The Singularities by John Banville is a recommended multilayered literary novel from a revered wordsmith. This one is for those who love literary writing by a true wordsmith.

A murderer recently released from prison, now calls himself Felix Mordaunt. He returns to returns to his childhood home, Arden House, where the descendants of Adam Godley, a legendary scientist, currently lives. Mordaunt becomes a part of the household working as a driver and servant. Soon another stranger joins the household with his own agenda. As the two compete for favor, they uncover each other's secrets. The narrative continues to move from one point of view to another. Characters from previous novels are revisited, alternative universes are explored, and the normal boundaries are gone.

Readers can expect beautiful, intelligent writing with clear literary references. Let me be clear, the writing, the careful crafting of sentences, is the draw, the allure of The Singularities for me. The atmospheric (and often scattered) story is one of redemption, nostalgia, life, death, and quantum theory. It is obvious that there is no clear plot in sight. The novel started out promising and then went downhill fast until it was simply the well crafted sentences and descriptions that held my attention. I'm sorry, but I need some plot.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

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.

I found this novel to be dull, self-indulgent and pointless. The events previous to this book, which are referenced often, seem like they might have been much more interesting although may not have necessarily given this particular story any more clarity or insight.

Very John Banville. Smart, wry. Something you definitely have to be in the mood for. I didn't love the second person at the start.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an advanced copy of this novel about the possibilities of life, making amends and understanding how we live they way we do.

There are many theories on the whys of the universe. Why me, why them, why not someone else, a lot of whys that never really get answered. Some say things happen because of entropy, others chaos. Maybe fate, or maybe it is all just atoms being atoms. There are as many theories as there are possible realities. One such reality is at the heart of The Singularities, by Booker Prize- winning author John Banville, a story about a man trying to capture the life he had in a new reality he doesn't want to understand.

Freddy Montgomery is released from prison after a long sentence for the murder of a maid and stealing a painting. An associate he once shared a cell with provides him with a new car and a new identification under the name of Felix Mordaunt, though the recently christened Felix is annoyed that his associate didn't stay to help on his first day out. Felix decides to return to the family estate, but finds that not only the name of the estate is different, but there are new owners the Godleys. We then meet Professor Jaybey who has been commissioned to write a biography of Adam Godley's father, also Adam who developed the Brahma Theory, a theory on how the universe works. Felix becomes a driver for Jaybey, as he lives on the estate, becoming entwined in the messy family life and the Professor as he starts to explore his subjects.

An odd book that starts off full pedal to the floor. The writing style is detached, and yet descriptively lyrical. Science, poems, thoughts, dreams, old gods, maybe new ones, mix as the possibilities of the world expand according to the Brahma Theory. The characters are an odd lot, the men are not likeable and the women seem very underdeveloped. The story floats along, sharing narrative with the characters and sometimes the estate it seems itself. This is a novel where the words do the heavy lifting, not the story, as the novel really reads better than any description could give it.

A story not for everyone. This is literary fiction, with a high rate of attention and patience for reading. Familiarity with the previous works the Freddy/ Felix appeared in would be helpful, but also might confuse the reader as it seemed that Freddy's story was done, but that is just my theroy. A challenging work, but worth the effort, especially for fans of novels that make a reader work.

Reader, he lost me. I went into this with high hopes- it's Banville, after all. But. regrettably, this tale of a murderer who returns to the estate where he lived as a child and winds himself into the family of scientific genius who lived there but who is in competition with a writer- it lost me. This moves around in ways I can't describe. Yes. the writing sparkles in spots but it's overblown in others. And plot? Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'll be the odd one out. For fans of literary fiction.

Having not read any of Banville's previous work, some of the nuances of this text were lost on me, and would perhaps be lost on my students, but it is a compelling read nonetheless and a good option for independent reading in our library.

I had expected to like the latest offering by John Banville who here returns to a character in The Book of Evidence, but I have to admit to finding a challenging book to engage with. Here Freddy Montgomery/Felix Mordaunt is being released after serving a sentence for murder at the Anvil and then a open prison. He picks up a car provided by Billy, whom he met at the Anvil, and sets off with a new name for a new life, but can you really leave your past behind? This story of life, death, quantum theory and time, draws on gods and Greek mythology. Initially I found the rather flowery prose acceptable and even witty, but before long I was losing patience with the over the top verbose language and becoming frustrated. I suspect if I had found the narrative and characters more gripping I would have been more forgiving, but alas this was not to be.

Mordaunt goes back to the place he grew up in, Coolgrange, but its changed hands more than once since and is now Arden House where Adam Godley lives with his beautiful wife, Helen, finding himself taken on as driver. Adam asks Professor Jaybey to write a biography of his father, Adam Godley Senior, known for his theory, but as Jaybey is to discover little of his life is as it seems. With a slew of unreliable and dislikable characters that lack authenticity, Banville reveals their interactions and relationships which made little sense to me, but perhaps that was the point. This is not a book for me, but no doubt there will be other readers who will love it more. I suggest readers read other far more positive reviews of the novel prior to making the decision to read this. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

“The Singularities” – John Banville

Thanks to @netgalley and @knopfdoubleday for letting me read an ARC of this in return for an honest review.

Straight of the bat: this book references and contains characters from Banville’s previous books, of which I have no knowledge whatsoever, so this is a review of someone taking this book as a standalone tome.

A man leaves prison, borrows a car, returns to his childhood home, one he hasn’t seen for years. When he arrives, he finds a family he didn’t expect, the Godleys, and he installs himself in the household.

The book then switches strands to Dr Jaybey, a professor commissioned by the son of Adam Godley to write an authorised biography of his father, the inventor of the Brahma theory. What is the Brahma theory? I couldn’t work it out from the narrative, but other reviewers describe it as a new way of viewing reality, where every insight results in a darkening of that reality, causing innovation to grind to a halt as mental activity leads to erosion of the world.

Confused? I was, for the entirety of this book, and not in a way where I was eager to see how it resolved itself. What I gleaned from this book was an unreliable narrative about unreliable people, tales of plagiarism and deceit overlapping, with a nonsensical plot and tiresome characters – women do not come out well from this book. Honestly, it’s a form of overblown and tedious literature that I thought we had moved on from, but clearly a Booker Prize carries enough cache to get this kind of thing published.

I can’t in good conscience recommend this book, and it actively makes me want to avoid Banville’s other work. I’ve heard he has another string of books that play out as more conventional crime novels, can anyone confirm this? Anyway, I was not a fan of this laborious puzzle box of a book – there are countless books more deserving of your time.

He knew it as Coolgrange, but returned to find it was Arden. He thought he could return home, but home was the same and yet not. Released early from life imprisonment for murder, he takes on a new name and returns to the scene of the crime. He is welcomed and given a room, hired on as a driver.

In the house is the son of Adam Godley and his movie star wife, a spinster caretaker, and hidden away, an elderly woman with a habit, lost in her memories. A man is hired to research Adam Godley Sr. and write his biography.

The characters are mysteries to each other and to themselves. Was life just “elaborate coincidences,” reality “no more than the jumbled fragments of a shattered frieze behind which an altogether other order of things is serenely and immovably fixed”?

I loved Banville’s writing, his long sentences filled with wit and twists. We are introduced to Freddy Montgomery/Felix Mordaunt with, “The notion of an assumed identity excited him, the poor sap; as if a new name could hide old sins.”

Early on, our narrator tells us, “See how my winged helm gleams in the morning light,” and we realize that it is the god Hermes/Mercury, the god of financial gain, travelers, messages, boundaries, luck, trickery, and thieves, who is telling the story. Greek myth pervades the novel.

The device allows us entry into the heads of different characters. Young Adam Godley’s wife is Helen, (who we know as a legendary beauty in Greek story), who talks about her son, “her Hercules,” named for the Greek hero whose mother was a legendary beauty. When she sees Mordaunt arrive at the gate, she wonders if he was “an Amphitryon back from the wars,” the man who married Hercules’s mother.

A startling theory by Adam Godley, Sr. challenges the nature of reality, the universe, and time. His ‘olympian detachment’ was legendary, and Jaybey has been asked by Adam Jr. to write his biography. He moves into Arden House, only to be enchanted by Helen.

An old associate and flame returns with a startling request for Mordaunt. The past interrelationships between the characters are revealed.

Readers for plot will be disappointed. The characters are sharp and interesting, but it’s the underlying ideas that will either puzzle or intrigue readers. I definitely need a second reading to feel I have conquered this one. But as a stylist, Banville enchants.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

This is a great example of literary fiction writing at its finest. John Banville always manages to portray his characters with lovely writing. The storyline wasn't the most interesting to me, but I enjoyed it just to read the writing.

This book just wasn’t for me, unfortunately. The writing style is interesting, but I just found it overly flowery, and so many words I had a hard time digging through to figure out what was happening. Perhaps I’m just not the right audience for this book. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I truly loved The Sea by John Banville, but this particular novel did not speak to me. I love the writing - the style and alliteration. But the characters, decisions and depiction of females made it a book that I did not enjoy.

Essentially the late Adam Godley discovered a famous theorem. Following his death, his wife and adult children live in a mansion that once belonged to Felix Mordaunt (from The Book of Evidence). Felix is just out of prison and has chosen a new name. He quickly moves himself into the estate as a hired driver. There are many strange decisions made by all of the inhabitants of the home, the women themselve never come clear as actual fully fledged characters. However, there is no doubt about it, John Banville can turn a beautiful phrase. This would be a book to read if you are already a fan.

This is Banville in top form. The Singularities reunites--in a manner of speaking--the protagonist of The Book of Evidence with the loopy, supernatural happenings in his later novel, The Infinities. We know Felix Mordaunt, recently released from prison after serving a sentence for murder, under different names (Freddie Montgomery, Morden, etc.), while we also once again greet members of the Godley family, truly a dysfunctional lot. After his "romps" with/as Benjamin Black, here Banville returns to what he does best. Fans will know not to expect a whole lot in terms of plot (though there is one), but will revel in his luxurious command of the English language, as well as his keen and mordant (!) insights into human nature. Highly recommended for readers of high-quality literary fiction.

The title and the cover intrigued me when I asked for the copy. However, the first part of the story I was kind of lost. Though the language used in delivering the story was good, however it didn't carried out for me throughout the book. This was my first read from this author but will try his other novels.

Thank you Netgalley & Knopf Doubleday Publishing for the Arc.


3.0/5 stars

I appreciate the advanced copy I received from Netgalley, and I wish I enjoyed this book better than I did. I'm familiar with the author, and I've heard great things about his books so I was expecting to love this one. In my opinion, the writing kind of dragged on and felt pompous at times- like the author went through and used a thesaurus to change some of the words. It just didn't resonate with me. I also wasn't a huge fan of how the women were written.

I feel I should apologize for not liking a new book by a Booker prize winner whose “Snow” was a favorite of mine. And I
started The Singularities with great expectations only to lose interest about halfway through. I highlighted many sentences and passages so I wouldn’t “lose” these marvelous word-fantasias, but kept waiting for a character I could like or at least respect or even find interesting. Nada. I kept wondering how a man who is so gifted with words and sentences and even paragraphs could take them (and me) on a road to nowhere. No doubt readers much more sophisticated than I will see great value in this book for more than its beautiful language.

DNF. I normally love John Banville/Benjamin Black but this titles was a miss for me. I got about 1/3 through it, but I found myself drifting over the too long sentences. Disappointing.

I didn't make it very far into The Singularities before giving up. In general, I enjoy Mr. Banville's novels, but this was perhaps a bit too "literary" for me. The omniscient narrator, much like the narrator of an old movie, but reveling in his own knowledge and eager to demonstrate just how godlike he may be, was quickly annoying. The characters were not particularly engaging, and the author seemed in no hurry to get on with the story. Overall, not a way I was inclined to spend my reading time. I am, nonetheless, grateful to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for the opportunity to read The Singularities.

I have long been an admirer of his.As usual well written and his command of the arts and of history is on display. Despite that, this book was a disappointment for me. All of the characters interesting, but the plot seemed to go nowhere . Perhaps I missed something, but not compelled to reread or explore more deeply. I also felt uncomfortable with the multiple female characters in the book.
All in all, a disappointment for me.