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.
It begins with a rhetorical question about all the above: “Yes, he has finished his sentence, but does that mean he has nothing more to say?” The “he”, we discover, is Freddie Montgomery, murderous protagonist of Banville’s 1989 novel The Book of Evidence. The sentence in question is both a long stretch in prison and a reminder that an author is always at liberty to put his creations on day release. Montgomery has been shut up, a closed book for a while, but here he is, brought back to life, with a new adopted name – Felix Mordaunt – and a zippy Sprite sports car in which to explore the world. Things, however, it slowly becomes clear, are not what they used to be. This is not only a factor of the arrested time and space of incarceration – “prison had winnowed out the profusion of things, but now he was to be thrown back into the middle of the muddle” – but also a reflection of his creator’s restless vocation. Banville has imagined many other worlds since 1989, as his villain is now free to discover.
