Trust John Banville to make mischief as soon as he opens his new novel by slithering straight into the mind of a psychopath. This very bad person may seem vaguely familiar.
Indeed, as you proceed through The Singularities, hypnotised by its wildly bonkers storyline and exuberant style, more characters drift in from earlier Banville novels. But which ones? It’s like trying to pin down an echo.
The overall effect is that Irish writer Banville, as inventive as ever at the age of 78, is playing with us mere mortals.
So here we are, on the first page, in the company of a man in his sixties who has just left prison somewhere in rural Ireland after serving 25 years for a notorious, brutal murder.
This man, initially referred to only as “he”, is vain. After wearing prison gear for so long, he’s feeling frisky, back in his old clothes, notably a slightly worn Harris tweed jacket, a raffish hat and shiny brogues, every inch a faded gent.
He’s changed his name, although he knows he can’t get away from himself, which drags on his mood. He is called “Felix Mordaunt”, but is later revealed as Freddie Montgomery, one of Banville’s most morally grotesque – and, yes, mordant – characters from an earlier trilogy, including 1998′s The Book of Evidence.
Felix has a plan – to head to “Coolgrange”, his old family seat in the countryside – which requires a car. He heads for the garage owned by his former cellmate (and “catamite”), where he is contemptuously offered a red Sprite, sporty but very small. It runs on processed sea water.
Oh yes, the world has changed during Felix’s time in chokey. An eminent physicist, the now-deceased Professor Adam Godley, inexplicably managed to impose his “Brahma theory” upon the entire planet, which seems to have created an absurd new parallel reality.
But something is definitely wrong. As he nears Coolgrange, Felix suddenly senses a dizzying shift in the atmosphere, a shimmer in the landscape. Upstairs, someone is watching as he enters the house – which he finds is now named Arden and owned by the Godley family, heirs to the professor.
Arden provides the kind of country house setting so beloved of classic murder-mystery scenarios, but those conventions are too easy for Banville, whose pared-back plots have been compared to the likes of his countrymen Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. He now abandons Felix – for a short time – to canvass the busy internal musings of the other occupants. In the gloomy house, the presence of Adam Godley senior lingers on in his papers – and in the memories of his tenure as a faithless husband recalled by his widow, who lies dying in the attic. Godley’s passive adult son, also named Adam, is overshadowed by his alluring wife Helen, while a ghost haunts the rooms. What a cheery lot. The household is completed by the Godleys’ old dog, which recognises Felix, and a housekeeper and gardener.
They are joined by an academic, Professor William Jaybey, hired by Godley junior to write a biography of his father, and haughty Anna, one of Felix’s old lovers. Suddenly, in a display of Banville’s contrarianism, boring, pompous Jaybey is afforded a platform with an “extract” from his Godley biography. It’s an exercise in flat writing filled with circuitous elaborations and overcooked footnotes. However, this extract also mentions that among Godley’s academic circle was “an aspirant mathematician” named … Freddie Montgomery.
Apart from its value as pure entertainment, The Singularities allows Banville to show off his formidably arcane vocabulary, using words like “diorchic”, “sidereal” and “anility” as if they were routine. Why not?
There’s a fascinating real-life criminal case behind Banville’s crafting of the Freddie/Felix character. He is based on a killer named Malcolm Macarthur who was arrested near Dublin in 1982 for two savage random murders that remain infamous to this day. When Macarthur, 37, was tracked down by the Gardai, he was staying with his friend, the Irish attorney-general, who resigned. Macarthur, a solitary man from a wealthy rural family, pleaded guilty to the murders so no evidence was heard in court. Banville’s Book of Evidence was a loose representation of the crime, while journalist Mark O’Connell’s book A Thread of Violence, which came out last year, includes interviews with Macarthur, who was released from jail in 2012.
And yes, in his younger pre-crime days, he was well known for his suave attire, including Harris tweed jackets and shiny brogues.
The Singularities by John Banville (Swift Press, $24.99)
