Book of the dayFictionReviewBanville’s characters are in flight from the crimes of the past in an eerie, playful synthesis of his previous novels
Here comes John Banville’s 20th novel under his own name, a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it. We are in the world of 2009’s The Infinities, with which The Singularities shares an Irish country-house setting and a handful of characters. But here, too, is Freddie Montgomery, the violent protagonist of an earlier trilogy of novels – The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena – itself seeded by a real-life murder in 1982 that not only horrified Ireland but scandalised it when links to the country’s political class emerged.
In this new book, Montgomery, now released from prison, returns to the house in which he grew up and which was the scene of his crime. Meanwhile, the academics, actors and their associates from another trilogy, this one made up of Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light, pop up in the background or in memory. Themes and motifs, too, chirrup to one another, as Banville’s preoccupations with art, cosmology, the existence of ancient gods, extreme violence, sex, self-knowledge and self-delusion are glimpsed through a tangle of hawthorns surrounding a lych gate or in the depths of a glass of oily gin.
You need know none of this to surrender to The Singularities; indeed, you will be exempt from the distracting detective work, with its attendant self-congratulation, into which the completist will find themselves repeatedly lured (ah! Could the novel’s egregious Benny Grace be somehow related to the Graces of Banville’s Booker winner, The Sea?). Suffice to say that what at times seems like a synthesis of Banville’s previous novels, gesturing towards his possible retreat from fiction – he has hinted, quite unconvincingly, that this might be his last novel – can be more productively viewed as a lark, a playful interrogation of the peculiar and suggestive world he has been busily creating for the past half century.
The Singularities opens with a question focused on the idea – or the impossibility – of a full stop: “Yes, he has finished his sentence, but does that mean he has nothing more to say?” The sentence is both prison term and unit of expression, as we encounter Montgomery’s return to the world, albeit on licence, the only freedom available to the recipient of a mandatory life sentence. Hitting upon a new name with a “suitably lugubrious ring” – Felix Mordaunt – and in possession of a sports car furnished by a former cellmate, he heads off to Coolgrange, now renamed Arden House and home to the disjointed, unhappy remnants of the Godley family, from The Infinities, whose overbearing patriarch has died.
Banville, as ever, is concerned with ghosts: traces left behind, lives we might have ledThe dead man, Adam Godley, was a celebrated scientist whose theory of multiverses has revolutionised the nature of space and time to the extent that the word “meanwhile” has become redundant. This is a disaster, if one thinks about it, for the novel itself, which relies on pulling off the trick of hopping between subjectivities and circumstances, its creator controlling the moments at which the track splits or the viewpoint shifts. The last thing a novelist needs is for a scientist to pull back the curtain and expose them at the levers. Banville has a degree of fun with this, dropping in tiny references to an altered historical reality – the Dutch have retaken New York, for example, and cars no longer run on fossil fuels – and spinning a vast web of literary allusions and echoes that foreground disrupted narratives and timelines, from Sterne to Nabokov, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Beckett.
He even inserts a hapless biographer, there to write the story of Adam Godley’s life, and calls him William Jaybey (for William John Banville, the author’s given name). Jaybey’s misgivings about his role begin when Mordaunt, by now established as a menacing interloper at Arden, arrives to fetch him from the station. They continue with his romantic enthralment to the woman of the house: “I feel like one of those effete, incurably melancholy, slightly hysterical young-old boobies to be encountered in the Russian drama of the 19th century,” he confides, “in exile on a vast estate a thousand versts from the nearest centre of supposed civilisation, 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. Oh, God.” It isn’t, in truth, a ringing endorsement of the writing life.
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Amid all this architecture, however, these overlapping circles described in stylised sentences, there is so much else, hiding in plain sight. Banville, as ever, is concerned with ghosts: the traces left behind by those who have found life too painful to continue, or whom we have destroyed, or who have simply disappeared; ghosts, too, of the lives we might have led had we been able to escape the limitations of our own unreliable selves. Montgomery-Mordaunt, a terrifying character so impishly sketched, is described as a “revenant” gliding disconcertingly in and out of rooms and corridors that he half remembers, propelled by motives mysterious even to himself.
These characters haunt themselves, are in flight from the crimes of the past, which they have quite possibly committed; they move between spaces that, as they occupy them, become uncanny and alien. Banville gravitates towards the disconcertingly empty hotel bar, the bedroom after an ambiguous and probably unhappy sexual liaison, the cavernous below-stairs kitchen that has become the empire of a family retainer with unspecified power and knowledge. They are always on manoeuvres, looking for some way to mitigate their distressing losses, their concealed guilt or their unmet appetites by gaining the advantage, gaming the system, escaping capture; it never works. But Banville, in following them through these dizzyingly reflective moods and milieux, has constructed a compelling underworld to run alongside our own.
The Singularities by John Banville is published by Knopf (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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