Reading John Banville is like being in the presence of a fathomlessly talented, witty, and intelligent magician — someone so captivatingly masterful at their craft, you suspect that they could make you disappear. If you want to know what I mean, read Banville’s new novel, The Singularities, which proves the 76-year-old Irish author deserves a summons from Stockholm ... A difficult book to summarize. Partly this is because Banville is more interested in the time and space between events, in insight rather than action ... This is not the kind of literature you skim. It demands your full attention. Indulge a stray thought, and you’ll miss it — not only what’s going on, but the gift, the beauty. Because time and again Banville stuns with sentences so dazzling they’re like a lightning-quick boxer’s jab — I blink, and read the line again ... Banville’s language actually re-enchants the otherwise dull world. Indeed, his sentences push against the numinous; several passages portray the spiritual tug his characters sense as they go along with their day ... If read properly, it’s an act of contemplation. Philosophical narrative, I want to call it, though the genre’s otherwise known as literary fiction. And here it is at its finest.
Ambitious ... Banville's narrative is thick with all manner of secrets and lies, spying and scheming ... The Singularities is Banville at his most inventive ... Regular readers of Banville will know not to expect much in the way of plot...and on this occasion, story plays second fiddle to style. But what style ... His verbal dexterity and poetic flourishes keep us absorbed throughout what is a complex, sometimes maddening yet ultimately rewarding work.
The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project, an exercise in pleasure giving ... The Singularities, Banville’s exhilarating new novel, offers itself quite overtly as a rumination on, or rummage around, ideas about representation. Like much of his best work, it aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things ... Ambitiously referential ... Banville capitalizes on his descriptive powers, but he is also concerned with exploring the ways in which truth is slighted ... For all its virtuosity, The Singularities doesn’t qualify as Banville’s masterpiece or summa. Toward the end, he gets a little lost in the Godley legend ... The whole thing has a slight air of, if not modesty — hard to picture with this writer — then a light-stepping, almost shrugging insouciance. But it’s still a triumphant piece of writing.
There is often a sense, reading John Banville, that there’s little he doesn’t know about the competing ironies of truth-telling and fiction. He has long enjoyed a brilliant gift for constructing word-made worlds replete with all home comforts and then allowing you to see the joins. The Singularities, his 20th novel under his own name, is something of a definitive articulation of his mastery of those dark arts, as well as another enjoyable quest into the ways in which we make sense of the world through make-believe ... Banville’s characters slip in and out of the overlapping worlds of his own imagining, like unwitting characters in an elevated bedroom farce ... If all this makes The Singularities sound like hard work, the opposite is the case. The book wears its self-references lightly, Banville’s writing remains beautifully exact and there is no need to be in on all the private jokes to enjoy those always nearer the surface of his prose. There is also a point to the playfulness. Few novelists are as alive as Banville to the edge of theoretical physics that suggests 'every increase in our knowledge of the nature of reality acts directly upon that reality'. It is a thrill to watch him work his way through the implications of that in his fictional worlds – while never forgetting that he also has a story to tell.
The Irish author is a prose stylist first and foremost...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 ... the drama the family is mired in can be quite delicious, particularly through the dry, gallows humor Banville supplies in sumptuous surplus ... 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.
... a synthesis of Banville’s own fiction and a book about what such a synthesis means. It provides a theory not just of itself but of the author’s entire self-contained fictional universe, a deeply textured space that can be endlessly fissured and remade. He is also at his most mischievous: his devotees will have enormous fun hunting for allusions and references to works from his other novels. There are many superb self-referential jokes, including one about Godley being hoaxed into believing he had won a major prize ... critics and commentators have often emphasised the artistry of his prose and his mastery of language. But it is sometimes not remarked upon that Banville is also one of the most substantial Irish writers of the past 50 years. In this book, as in others, he has created a work that meditates in highly sophisticated ways on the nature of reality, existence, knowledge, art, love and death ... And in a literary culture that is dominated by realism, his continued experimentalism marks him out as the most eminent innovator in Irish fiction of the last 50 years. Does it matter here if readers have not read all or any of his other works? It does not. One can linger in the lushness of the prose and admire the extraordinary capaciousness of Banville’s unique imagination.
John Banville is a marvellous and rewarding novelist, but you don’t read him for the story, except when he is writing Crime as Benjamin Black, and, to be honest, not even always then. Actually, the Banville/Black double act has worn a bit thin, and not only because his most recent Black novel with familiar characters was published as by Banville. You read him – anyway, I read him – for the prose, the richness of the characterisation, all the better for seldom being fully fleshed-out, for the glittering and sometimes mischievous intelligence, and most of all for his uncanny ability to render mood and atmosphere into verbal pictures ... Sometimes you might call his work self-indulgent, especially when, yet again, the setting is a decayed and further decaying Irish country house where the wallpaper is peeling and there are strange odours in the dark and dank stone-flagged kitchen. Nobody does this sort of thing better, and if it is self-indulgent it is so only in the way that Cezanne returned time and again to Mont Ventoux. In any case, I can’t have enough of it ... plot, though you might be hard-put to follow it, let alone recount it, but this scarcely matters. Indeed, it doesn’t matter at all. There is delight in the jewelled sentences, in the perceptive flashes of understanding and misunderstanding, in the clarity of perception ... there is always matter in Banville’s novels. There is no escape from real experience, no mere flaunting of the peacock’s tail feathers. In truth, he works very close to the experience of life beyond or behind the words. He is a magician, really.
Felix Mordaunt’s true name, when it is revealed, will be familiar to Banville’s longtime readers, most of whom will no doubt already have guessed his real identity. Sometimes it feels like Banville is toying with his characters, or torturing them, as Luis Bunuel or the Coen brothers sometimes do with theirs. For their part, Banville’s characters seem highly self-aware, intuiting the existence of a higher power that is toying with them and wondering what he is up to. But unlike Banville’s readers — who are no doubt wondering too — they have no way of knowing how luscious and finely wrought are the exquisite sentences in which their sad lives and inscrutable fates are described and revealed. Such is the beauty of Banville’s prose that every page of The Singularities is a perplexing and enigmatic delight.
There is more than a touch of surrealism in this, as well as a certain amount of what Kingsley Amis might have described as 'buggering around with the reader' in the shifting narrative perspective. It’s fortunate then that you don’t read Banville for his taut plots. But flick to a page in any of his novels and soon you will come to a sentence or an image so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street ... From all this you get the sense that Banville is hanging loose, writing not to be accessible or comprehended, but simply for his own sensual joy ... Reading The Singularities...is like spending a weekend inside the little bubble of Banville’s imagination. It’s pleasant enough for the most part.
The Singularities is a book overtly written, a book, therefore, about writing, and therefore about the writing self ... I might as well say at this point that The Singularities will in all likelihood prove near-incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t already familiar with Banville’s previous novels; this, too, I suspect, is part of the joke ... Gorgeously written and superbly choreographed, The Singularities in its unapologetic complexity and brilliance seems similarly unlikely to please the crowd. On the other hand, isn’t two a crowd, under certain circumstances? Writer, reader: who else do you need to play the supreme game?
The Singularities is lively on the surface, but there’s a current of sadness running beneath ... This being one of Banville’s literary novels, rather than one of his crime books, there is the usual sumptuous style, a desire never to write a sentence that has been cast down before ... But The Singularities seems to be reaching for something it never finds. There’s rich potential here...but the book squanders it ... Banville is clearly having a lot of fun, even if the book is so steeped in his past work that the ideal reader is probably the author. If only he extended that pleasure to the reader a little more willingly.
... a smart, stylish story ... The pace of The Singularities is leisurely at times, but Banville is such an intelligent and sophisticated guide that it’s always pleasurable to follow him along the winding path he’s navigating. There are few cultural touchstones beyond his ken ... Banville is also a gorgeous writer who favors sinuous but shapely sentences. Although it may be hard to believe, in his hands there’s enormous pleasure in reading a full paragraph devoted to the description of a fly, a chair or the anatomy of a scab. At the same time, he’s gifted with the ability to produce crisp, aphoristic prose ... Assiduous readers of Banville’s previous novels undoubtedly will spend many enjoyable hours poring over the pages of this one, searching for Easter eggs and correspondences between his latest and those earlier works. Whether you’re one of those loyal Banville fans, or someone coming to his work for the first time, The Singularities is a fun ride. Hop on, settle back and let a masterly novelist carry you where he will.
Exquisite and mischievously voyeuristic ... Secrets are revealed, and relics are stolen. Banville’s crisp wit, sardonic humor, and unique style will keep readers on edge, smiling and questioning, entranced and thoroughly entertained until the very end.
... a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it ... Banville’s preoccupations with art, cosmology, the existence of ancient gods, extreme violence, sex, self-knowledge and self-delusion are glimpsed through a tangle of hawthorns surrounding a lych gate or in the depths of a glass of oily gin...You need know none of this to surrender to The Singularities; indeed, you will be exempt from the distracting detective work, with its attendant self-congratulation, into which the completist will find themselves repeatedly lured ... Suffice to say that what at times seems like a synthesis of Banville’s previous novels, gesturing towards his possible retreat from fiction – he has hinted, quite unconvincingly, that this might be his last novel – can be more productively viewed as a lark, a playful interrogation of the peculiar and suggestive world he has been busily creating for the past half century ... Amid all this architecture, however, these overlapping circles described in stylised sentences, there is so much else, hiding in plain sight ... Banville, in following them through these dizzyingly reflective moods and milieux, has constructed a compelling underworld to run alongside our own.
Banville’s writing has always played with this notion, with characters constantly grappling to understand the complexity of knowing oneself ... Banville’s poetical fiction explores the implications of the theory of singularity through the human perception of memory, loss, and guilt, even as he slyly braids together characters and themes from his past novels into a meta-narrative about the haunting implications of parallel universes.
Intrigues follow and secrets are revealed in this exceptional work. Like many Banville novels, this one is heavier on descriptions than plot, but what exquisite descriptions ... like a carriage ride along a country lane: it proceeds slowly, affording ample time to admire the scenery.
Banville once again mines past work for characters and a challenging narrative ... 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...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.
Artful and atmospheric ... Though short on plot, the book boasts some of Banville’s greatest prose ... Overall, it’s a fine addition to a brilliant body of work.
