This is my favourite historical novel. Banville's prose is exquisite, moving between a grimy reality and Kepler's cosmic dreams of mathematical order. Novels of ideas don't come any better than this. Banville's style often seems mannered in his other books, but here it is in its element. Read it alongside Arthur Koestler's 'The Sleepwalkers'. Perfect.

An exceptional novel by the ever elegant Banville. Didn't want it to end.

The scientific and historical details in this book were above my head but I enjoyed it nevertheless because of Banville’s style.

In theory quite an interesting book, but I couldn’t really get into it. This is about KEPLER. He challenged the pre-existing notion of the Earth being the centre of the universe and helped change the system to make it more heliocentric. If you take a £2 coin and look around the edges of you’ll see a statement which says standing on the shoulders of giants : this is a famous quote from Isaac Newton who said “ if he has seen further? It’s because he was standing on the shoulders of giants”. KEPLeR was one of the giants that he was talking about. Here are the best bits from the book:

I hold the world to be a manifestation of the possibility of order.

he is called, Kaspar von Mühlstein, darkly measuring the name as a hangman would a neck. think he is a Jew.

Geometry existed before the creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself.

The child was born at noon, a boy. A great blossom of heedless happiness opened up in Kepler's heart. He held the softly pulsing mite in his hands and understood that he was multiplied.

He drew up a horoscope. It promised all possible good, after a few adjustments. The child would be nimble and bright, apt in mathematical and mechanical skills, imaginative, diligent, charming, O, charming! For sixty days Kepler's happiness endured, then the house was pierced again by screams, miniature echoes of Barbara's lusty howls, and Oberdorfer again sculled himself up the stairs and Kepler snatched the infant in his arms and commanded it not, not to die! He turned on Barbara, she had known, all that pain had told her all was wrong, yet she had said nothing, not a word to warn him, spiteful bitch! The doctor clicked his tongue, for shame, sir, for shame. Kepler rounded on him. And you ... you...! In tears, his vision splintering, he turned away, clasping the cresture to him, and felt it twitch, and cough, and suddenly, as if starting in amazement, die: his son. The damp hot head lolled in his hand. What pitiless player had tossed him this tender ball of woe? He was to know other losses, but never again quite like this, like a part of himself crawling blind and mewling into death.

Life, so it used to seem to me, my dear Regina, is a formless 1& forever shifting stuff, a globe of molten glass, say, which we have been flung, and which, without even the crudest of instruments, with only our bare hands, we must shape into a perfect sphere, in order to be able to contain it within ourselves. That, so I thought, is our task here, I mean the transformation of the chaos without, into a perfect harmony & balance within us. Wrong, wrong: for our lives contain us, we are the flaw in the crystal, the speck of grit which must be ejected from the spinning sphere. It is said, that a drowning man sees all his life flash before him in the instant before he succumbs: but why should it be only so for death by water? I suspect it is true whatever the manner of dying. At the final moment, we shall at last perceive the secret & essential form of all we have been, of all our actions & thoughts. Death is the perfecting medium. This truth—for I believe it to be a truth-has manifested itself to me with force in these past months. It is the only answer that makes sense of these disasters & pains, these betrayals.

«¿Qué decía el judío? Se nos dice todo, pero nada se nos explica. Sí, tenemos que aceptarlo todo a ojos cerrados. Ahí reside el secreto. ¡Qué sencillo! Sonrió. Así, no fue un simple libro lo que arrojó, sino el fundamento del trabajo de toda una vida. Al parecer, no tenía la menor importancia [...] No mueras nunca, no mueras nunca». (Kepler, John Banville, p. 286)

One feels as if one is living in that tumultous, war-torn time, wresting beauty and harmony for the mess of history.

I may have to read this a second time.

What most resonated with me was the feeling that Kepler must have felt like the most solitary, confined scientist of the 1600’s.

Struggling to understand the nature and position of the planets, mathematics and spatial orientation, on top of being not only the first renowned astrologist of his time, but also like a medium of sorts, I felt Banville captured his angst and epiphanies. While most only remember Kepler for his laws related to physics, this book sheds light that he also would have keenly predicated mercuries retrograde pattern and likely phenomenal aspects within the last few centuries.

Lo único que tengo que lamentar de esta novela es que esté escrita en inglés y no en alemán para así saber qué palabras pudo usar Kepler. La personalidad y la vida de Kepler fueron complejas y la novela saca partido de eso.

There is less science in this book, much more interrelationships between Catholic power and Lutherans, the pressures on Kepler and the difficulty of his bringing himself to accept the evidence of Brahe's calculations to move from epicycles to elliptical motion of the planets. The writing is fine, and Banville has just the right way of bringing the reader into the situations in which he finds himself and emotions they arouse in Kepler.

I felt like 10% of this book had interesting biopic-like climaxes of discovery and 90% name dropping people who popped in and out of Kepler’s life. Definitely just felt a level of “huh” on finishing the book.

I can't believe I'm not giving this one five stars. It's because the scientific ideas seem a little grafted on, rather than part of the story. But that's like the one flaw in a precious stone, visible only because the rest is so perfect.

Radiant, beautiful, moving novel with an exquisite sense of place and prose that was so good it was suspenseful to read.

I will read all of Banville's seventeen or so novels based on the strength of this one.