise unremarkable afternoon when I was browsing among the correspondence files, I came upon, on a four-times-folded yellowing foolscap of paper — “To the Editor, Nature: Sir, I have read with amused forbearance what Professor Popinjay imagines is his rebuttal of my rebuttal of his rebuttal, and” — what at first I took to be just such a tell-tale rusty-brown stain. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be not blood but, and perhaps more interestingly, a dried-out smear of lipstick. What would I not give to know whose lips they were that pressed upon that piece of paper, and what was the occasion of their doing so.
Even this following line has that snappy, musical perfection, six orderly spaced stressed syllables, fitting perfectly on a single line of print:
“Except in my case it’s not phrases but facts, or facts set in phrases.”
What about Jeybey’s attitude toward his subject, and the sciences? He finds Old Godley quite contemptible, which we can understand. But he’s also a conservative pessimist about rationality, an attitude that many undergrads exploring postmodernism would find sensible. He is firmly against the encyclopedic aspirations of the Enlightenment-era thinkers like Diderot (one of the big heroes of SF):
Wise old Vaublin, though a mere maker of pictures, knew full well whither those gentlemen and their proto-Enlightenment ideas were headed in a handcart, and dragging a good part of the world along with them. Enlightenment? Endarkenment, say I.
If Singularities isn’t meant to be a summation of science except in this familiar, dissatisfied sense, it is definitely a summation of JB’s “metafictional” novels. — But as opposed to his crime novels? But even there he has retired the Benjamin Black moniker, and has been called in to write new Philip Marlowe stories.
It’s also a really funny book! The opening lines: “Yes, he has come to the end of his sentence, but does that mean he has nothing more to say? No, indeed, not by a long stretch.” And it’s moving, up to the very last pages. They seem to indicate that this is the last experiment from Banville, who is pushing 80. So that the narrator really means it profoundly when the text ends with “a full, infinitely full, stop.”
And doesn’t that big splotch of black paint on the cover remind us of something…?