2.5
There is more of John Banville in this book than there ever will be of Copernicus. What little there is, describes the life of a wholly unremarkable, unadmirable man. His only thing of note was his intellect which the author conveniently sweeps away in his own poetic reveries about the sky, stars and so on. Banville's writing is exceedingly pretty but not pretty enough to redeem banality.

"You must try to understand that men have need of answers, articles of faith, myths-lies, if you will. The world is terrible and yet we are terrified to leave it: that is the paradox that hurts us so."

The middle part is slightly boring but otherwise pretty engaging. It is a historiographic metafiction

John Banville in this leg of trilogy of Revolutions paints a detailed sketch of Nicolas Copernicus- from his childhood to his long feeble death; his conflict in being a disciple of both the science and the church during the testing medievia in astonishingly sublime prose that only Banville is capable of.

Written in the 70s, I'm sure this was a tough book to write, research was a much tougher and drawn out affair and to try to make Copernicus the protagonist of a work of fiction is daring as well. For me this book felt a bit flat, Copernicus had an interesting career, but it was mostly of a political nature, it makes for fairly dry reading. There's also large chunks of introspection and exposition, a little of this goes a long way with me. Because fictional encounters are mixed in history, it's hard for me to get a feel for the historical Copernicus.

An interesting attempt at historical fiction based on the life of a real person. It's tedious in spots but otherwise an OK read.

Perhaps it's better to cast historical figures as background characters, a good example of this would be Mistress of the Art of Death, after reading it, I went on a bit of an English history binge.

It seems that who suffers the most from Copernicus's essentially (but not actually) heliocentric view of the solar system is not the Church or any professor stuck in a Ptolemaic view of the solar system; instead, it is Nicolas Copernicus himself. He knows that this revelation will hurt people who have so little to feel important about and so he keeps it mostly to himself, not publishing his great book until he is near death. While the beauty of the creative connection he makes is clear to him and to the readers, it is not enough to keep his own life from degenerating into bitterness, anger, and misery. The presentation of the late medieval, early Renaissance time period is incredibly bleak, and Copernicus's life is anchored deeply in that bleakness. As he will say, "There is no contact, none worth mentioning, between the universe and the place in which we live." In his head he saw the beauty of his construction of the universe, but all the days of his life he remained very much stuck in the ugliness of everyday life, saying, "Our lives are lived in such a tiny, confined space, and in such disorder, that this perception [of the heliocentric theory with its accurate elliptical orbits] is not possible."

Banville's presentation somehow makes life as he imagine that it was somehow ordinary, as if we of course knew how things were. As if he knew we might tire of the darkness of Copernicus's take on life, he assigns the third section of the book to Georg Rheticus, Copernicus's student and the one who finally gets the book to the publisher. Despite the lesser mind, the book moves faster there.

Definitely worth reading, even if what the book says is often unpleasant.

A fascinating fictional biography of the man who "came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe": Niclas Koppernigk, known to the world as Copernicus.

Copernicus was more than just an astronomer: as mathematician, physician, polyglot, classical scholar, translator, artist, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist he defined and shaped his most tumultuous age. And though astronomy was little more than an avocation, it was there he made his mark upon the world. With the publication of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just before his death in 1543, Copernicus marked a milestone in the history of science that is often referred to as the "Copernican Revolution".

Banville divides his novel into four sections, each with a slightly different style and point-of-view. (Though the third section has a remarkably different style, written in the first person as a memoir of Copernicus by his student/amanuensis/flunky, Georg von Lauchan Rheticus, here presented as a highly unreliable narrator.) Other titans of renaissance learning and politics filter through the pages: Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Kulm; Girolamo Fracastoro, the poet/physician who first identified syphilis and wrote on contagious diseases; Andreas Osiander, Lutheran theologian; as well as various prince-bishops, Polish kings and Teutonic Knights. For the life of a quiet cleric, there are some swashbuckling moments in Doctor Copernicus—armies and diplomats, whores and sodomites, priests and paupers populate the pages.

But beyond the details of the polymath's life, is Banville's love of the language, in all its deliciousness. This early novel (it won the James Tait Black Award in 1976) shows many of the traits which have made Banville one of my favourite novelists. It was followed in 1981 by Kepler (which I read last year) and The Newton Letter (1982), which together comprise what has come to be called his "Revolutions Trilogy".

Interesting...

An Accidental Hero

What was it that inspired this book? Apparently not its subject. As portrayed by Banville, Copernicus is hardly a prepossessing character. Emotionally he is vacant and incomprehensible - at times irrationally loyal to his brother, at other times completely indifferent (ditto for his cousin-housekeeper-concubine), alienated from his female siblings for reasons that are vague, essentially friendless with a chip on one of his tradesman’s son’s shoulders toward the aristocracy, and on the other toward the better placed intelligentsia of the period. Intellectually he is a desultory scholar. His concern with astronomical theory is intermittent and hardly the driving force of his life. He is a dabbler who reacts to conditions, both of the mind and of the body, usually passively, as they arise. Although a minor cleric as cathedral canon in a Catholic region, he has no point of view on faith or the church (or on science for that matter) except as a possible impediment to the publication of his ideas.

The best that can be said of Banville’s Copernicus is that he is no fanatic, religious or humanist, in a time of fanatics. He is a medical doctor without empathy, a perennial student without a clear subject, a competent bureaucratic administrator but without perspective or judgment, a diplomat with little diplomacy, a lawyer without a practice. He is a grey personality, having no clear direction in his life except a desire for reclusion and anonymity. The world of the Reformation, global exploration, the humanist Renaissance, and Prussian militarism swirls about him but raises little concern except when he is confronted directly by their effects - and even then he barely registers a response. The overall picture is one of an accidental intellectual hero, detached and aloof to the point of psychotic depression. Not therefore an obvious candidate for a biographical novel, or a promising beginning to Banville’s Revolutions Trilogy that moves from Copernicus, to Kepler to Newton.

There is much ‘throbbing’ by dogs and silences in Banville’s prose, and frequent allusion to the seductive evils of the time - nominalism, Gnosticism, solipsism, and clerical homosexuality - which pervade an otherwise brutal European existence. There is the typical Banvillian expansion of one’s vocabulary with words like ‘jesses’. ‘prog’, and ‘biood-boltered’. But there isn’t much attention devoted to the intellectual challenge Copernicus confronted in overcoming the remnants of scholasticism. Banville seems to be anachronistically anticipating the ‘reality vs explanatory’ schools of quantum theory rather than developing the issue of the biblical authority for an earth-centred cosmos.

In short, Banville doesn’t give the reader a reason to be interested in Copernicus’s life other than that he is an historical celebrity. Perhaps that is the only justifiable reason. If so, is it reason enough? That science and scientists can be excruciatingly prosaic?

Nicolás el hombre y su tiempo

Maravillosa novela biográfica. Esperaba más datos de astronomía y me encontré con una excelente lectura que enfatiza mas la cultura de esos años y una personalidad filosófica, intensa y profusa de un médico, astrónomo, teólogo y filósofo que impactó profundamente la ciencia y la vida misma.

3.5. great writing, not actually about Copernicus but more like a shell for something else entirely that in the quick read I could not place my finger at....

Doctor Copernicus is not a traditional work of historical fiction wherein the reader is immersed in the life and times of an individual in order to vicariously come to know that person and experience their era. Rather, John Banville uses Copernicus and the Renaissance setting, that nova of intellectual expansion, as a means to explore themes much greater than the life of one man, namely the nature of reality and the essence of truth. Are scientific observations ever adequate to in fact know the nature of the universe? Is there an objective unassailable truth that can be known? Weighty questions certainly and Banville is clever in his exploration of them. An equally compelling theme, although somewhat subsidiary here, is the nature of the creative mind. Banville depicts the essential role mental torment plays in the creative process, exemplified by Copernicus’ brother who serves as his malevolent creative muse, and contrasts this with the stifling power of the tranquil mind, as when Copernicus’ acquires a housekeeper along with a tidier life, and his time as an scientific visionary comes to an abrupt halt.
tDoctor Copernicus is divided into four parts with the first, second, and fourth written from a third person limited (Copernicus) point of view. The first two parts in particular are very enjoyable and thought-provoking, and the writing - the style, word choice, and vocabulary - are enviable. The third part of the novel deviates to a first person narration by Rheticus, the mathematician who convinces Copernicus to publish his book on the heliocentric universe. Rheticus is an unlikable and unreliable narrator, deliberately so, with delusions of grandeur. In this regard he is like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert or Alex from A Clockwork Orange, but while these characters possess a charm that makes them disconcertingly sympathetic, Rheticus possesses none. In this Banville errs. Reading Rheticus’ convoluted justifications, imagined persecutions, and personal slights are wearisome to the point of boredom in some stretches, and one becomes desperate to leave the mind of this overinflated prat. This is unfortunate because it is in the third part of the novel that the most compelling ideas are broached regarding the nature of truth. What is truth and what are people are willing to sacrifice truth for (i.e., religious dogma, political gains, personal ego)? Sadly, these issues become secondary to our distain for Rheticus. Additionally, the writing, which to this point has been masterful, now seems heavy, self-conscious, and even pompous at times. Perhaps it is difficult to portray someone as a self-absorbed egotist without taking on some of those qualities in your writing. It is unfortunate that Rheticus’ self-aggrandizement takes up most of the later part of the novel because it leaves the reader somewhat brought down. No matter how delicious the first taste of a new and anticipated bottle of wine, a bitter aftertaste on the tongue spoils that first pleasure and ends in disappointment. So it is with Doctor Copernicus. 3 1/2 stars.

I so wanted to read a historical fiction about Nicolas Copernicus, but this story is so descriptive. It was simply unbearable to read.