Great writing. Wonderful descriptions of life circa 1600. Would have like a map of Europe to follow his travels and residences. Great discoveries by a man dogged by problems.

Literary Fiction

Wonderfully evocative

He was after the eternal laws that govern the harmony of the world. Through awful thickets, in darkest night, he stalked his fabulous prey. Only the stealthiest of hunters had been vouchsafed a shot at it, and he, grossly armed with the blunderbuss of his defective mathematics, what chance had he? crowded round by capering clowns hallooing and howling and banging their bells whose names were Paternity, and Responsibility, and Domestgoddamnedicity. Yet O, he had seen it once, briefly, that mythic bird, a speck, no more than a speck, soaring at an immense height. It was not to be forgotten, that glimpse.

In renaissance Europe, divided on nationalistic and religious lines, a revolution is taking place - something that's going to totally upend humanity's worldview. Earth, from its position at the centre of the universe, is going to become a practical nonentity circling the Sun, a star in a solar system among countless solar systems, in a galaxy among many such galaxies. Then men on the vanguard of the revolution, the early astronomers, don't know they are going to do it, however. They are just men of science, lusting after the elusive thing called truth, glimpsed once in a while tantalizingly through all the random noise that surrounds the intellect in this journey we call life.

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler is hunted in his native Catholic Germany for his Lutheran faith. To add to his travails, he has a wife who does not understand him, a capricious father-in-law, tragic memories of the deaths of his infant children to haunt him, and a weak constitution. He escapes to Prague to work in collaboration with Tycho Brahe, the scientist who has made the most accurate astronomical observations. But he has to contend with Brahe's high-handed behaviour as well as the idiosyncrasies of the ruler of Bohemia, the eccentric Emperor Rudolph, his official patron: also, his own private insecurities and irrational beliefs. To compound the problem, Brahe favoureds the Ptolemian model of the universe and Kepler, the Copernican.

This book by Booker-winning author John Banville is not a biography of Kepler - the standard "lives of the scientists" kids study as part of their school curricula. It is a recreation of a turbulent period of history when humankind, emerging from centuries of ignorance, was taking huge strides in the field of science. The author tries to show the men of intellect in pursuit of eternal truths in all their humanity; and in the process, also the journey of science as it really was - one with a lot of stoppages, false starts and retrogressions: compounded by religious intolerance and the petty jealousies among the scientists themselves.

Kepler's original contributions were in the field of calculating the orbital pathways of the planets and establishing the laws of planetary motion. Being a believer, he tried to bring "harmony" into his concept of the universe as he believes God wouldn't have it otherwise. John Banville has succeeded in picturising the orderly mind of mathematician, who sees beauty and logic as the manifestations of the divine science of numbers.

This is a short book, but very rich in content.

Without doubt a difficult read but well worth the effort.

1.5. Well written, but unengaging. I gave up with only a quarter to go, but life is short.

Banville continues his exploration of brilliant scientists whose fleeting moments of rational lucidity allow them to pierce the cages made of religious identities and superstitions that they inhabit. This novel is not as successful as its predecessor, Doctor Copernicus, as the cultural impact of Kepler's discoveries are still rather opaque to me. Clearly the Copernican revolution had tremendous implications for humans who thought they were at the center of the universe, but I am not sure why Kepler's insights (e.g. planetary orbits are elliptical) would matter a whole lot to spiritual and political authorities. Judging from this novel, elites just saw astronomers as playthings, kind of like how Jeffrey Epstein saw the superstar academics he collected. Kepler the character is not terribly interesting--he is rather passive as his life is buffeted by the political and religious strife of Renaissance-era Germany.

A work of historical fiction, and more fictional than it is historical. Many scenes begin in medias res, and we are not always given details of the events leading up to those beginnings. In comparison even to other novels, there seems to be a lot less of the expository material one typically finds in the story of a life. In addition, there is not as much about Kepler's scientific work as one might expect from a historical fiction about a noted astronomer. Rather, much of what the novel depicts is Kepler as a son, as a husband, and as a father. We see him dealing with practical matters such as chasing down money promised him by patrons and adapting to changes in the political climate.

Although I suppose readers already familiar with Kepler's biography might get more out of it than I did, I found I was able to enjoy the book as a novel without going to Wikipedia or other resources to fill in factual details that Banville does not include. Stylistically, it reminded me somewhat of James Joyce's Dubliners. Also Joycean was the way that certain patterns in the narrative techniques Banville employed resonated with particular themes in the novel.

I liked Banville's fictionalized representation of Kepler's inner life. Here is a passage in which he imagines Kepler's subjective experiences during a particularly trying moment:

Kepler supported her, trying in vain to think of some comforting word. The strangest thoughts came into his head. On the journey from Linz he had read the Dialogue on ancient and modern music by Galileo's father, and now snatches of that work came back to him, like melodies grand and severe, and he thought of the wind-tossed sad singing of martyrs on their way to the stake. (167)

Another passage I like depicts an image that is not only aesthetically interesting in itself, but that would plausibly interest a geometer like Kepler: "The summer evening hesitated in the doorway, and in a big mirror a parallelogram of sunlit wall leaned at a breathless tilt, with a paler patch in it where a picture had been removed" (66).

Acquired Dec 15, 2006
P.T. Campbell Bookseller, London, Ontario

Science As Pyschotherapy

Unlike his introduction of Nicolaus Copernicus in his first volume of his Revolutions trilogy, John Banville gives a very clear key to his interpretation of Johannes Kepler’s life in the second: “…disorder had been the condition of his life from the beginning.” Not only does he set off a much more distinctive character for Kepler than for Copernicus, but Banville also pursues the interaction of that character with the intellectual and social context of the time in a much more interesting way.

Kepler’s neurotic condition - a longing for assurance about the ultimate rationality of the world - is described by Banville in all its stages: the initial trauma created by a chaotic midden of an early family life; subsequently confirmed through a young Lutheran adulthood in an increasingly oppressive Catholic country; and routinised in the shambolic Benatky castle-circus of Tycho Brahe. It Is hardly surprising that the need for an underlying order in the universe would be a response upon which Banville could build a narrative. Science, or more generally thought itself, as psychotherapy.

And this psychotherapeutic narrative, never overdone but muted and hinted at continuously, does provide a convincing coherence to Kepler’s life. His ‘passion’ for astronomy is a sort of self-medication in Banville's story. Kepler’s work is a reflection and projection of his deepest fears of meaninglessness and purposelessness. His but-this-will-interrupt-my-work attitude to politics, religion, and family relations is a persistent part of his character until late in life. Even the death of his second child is primarily an inconvenience rather than a tragedy. A complete indifference to the suffering of his wife is a clear symptom of neurosis not diligence. It only gets to be called genius in history, not because of what it produced but because of where it leads. Neurotic doesn't imply destructive. However when the therapy, carried on as a slavish routine, becomes a solution, an end in itself, it doesn't lead anywhere but to the hell it is trying to avoid.

Is this purely a personal story therefore? Well not really. It is likely that we all get trapped by neurosis of some sort given that every child develops at best a partial, and at worst a distorted take on reality which is then imported into adult life. If the result is success by prevailing standards, this largely unconscious condition is called a life-passion or driving force. If the results are by conventional norms unsuccessful, these same conditions are obsessions, or addictions. Doesn’t a career as a scientist, and not only a scientist, begin with a presumption of an underlying order awaiting discovery? And what would provoke anyone to presume such order and then to embark on a hopeful life of such discovery, if not an absence of order of one sort or another in one’s formative years? And there always is an absence of one sort or another.

In Kepler’s case the therapy was intellectual; in others’ it might be political; in my case it was, in the first instance monastic, and then military. Only late in life did I recognise my own drive to exist in, by creating it, an orderly world as a consistent theme of my life. I too, like Kepler, ultimately chose an intellectual therapy, corporate finance (a discipline just about as solidly based in reason as astrology). Not because I was particularly gifted in either business deal-making or mathematics but because, also like Kepler, I had found a way to survive economically while pursuing the itch for order in an apparently chaotic world. And I too mistook the therapy for a destination. Your garden variety ends-means confusion. Banville has Kepler recognise his error in a letter of 1611 to his step-daughter (I don't know if the letter is authentic). The recognition is traumatic. Recovery is excruciatingly slow. I'm still recovering.

So thank you John Banville for providing a bit of life-affirmation for me. And thank you as well for the typically Banvillian additions to my vocabulary like caparisoned, utraquist, widow's weeds, pavonian and scolopendrine. I love it when the spellchecker gets snookered. Now, old pal, how about an historical biography of Freud and how psychoanalysis went off the rails?

Poetry and science.

Banville is a fantastic writer, and this I think is his best historical fiction. I really felt I was struggling through the dirt and misery of those times with Kepler, chasing his dream of perfect order in the cosmos, in the footsteps of Copernicus who established that the galaxy is heliocentric. When you are taught the dry facts at school you get nothing of the passion that went into them, and schoolkids should be given more of that.

This isn’t a novel about Johannes Kepler so much as an extended reflection on what it might have been like to have been a largely unacknowledged genius living through a time of war and religious persecution with limited cash and a wife who can’t stand the sight of you. Not much fun if Banville’s portrayal is anywhere near the truth, and it feels very much like it could be. His Kepler is neurotic, paranoid, vain, self-pitying, frustrated and passive aggressive to an almost camp degree. He is also believable and sad, with a sort of inner integrity mixed with defiance that ultimately has you rooting for him. In all of these respects he is a typical John Banville character.

This is not Banville’s most entertaining book - large parts of it are heavy going - but it is yet another example of something Banville does better than any other contemporary English language novelist that I know of, which is to take something seemingly huge (murder, treachery, bereavement, genius) and render it grubby and relatable.