The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1981: John Banville, Kepler

Also Published in 1980 Mary Beckett, A Belfast Woman; Samuel Beckett, Company; Desmond Hogan, The Leaves on Grey; Neil Jordan, The Past; Bernard MacLaverty, Lamb; William Trevor, Other People’s Worlds 1981 John Banville, Kepler Banville (b. 1945) is a native of Wexford town and is the author of a book of short stories, a number of plays and fourteen novels. Early works are Nightspawn (1971), set in Greece on the eve of the 1967 Colonels’ coup, and Birchwood (1973), a take on the Big House novel. His noted science tetralogy – including Doctor Copernicus (1976), The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982) and Mefisto (1986) – was followed by an art trilogy consisting of The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995). Other works include The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), The Sea (2005) and The Infinities (2009). All these works are distinguished by their stylistic accomplishments, the effect of which is less to ornament than to counteract the characters’ general sense of superfluity and philosophical disquiet. These features also hold good of the crime novels Banville has published under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black – Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), The Lemur (2008), Elegy for April (2010) and A Death in Summer (2011). The Holy Roman Empire is entering its last days. The build-up to the Thirty Years War is well advanced. Religious sectarianism is rapidly becoming more pronounced and more vindictive. Employment prospects for Johannes Kepler, mathematician and astronomer, are not promising, unless he is willing to confine his work to casting the horoscopes of his world’s star-crossed leaders. His marriage is a misalliance, his health is not good, and too much of his time has to be spent wandering from Graz to Linz and from Prague to Regensburg, through the riven heart of mitteleuropa. And yet, none of this deters him from producing his ground-breaking studies in cosmology, among which are three laws laying out a new theory of the coherence of the cosmos. It is appropriate that the reader first encounters Kepler as he emerges from a dream, given the significance of vision, in various senses, in his work. His coming to his senses coincides with his arrival at the household of Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer of the day and court mathematician to the Emperor. The household is in a state of disorder that is 1981: JOHN BANVILLE, KEPLER 75 characteristic of nearly all of Kepler’s domestic and working conditions . And his experiences here in the castle of Benatek are typical of his difficulties in opting for the only source of employment open to him, which is that of court functionary. When he succeeds Tycho Brahe as court mathematician, he is treated no differently by the Emperor Rudolph than he was at Tycho’s castle, and his reaction to such treatment is the same. He can do no other, it seems, than think for himself. This stance is evident in his continuing adherence to Protestantism, even though it is socially stigmatising and although he holds no brief for it or for any other Christian dispensation. The greatest testament to his independence of mind is obviously his scientific thought, if thought is the best term for the manner in which Kepler grasps the first glimpses of his theoretical breakthroughs . A better term might be revelation. The most banal and unexpected occasions – a night’s carousing, in one memorable instance – can be accompanied by moments of insight, epiphany and inspiration. Kepler thinks of them as angelic annunciations, a view whose implications are sympathetically broached by the novel’s epigraph – ‘Preise dem Engel die Welt . . .’ (‘Praise the world to the angel’, from Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy). The point, however, is not just the way Kepler describes these imaginative brainstorms to himself; it is the fact that he goes on to take responsibility for having experienced them. Feeling the touch of an angel’s wing has an obvious element of the metaphorical and fictitious about it. But Kepler is determined to subject what he has intuitively perceived to the rigours of proof, as though driven to demonstrate that he is a worthy recipient of his inspiration. And he has the ideal idiom of proof to hand in mathematics. By means of that science’s imperturbable objectivity, Kepler imparts consistency and integrity to what his imagination has envisioned. He concludes that the universe exemplifies order and harmony. It might be noted that these qualities are also fundamental to conceptions of beauty and...