THE SINGULARITIES

Irish writer Banville once again mines past work for characters and a challenging narrative.

It begins with a released prisoner and a pun on sentence. The man adopts the new name Felix Mordaunt and travels to his family’s home in Ireland, but he finds it transformed, occupied by other people. Still, they take him in, and soon it becomes clear that he is Freddie Montgomery, who inhabited a trilogy by Banville starting with The Book of Evidence (1990). His hosts are Helen and Adam Godley, son of the Adam Godley who lay dying in The Infinities (2010) and whose work as a theoretical mathematician posited, inter alia, alternative universes. The household expands yet again when Adam Jr. hires a professor named William Jaybey (William John Banville is the author’s full name) to write a biography of Adam Sr. with the stipulation that he work in the Godley house. The extended ménage exhibits a meandering busyness, with couplings and hoped-for couplings, spying and pilfering, and frequent excursions to the past. Felix/Freddie revisits the death of his wife and only son. He reconnects with an old lover who has an odd request and who also is tied to Adam Sr. The latter is seen with a lover in Venice. Banville doesn’t offer a conventional plot or clear theme, but he does fashion alternative universes with his recurring, repurposed characters, and all his players find in the past an alternative world they can't help dwelling on. To a great extent, Banville seems simply to revel in the delights of creativity, piling up wordplay and allusions (to Joyce, Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, Nabokov), playing the god of his literary realm, and all this with constant flashes of exquisite writing.

An intriguing puzzle box that is variously enchanting and frustrating.