The Singularities
A novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the revered Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters as he is released from prison.
“A triumphant piece of writing…Prose of such luscious elegance…Exhilarating.” —The New York Times Book Review
A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car—also borrowed—onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.
With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career’s most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker winner Banville (The Sea) revisits characters and themes from his past works in this artful and atmospheric story of redemption. Recently released from prison, a murderer now calling himself Felix Mordaunt returns to Arden House, the estate of his childhood, which is inhabited by the family of Adam Godley, the legendary scientist behind the cosmic Brahma theory. Soon, Mordaunt infiltrates the lives of the late genius's son and daughter-in-law and their amorous housekeeper by working as their driver and servant. But Mordaunt is not the only stranger on the premises nursing ulterior motives; he is soon joined by the nefarious William Jaybey, whose own scientific work was scorned and life destroyed by the elder Godley, and has come to write a biography of his fallen arch-foe. With penetrating psychological insight, Banville tracks the private struggles of these mismatched trespassers as they compete for the favor of their hosts and slowly uncover each other's secrets. Though short on plot, the book boasts some of Banville's greatest prose. Here's a surprising and apt swerve in Mordaunt's memory of coming across a cuckoo as a boy, "aware the two of them of being caught in a somehow compromising situation... like a gentleman and his valet brought face-to-face by ill-chance in the front parlour of a back-street brothel." Overall, it's a fine addition to a brilliant body of work.
