The Irish prose master returns with a novel filled with his past work.
The Singularities by John Banville. Knopf, pp.320. $30.
If there is a lonely man and an old house, you’re probably reading a John Banville novel. And one does not read Banville for plot—his unreliable narrators’ reliability make it meticulously muddled. The Irish author is a prose stylist first and foremost, “trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form.” Some reviewers (and readers too) might find his writing pretentious or difficult—his sentences often require a dictionary to be on hand at all times (prelapsarian, plimsoll, flocculent). However, there is a great beauty to his work and writing that cannot be overlooked, that should be enjoyed and immersed in, lounged in.
His latest novel, The Singularities, which comes on the heels of a fun murder mystery, reunites us with an old character from his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as well as other characters from other works. Once again our narrator is an older man, a somewhat sinister figure, who has trouble remembering (whether by force of age or psychological suppression or just plain rudeness) and who has supposedly returned to his home…a home of sorts. Felix Mordaunt (so he renames himself) has recently been released from prison and is returning to an estate currently occupied by the Godley family. Adam Godley, the deceased patriarch (from The Infinities, 2009), is discussed at length about his theories of the multiverse, which are somewhat dry if intriguing. Yet the drama the family is mired in can be quite delicious, particularly through the dry, gallows humor Banville supplies in sumptuous surplus.
Like his previous works (Shroud, 2002; The Sea, 2005), there is a question of who is actually telling the story. The narrator not only shifts but jumps from present tense to past tense (especially noted near the end at the birthday party). Having won the Booker Prize, I doubt that these shifts are accidental, yet their reasoning never seems perfectly clear. If the Godley theory is to be taken into account, one might suspect that while murderous Mordaunt was locked away, his universe might have been swapped for another (Felix’s remembered “Coolgrange House” is apparently “Arden House”). Banville is surely having a good time here, playing off his other novels and playing with narrative temporality and spatiality.
But underneath the drama of stuffy academics and sexual liaisons and car trips to the coast, there is a hauntness. There are ghosts. Everyone is trying to run away from a past, trying to pretend, from Helen Godley (of Troy to be sure) to a former cellmate known as William “Billy” Hipwell now in the car rental business. Banville, as with coevals Edna O’Brien or Anne Enright, enjoys bringing in a bit of the gothic, toying with the memories that we hide away from. Though the narrative might be winding and wily, the prose is a feast that only Banville could deliver. The Singularities is exceptional for those willing to sit and absorb the vast amount of allusions and the linguistic skills employed by the author who is a master of the written word.
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