Review of THE SINGULARITIES by John Banville (New Release)

 3 Stars

I am not very familiar with John Banville’s books so this one, which supposedly references many of his previous novels, left me puzzled.  I don’t think I was the intended audience. 

Freddie Montgomery is released from prison.  He decides to adopt a different name, Felix Mordaunt, before he returns to visit the family estate where he grew up, but everything feels slightly askew.  The estate has a different name, for instance, and there seems no evidence of his family having lived there.  The Godleys are the family now in residence.  They have been joined by a Professor Jaybey who is writing the biography of Adam Godley, father of the current Mr. Godley, whose Brahma Theory threw the world into chaos.

The Brahma Theory is never clearly explained, but from what I could gather, it proved the existence of parallel universes, an infinite number of possible universes.  The theory was so revolutionary that there was a “sharp rise in suicides throughout the world in the years following the general acceptance of the Brahma theory and its consequences.”  Reference is made to the Hadron Collider being shut down and “fast, bright, gleaming communication devices” being replaced with “clumsy and defective artefacts [like telegrams].”  Perhaps the author reprised characters and placed them in an alternate universe to examine how they would react?

There is also the presence of a narrator who identifies himself as a “little god” who wears a “winged helm” and has “ankle wings.”  This brings to mind Hermes, the trickster god.  He seems to take pleasure in manipulating events, “For we couldn’t have let them leave well enough alone, now could we.”  He admits, “Unseen, I usher them forward, though they imagine they go under their own steam.”  So the characters are at the mercy of a “mischievous godlet”?  In fact, allusions to Greek mythology abound.  It seems that Helen of Troy in one universe is Helen Godley in another universe.

I had difficulty engaging with the book because I found the characters unlikeable and, worse, tiresome.  Their motivations are not explained.  Why would Helen, who suspects that Felix is a murderer, welcome him into her home?  Why would Jaybey give up a prestigious position in a university to write the biography of a man for whom he has only scorn?

The portrayal of women is problematic.  They are all two-dimensional and important only in terms of their relationships (usually sexual) with men.  A woman will often remind a man of a former lover.   If they are not faithless, they are mistreated by faithless men.   The old man/young woman trope is repeated.

The main attraction for me was the writing style.  Lengthy sentences are common:  “I feel like one of those effete, incurably melancholy, slightly hysterical young-old boobies to be encountered in the Russian drama of the nineteenth century, in exile on a vast estate a thousand versts from the nearest centre of supposed civilization, tinkering with a never-to-be-completed treatise on land reform, or the serf question, or the use and misuse of the subjunctive in the works of Lermontov, while all the time pining in secret for the dim-witted landowner’s young, feyly lovely, heartlessly provocative and utterly unattainable wife.”

Besides mythological references, literary allusions abound:  “his behaviour reminiscent of that of a character out of Plautus or of Aristophanes” and “Iagoesque mischief-making” and “as if Ophelia were to rise up from the glassy waters.”   One character refers to “a stew pot of metaphors” and Banville certainly excels at those and similes:  “I approached cautiously, crabwise, in the wincing manner, apprehensive yet agog, of a traveller on a lonely road late at night coming upon the still-smoking scene of a glorious smash-up involving multiple vehicles and countless casualties” and “Her memory was like a crate of Meissen figurines that a clumsy porter had dropped on to a marble floor” and “garments on a laundry line kicked up their heels in the wind, as full of themselves as corseted chorus-girls.” 

I loved the touches of humour:  “there are no great men; ask any woman” and “the much-dithyrambed daffodil, the blossoms of which, as everyone knows but is too embarrassed to admit, are not golden at all, as is pretended, but in plain fact an acid shade of greenish-yellow, the colour of an absinthe-drinker’s bile.”

And who cannot marvel at Banville’s vocabulary.  Words like brumous, haecceity, matutinal, nugatory, instauration, catamite, caducously, melodeonist, cloacal, phthisic, lemniscate, perihelium, aphelion,  mephitic, diorachic, auscultate, and quondam make an appearance.

For me, it was this style that kept me reading.  Perhaps if I were more familiar with Banville’s other novels and characters, I might have appreciated the novel’s other layers.  It is to fans of this author that I would recommend this novel. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.