A thing is pure and independent, the object and the idea of the object utterly united with no division and no corruption. Then comes language and the thing acquire a name and suddenly the idea of a tree and a tree itself are divided, and the idea becomes a separate thing to the thing it's supposed to describe. Thus Nicolas Copernicus, who has a bright vision of the motions of celestial bodies that will turn everything humanity has understood about the world on its head, that will eventually unmoor us from our conception of the world and from religion, soils this vision, destroys it and mars it with his efforts to express it in language. And yet it is the world itself that is diseased and corrupt and downright petty, and he himself fears and hates the world and its imperfections.

John Banville's Copernicus, brilliant but cowed and cringing, dominated by his uncle, savagely haunted by the deteriorating spectre of his brother, seared by the knowledge that he has failed before he has even begun his great work, so that even if he completes it, he almost cannot bring himself to release it to the world because of what his flawed ideas of planetary motion will set in motion. A novel of ideas and angst, fear and base cunning, failure and futility - though his success as an administrator to his war-torn province seems oddly at odds with Banville's portrayal of his internal life, and so gets glossed over a bit.

Suspend your cynicism

Fun read. Lots of historical characters, real and imagined. Written with sometimes over the top imagery. Some modern philosophy/theology strung on an early renaissance frame with an entirely satisfying ending. A masters novel.

Nicolaus Koppernige is born, learns the names of things, loses his parents and is sent away. He fits badly in the world, not knowing how to behave or how to touch it, holding it at arms length, looking upwards for purity and the celestial music of the orbs. His brother meanwhile throws himself into the sordid sensuality of the world, a constant thorn in his brother's side. John Banville does not hesitate to inflict upon his historical protagonist the agonies one rarely imagines of genius that has become a hook for a concept rather than a human being, and he does it very well. Characters merge into landscapes, atrocities and genius overlap, and at the end there is no long historical view but an intensely personal encounter with death.

Compelling account of the Renaissance astronomer and his times. The writing is excellent throughout, and a lot is covered in relatively few pages.

He was convinced that he would be granted an insight, a vision, of profound significance, before the end. Was this why he was calm and unafraid?






For a couple years now I’ve had a small pile of books on the floor by my upstairs bookshelves, next to my reading chair: The Copernican Revolution, The Sleepwalkers, The Abyss. And on top, this book by Banville. All of them read. The first three at least rated (all right, only rated the last of those just now).

The first two books cited above are mentioned prominently in Banville’s Acknowledgements. After citing a couple biographies of Copernicus, and “a more technical, but very elegant and readable explication of the heliocentric theory”, he says, “However, the two works on which I have mainly drawn are … [Kuhn and Koestler].”


But Banville’s book, while read, still sat on my to-read shelf, unrated, unacknowledged.

Why? I knew that the books under it would need to be mentioned, maybe even referenced, in a review. And after putting it off for a couple weeks … a couple months … a couple years …

Well, it’s time. And I’m glad that I’ve delayed so long. My reading on GR since I read Doctor Copernicus has enlightened me to a few things that I somehow failed to acknowledge back then.

With the Passage of Time

What did I learn in the interim? Well, that Banville wasn’t writing a biography (duh!), rather a fictional biography; and really wasn’t all that interested in the scientific aspects of the Copernican system. That being the case, I’m a bit mystified at the credit he gives to Kuhn’s book, because he sure didn’t use much of Kuhn’s information in the novel. Perhaps as background information for his own understanding of the related science?

The lack of anything technical is one of the things that I was uncomfortable with a couple years ago. Now I realize that the novel which I the wished had been written would have been of little interest to most readers – maybe not even of much interest to me!

Historical Background

The novel is obviously about Nicolas Copernicus, the fellow who helped lift Europe and Western civilization out of the dark ages. Copernicus was born in 1473, died in 1543. He spent most of his life in Poland. So we’re talking here of the first part of the sixteenth century for most of Copernicus’ life. In Italy the Renaissance has been under way for two centuries, and is now in fact ending as a historical period. Farther north, in Poland for example, the period which might be called the Northern (or Central) European Renaissance is, on the other hand, in its earlier stages.

And in this part of Europe, something else is being born – the Reformation. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg (assuming he did this at all) in late 1517. Luther was, in fact, quite contemporaneous with Copernicus – born in 1483, died in 1546. Nicholas ten years older, died 3 years earlier.

Banville’s acknowledgement of Koestler’s book indicates, I think, that he probably used that portion of it devoted to biographical information about Copernicus (about 70 pages) as a skeleton – indicating what he, Banville, would have to work with when inventing the flesh of his tale. Our author doesn’t go into details concerning all the bones Koestler dug up. He picks and chooses those which interest him, and leaves the rest unmentioned, hidden beneath what he does tell.

Copernicus was not simply a man who observed the skies, and tried to put what he saw into a coherent system. This is what we remember him for, but Banville (following Koestler) makes it clear that frankly this was only part of his life, and to Banville, the greater part of what he was doing from month to month, year to year, was quite different from that. Copernicus was, as Wiki puts it, “a polyglot and polymath who obtained a doctorate in canon law and also practiced as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. Like the rest of his family, he was a third-order Dominican. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money – a key concept in economics - and in 1519 he formulated a version of what later became known as Gresham’s law.”

Thankfully, Banville ignores much of this. The aspects he focuses on are the religious, the medical (to some degree), and the diplomatic.

But to an admirable extent, Banville is able to hold the reader with his telling of the backstory, his setting the stage on which Copernicus performed – the stage of the late middle age power politics in central Europe that, after 1517, became increasingly intermixed with power struggles over the Reformation.


The book

There are four parts, unlike Gaul.

I Orbitas Lumenque (1473-1506) Tells of: Copernicus’s education - in 1491-2, age 18, begins four years of study at the University of Cracow, then spends ten more years in Italy at the Universities of Bologna and Padua; and significantly, his brother Andreas, very unlike Nicholas, with whom he had vacillating relations, and who followed him, almost plagued him, for years - for purposes which Banville imagines. Actually, almost everything about these years is imagined by the author, since almost no documentary evidence has survived to modern times (if such ever existed).

II Magister Ludi (1506-1539) He returns from Italy to Heilsberg. The narrative of these years deals mostly with Copernicus’s religious and diplomatic duties, and with the constant struggles for dominance between the lay rulers of city & province on the one hand, and, on the other, the Catholic Bishops of the various local sees; then later, from 1517, Luther’s swelling ranks thrown into the mix. It was a time wracked by the predations of the Teutonic Knights against these Polish territories, some of which are described in gruesome, thankfully short, detail.

Here’s an example from this section which illustrates Banville’s narrative voice. He’s describing Copernicus’s appointment as physician-in-residence at the castle of Heilsberg.

He liked the job well enough. Medicine was a means of concealment, whereby he might come at his true concerns obliquely and by stealth … But although he was free to work, he felt that he was trapped at Heilsberg, trapped and squirming, a grey old rat. He was thirty-three; his teeth were going. Once life had been an intense dream awaiting him elsewhere, beyond the disappointment of ordinary days, but now when he looked to that place once occupied by that gorgeous golden bowl of possibilities he saw only a blurred dark something with damaged limbs swimming toward him. It was not death, but something far less distinguished. It was, he supposed, failure.

But this introspective tone is at times thrown out the window, in passages, some of them long, which seem like dream sequences. This is at the very beginning of the same Part II.

Waterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bared tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, grinning …

The sort of passage that can leave the reader guessing. Is it meant to suggest the fear and superstition of the times? Just an extravagant telling of a happening much more normal than it seems?

III Cantus Mundi (1539-1543) The arrival of Rheticus into Copernicus’s life. Rheticus, a young disciple, who has read the unpublished, privately distributed version of the Copernican system. Rheticus, who spends almost five years helping Copernicus put his manuscript in order for publication, who carries it to the publisher, shepherds it through the doubts that the author has over and over about making it public.

Before you open this spoiler, be advised that what it reveals is something that absolutely shocked me. So you may not wish to know. This section starts thus:

I, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, called Rheticus, will now set down the true account of how Copernicus came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe. There are not many who will admit that if I had not gone to him, the old fool would never have dared to publish.

That right! Banville brilliantly switches to a first person narration to tell the story of Copernicus’s waning years. I loved it.

IV Magnum Miraculum (1543) Copernicus’s departure.


Who might like this book

Answer me:

1. Do you like historical novels?
2. Do you have an interest in the late middle ages of central Europe?
3. Can you abide a very fictionalized story of a real person?
4. Can you handle some post modernism here and there?
5. Are you unafraid of a novel that can just be a bit confusing at times?
6. Does a pretty short read appeal to you?

Four “yes” might be enough. Five should certainly be.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Reading this book during a time of plague, when we are leaning harder and more explictly upon science than perhaps at anytime I can remember, was both pleasurable and insightful. Banville illuminates a time of both intellectual and spiritual revolution through layers of of near poetry and shows the human desire to get at the thing itself - phenomenon - has always been thus. For humans, the world is mediated by language and we lie mute in the presence of reality.

The Heliocentric Revolution

While reading this first novel in John Banville’s "Revolutions Trilogy", I was often unclear about exactly what I had got myself into.

Was it a novel of ideas, or an historical novel that would dramatise the Copernican Revolution, Copernicus’ proof of the theory that the universe (or at least our solar system) is heliocentric?

The ideas seemed to take a back-seat most of the time. We learn little about the cosmology for which Copernicus is best known.

Instead, it was interesting to read the novel immediately after Edmund Wilson’s n  "To the Finland Station",n which suggested that history is not so much made by abstract forces, but by humans performing small or large acts (regardless of how courageous they were, and whether or not they believed their acts would have a significant historical impact).

Hesitation Before the Revolution

John Banville seems to be more interested in the man, Nicolas Copernicus, his daily life, and his response to the conflict between science and religion (or faith).

It’s the nature of a revolution to overturn whatever came before it (in Copernicus’ case, Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system, which was endorsed and enforced by Catholicism, under threat of excommunication).

Because of his family connections, Copernicus maintained good relations with the Catholic Church for most of his lifetime. He was nevertheless torn by an internal dispute as to whether he should publish the book that set out his theory and mathematical proofs. What should prevail: faith or the truth? Is our perception of the truth just another belief? How then does science differ from religion? Is one true and the other not (necessarily)? Does either have to meet the test of common sense?

n  "It is not doubt as to the validity of his conclusions that makes him hesitate, nothing like that, no - but fear."n

"Save the Phenomena"

When it comes to astronomy and cosmology, is it important (according to Plato) that any theory "save the phenomena" (i.e., that it be consistent with observable phenomena), or is it permissible for the theory to rely on non-observable material to explain the real underlying mechanisms that cause the astral phenomena? Was it acceptable that different mathematical models could describe (or save) the astral phenomena equally well? You can see that at the centre of this dilemma is the question of the subject or observer, and their perspective on reality. Can we describe something without access to what we cannot observe?

How can we arrive at certainty in this context? Is science subjective? Does it involve an act of faith that can take us down the wrong path, and away from the truth?

n  "Astronomy does not describe the universe as it is, but only as we observe it. That theory is correct, therefore, which accounts for our observations. Ptolemy's theory is perfectly, almost perfectly valid insofar as pure astronomy is concerned, because it saves the phenomena. This is all that is asked of it, and all that can be asked, in reason."n  
n  
n  "...Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience…"n

"The Act of Creation"

Yet, Copernicus was concerned to determine the truth, the real underlying truth, even if it involved an act of creation on the part of the subject:

n  "The birth of the new science must be preceded by a radical act of creation. Out of nothing, next to nothing, disjointed bits and scraps, he would have to weld together an explanation of the phenomena...What mattered was not the propositions, but the combining of them: the act of creation."n

This act of creation might not be capable of absolute proof. If so, when would the manuscript of his book be ready for publication:

n  "Yet if they should come, sneering and snarling and bellowing for proof, smash down his door and snatch the manuscript from his hands, dear God, what then?"n

"Coming Directly at the True"

Copernicus was also conscious of the effect of his revolution on the real people around him, including his family. A true revolutionary would act without regard to the impact of the turning over of the status quo. Sometimes you have to push people through the eye of a needle, to get them to the other side, to get them to the truth:

n  "The people - peasants, soldiers, generals - they are my tool, as mathematics is yours, by which I come directly at the true, the eternal, the real...The generations may execrate us for what we do to their world, but we and those rare ones like us shall have made them what they are."n

In the end, Copernicus chooses truth. The quest for truth is the highest calling:

n  "How are we to perceive the truth if we do not attempt to discover it, and to understand our discoveries?"n  
n  
n  "We are the truth. The world and ourselves, that is the truth. There is no other, or, if there is, it is of use to us only as an ideal, that brings us a little comfort, a little consolation, now and then."n

Alliteration and Sibilance

Stylistically, the novel is not as assured as Banville's later works. It has a stony, almost Gothic tone (as if chiselled from granite) that often recalls the atmosphere of Mervyn Peake’s n  "Titus Groan"n or Rikki Ducornet’s n  "The Stain".n

Whether consciously or not, Banville often lapses into alliteration or sibilance that appears to have little discernible function. It happens so much that eventually I started seeking it out and trackng it, all the time, in the words of Banville, “wracking my brain for pretty metaphors and classical allusions”:

n  
n  

n    "Shimmering singing spirits...
A tawny sad September...
His shabbiness, his studiousness, his risible sobriety…
Malicious relish…
The dry sands of a sealed mind…
Make amends for the years of stubbornness and wilful blindness…
This stargazing and so forth…
With his sword in its ornate scabbard swinging at his side…
Ringed round by oppressive pillars of silence stretching up past the gallery to the high ceiling with its faded frescoes…
Disembodied voices that shredded the silence…
A smiling girl in a green gown going out by another [door], leaving behind her trembling on the bright air an image of blurred beauty…
A little heap of dust and drapery and dry bones…
Nicolas felt his smile curdle into a sickly smirk…
The blank anonymity of surfaces, the sullen, somehow resentful secretiveness of unfamiliar things…
A dismayed sense of doom…
Dark parcel of pain and loathing…
The singer gazed about him with a lost forsaken look, fretfully fingering the lank yellow strands of his hair…
Cliques and cabals of the papal court…
The poor foolish faithful…
Lifting their faces trustingly toward the hot sun of spring…
A pallid, faintly flickering light…
Slip disconcertingly from hard cold derisive cynicism into simple silliness…
Stained marble statuary…
A gangling spidery pale fork of flesh and fur, faintly repellant, faintly comical, wholly absurd…
An exquisite agony of embarrassment…
Wide stone steps swept up to a pillared entrance…
An anguished grimacing clown…
Feeling a fool and a fraud…
Snout lifted, sniffing…
Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps…
A slow stealthy chase…
Its glorious vistas of bog and slate-grey sea…
The great sphere of searing fire burst in his brain…
Death’s secret signals…"n  

n  
n

DIVERSIFICATION
[In the Words of John Banville]

The Clear Blue Unearthly Sky

Only now and then,
In the grave cold music
Of mathematics,
In the stately march of a Latin line,
In logic’s hard bright lucid,
Faintly frightening certainties,
Did he dimly perceive the contours
Of some glistening ravishing thing
Assembling itself out of blocks of glassy air
In a clear blue unearthly sky,
And then there thrummed within him
A coppery chord of perfect bliss.

Invisible Struts and Wires

Monstrous hawklike creatures were
Flying on invisible struts and wires
Across a livid sky,
And there was a great tumult far off,
Screams and roars, and howls of agony
Or of laughter,
That came to him from that immense distance
As a faint terrible twittering.

The Clamour of Tiny Deaths

The hawks, terrible and lovely,
Filled the sunny air
With the clamour of tiny deaths.

Brilliantly illuminating retelling of the scientists life around his great heliocentric theories.

I'm such a Banville fanatic that it's hard to press the "four star" button and not the "five." A wonderful and informative story about life in that era, when the Church was the judge and the jury, and any deviation from that, even by a supremely devout man, was dangerous. Somehow, Copernicus made it through. But at a significant cost.

Not your standard biography. Banville is an extremely impressive wordsmith and explorer of the psyche. He chose as his subject here (and in the books on Kepler and Newton that I'm excited to read) a major figure in world history, responsible for changing mankind's view of existence. It's easy for such a work to be full of Eureka moments and platitudes about persistence and the conviction of one's beliefs. But Banville imagines a man as confused as we all are, and perhaps moreso due to the inevitable conflictedness of holding a "secret" of such consequence. There's family dysfunction, unseemly clergy, troubling sexual encounters, plague, and gratuitous medieval squalor to strike a disconcerting balance with the celestial matters at hand. In other words, a book that leaves a deep sensual and intellectual impression rather than attempting a documentary survey of a cultural icon. It's radically imperfect and unobjective, but full of genuine insight, often embedded richly in the turn of a couple of terse phrases. A stroke of brilliance was surrendering the point of view to youthful and vivacious arch-nihilist Rheticus for much of the latter half of the book. A really strong and courageous piece of writing. Really close to 5 stars.

Parental suggestion: Age 15+.

So you're taught from a young age that, clearly, everything in creation must revolve around the good ol' Earth because not only are our eyes not lying in seeing how the sun doesn't rise or set in the same spot but as the most important people ever in the history of Important Things it's quite obvious that we're the literal and metaphorical Center of Everything. That sounds pretty reasonable.

Then you read some other theories, look up at the sky again and do some other calculations and think "Wait a minute, that's not right . . ." and come up with a book in your head that is going to blow apart everyone's notion of the world and really puncture a lot of egos. It's probably too dangerous to publish because if you do, people are really going to hate you.

As it turns out, there was no reason to worry. Everyone hates you anyway. But not for the reasons you'd think.

Banville is one of those writers who seems really precise in how he goes about the actual act of writing, so you imagine that a novel set in the late 15th century is going to evoke the times something fierce. And it does. He gives us a two hundred some-odd page biography of our friend Nick Copernicus, from his early life and gradual polishing of his theories and right up until his book is published right before his death. Along the way he see that most everyone dislikes him, from his extended family on down even as he keeps going through life fulfilling various duties that he keeps stumbling into, all the while getting ready to blow Ye Olde Mindes. Meanwhile, the 1500s happen, and they're sort of exciting too.

Being the kind of writer who insists on not doing anything in a straightforward fashion, this is about as unconventional as a linear narrative can be, jumping around like a cut-up film strip, taking a detour three quarters of the way through for someone else to tell a story and even indulging in that favorite technique of historical writers everywhere: the epistolary sequence. In a way, some of this is good, in that it distracts from the fact that Copernicus himself isn't all that interesting, at least the way he's written here. He's not all that likable and comes across as rather passive, not at all minding wanting to stay under the radar, coming up with theories but not all that interested in publishing them. Along the way he manages to irritate almost everyone he knows, until by the time he dies, you expect someone to wander into the scene and say "Geez, are you still around? Just die, already!"

Still, anyone can write a novel about a basically unlikeable person set in the 1500s . . . the trick is to make a readable version of that. And, surprisingly, Banville almost pulls that off. I can't say I was riveted the entire time, but the clarity of his prose is remarkable in how he can sketch out a scene with every detail in place, but do it in two paragraphs and cut it off without making it seem choppy. Most of the novel consists of these short scenes and some of that contributes to the lurching feel of the narrative, like having someone tell you a story via strobe lighting. Which is a neat approach but it never builds to any kind of momentum. The focus on Copernicus is sort of the problem and the story suffers because whenever somebody comes in that seems to be inhabiting a much better story (his brother, for one), they're only around for a few pages before meandering off to more interesting events, leaving Copernicus behind to engage in another round of "publish? Don't publish?" When the third section roars in with Rheticus taking hold of the narrative, it's almost a relief to have the story focus on someone with some actual vitality. He may be arrogant but golly, he's entertaining.

But this isn't a Dan Brown race to the historical finish and the words "gripping" and "thriller" really shouldn't be applied here. Instead it's a rumination on the changing attitudes toward science and the effect that one man can have, even if the effects aren't immediately apparent and everyone spends most of their time arguing over land territory (which, in the 1500s, is probably what passed for conversation). Needless to say, there's not a lot of historical hand-holding going on here, if you don't have a passing knowledge of the political conditions in that time frame, you may be a bit lost. Maybe not in an "let's-actively-confuse-you" Gene Wolfe sort of way but I do recommend taking a gander at a Famous Internet Encyclopedia to at least get the lay of the land. For one, we're in Poland and the Teutonic Knights keep invading. At one point they were granted large chunks of territory. They seemed like neat fellows to get to know but we don't see any here.

Yet, its readable. I don't know how to explain this other than, even at this early date (this was maybe his third novel?) Banville knew what he was doing and how to go about it. Its very even tempered, the pace rarely creeps over a steady canter, there's very few standout jaw-dropping scenes, and yet the pages keep turning. He drops quotes from various personages from the future into the mix like a hip-hop producer, and the story never even flinches. He plunges us deeply into the world of the 1500s, so deeply that the only view we have is that of Copernicus and he's too ground level to give us a good picture. We become immersed, like these people, and you can understand how everyone was convinced that they were the center of everything decent, even physics. It's not until the end, the last twenty or so pages where Copernicus is dying, a messy, undignified and lingering death, where the prose sharpens ever so slightly and Copernicus has less a realization than an understanding: we're not the most important creations ever in a universe that has miracles contained in practically every molecule but there's a difference between "unimportant" and "vital". It's the knowing that lets us shift the view just enough that we can finally see past ourselves. We can go, and we can let go, and from there, all the rest can follow.

L'importanza di guardare fuori dalla finestra
Il romanzo inizia con una bella immagine vivida: qualcosa che si agita fuori dalla finestra nell'aria dorata e un bimbo piccino nel lettino che lo guarda. Albero e tiglio sono fra le prime parole che impara.
Banville ci racconta la laboriosa vita di Copernico. Nicolaus Koppernigk studiò a Cracovia e poi a Padova, finanziato dallo zio vescovo, quindi fu richiamato a guadagnarsi il pane. Banville non entra nelle teorie dell'astronomo se non per far comprendere quanto fossero avanzate e originali, dipinge piuttosto un interessante quadro storico di quello che accadeva in Europa ai tempi di Martin Lutero fra Italia, Germania e Polonia. Erano tempi grami, lo zio, vescovo dell'Ermland, usava tutte le sue fini doti di politico per mantenere l'indipendenza del piccolo stato stretto fra la Polonia della dinastia Jagellone e la Prussia dei cavalieri teutonici e il nipote fece per decenni il funzionario e l'amministratore, scegliendosi gli appartamenti nelle torri in modo da poter coltivare con discrezione l'astronomia e dimenticare almeno la notte quello che succedeva nelle campagne squassate dai cavalieri teutonici (flagello dei paesi baltici).
L'uomo tratteggiato dal libro è distaccato e rinuncia presto agli affetti, per paura di essere coinvolto e distratto. E' prudente e schivo al punto da non voler quasi parlare delle sue teorie, sembra che siano state divulgate quasi per sbaglio, per indiscrezioni di persone con le quali aveva conversato e che siano state stampate per iniziativa di un suo ammiratore, che lo aveva corteggiato per anni per convincerlo a renderle pubbliche. Il libro è interessante, Banville è uno scrittore eccellente, ma secondo me la figura che ne esce rimane irrisolta.
Inoltre mi sembra che si dia troppo spazio al Copernico anziano raccontato da Retico, l'ammiratore astronomo. Per quanto nelle intenzioni dell'autore questa parte sia funzionale al romanzo, poiché introduce movimento e una seconda voce, secondo me risulta stonata e non contiene la poesia del mite Koppernigk.