Here comes John Banville’s 20th novel under his own name, a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it. We are in the world of 2009’s The Infinities, with which The Singularities shares an Irish country-house setting and a handful of characters. But here, too, is Freddie Montgomery, the violent protagonist of an earlier trilogy of novels – The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena – itself seeded by a real-life murder in 1982 that not only horrified Ireland but scandalised it when links to the country’s political class emerged.
In this new book, Montgomery, now released from prison, returns to the house in which he grew up and which was the scene of his crime. Meanwhile, the academics, actors and their associates from another trilogy, this one made up of Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light, pop up in the background or in memory. Themes and motifs, too, chirrup to one another, as 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.
