Mysterium Cosmographicum

John Banville has long been a favorite writer.  For me his principal strength has always been the writing itself.  His prose is just about always lovely.  There is so much pleasure in reading his words.  With Banville I can relax in the confidence that my senses will be well cared for.  In that regard ‘Kepler’, a short historical novel based on the life of the Renaissance astronomer, astrologist and writer Johannes Kepler, is no exception.  I like to read Banville with a highlighter in hand; I just can’t resist marking some striking passages.  I’m not sure these excerpts will read so well out of context, but nevertheless:

‘A bubble of gloom rose and broke in the mud of his fuddled wits.’

‘Italian oranges throbbed in a pewter bowl on the table between them.  Kepler had not seen oranges before.  Blazoned, big with ripeness, they were uncanny in their tense inexorable thereness.’

‘Her labour lasted for two days.  The rain of February fell, clouding the world without, so that there was only this house throbbing around its core of pain.’

‘The game, which they had not realized was a game, had ended; suddenly life was taking them seriously.  He remembered the first real beating he had got as a child, his mother a gigantic stranger red with rage, her fists, the startling vividness of pain, the world abruptly shifting into a new version of reality.  Yes, and this was worse, he was an adult now, and the game was up.’

‘Regina tentatively came to him, and, her face buried in his cloak, whispered something which he did not catch, which she would not repeat, which was to be forever, forever, a small gold link missing from his life.’

‘His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.’

‘Curious, how easy it is for us little creatures to confuse the opening of our eyes with the coming into being of a new creation: like children conceiving the world remade each morning when they wake.’

‘Even random phenomena may make a pattern which, out of the tension of its mere existing, will generate effects and influences.’

Kepler's illustration of geometric harmony.

It’s a relatively short book, and is not by any means a full-scale biography.  It is historical fiction in the best sense:  truly creative writing based on real people and events.  The narrative is a little confused, particularly in the last quarter of the book, but Banville manages to share real insight into the mind of the Renaissance man.  He illustrates the almost manic search for patterns, for truth, for meaning.  That some of those supposed patterns are severely limited by the concepts and prejudices of the day is inevitable.  At the time, who could say what was real truth and what was an irrelevant pattern forced onto the data from the outside.  Who today can know that about today’s best thinkers?  A few hundred years from now they’ll be considerable snickering about some of those early 21^st century limitations and prejudices.  We just can’t see them as such today.

Much earlier in my life I spent years working in the field of music theory, particularly Schenkerian analysis.  The search for patterns and structure is prominent in that field, and the dangers are similar.  Many patterns are there which don’t much matter.  Some are coincidental, some merely incidental.  But others are basic to a core understanding of the music itself, and are unconsciously perceived and appreciated by trained listeners.  And those patterns provide the structure on which pure beauty, grace, and emotion can safely be draped.  The art is not just the structure, but without the structure the art will collapse.

Or maybe, as Banville has Kepler say:

‘Since God, in his highest goodness, was not able to rest from his labours, he played with the characteristics of things, and copied himself in the world.  Thus it is one of my thoughts, whether all of nature & all heavenly elegance is not symbolized in geometry . . . And so, instinctively or thinkingly, the created imitates the Creator, the earth in making crystals, planets in arranging their leaves & blossoms, man in his creative activity.  All this doing is like a child’s play, without plan, without purpose, out of an inner impulse, out of simple joy.  And the contemplating spirit finds & recognizes itself again in that which it creates.  Yes, yes, Roslin:  all is play.’

Really?

A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year.  Critical acclaim from serious authors and reviewers. The New Yorker loved it.  Lots of play in the publishing world.  All over the bookstores.

Chad Harbach’s first novel, ‘The Art of Fielding’, made a big splash.  I must be missing something.  It’s a pleasant enough read,  but overall it comes across as a book for the young adult reader. And it probably wouldn't succeed there either. Lots of baseball in the plot.  A team to root for.  A championship game. A shortstop who thinks himself into trouble.    Off-the-field action which includes romance, parents, a college president, gay themes, alcohol.  There’s nothing wrong with having young characters act like young people, but here we have pretty much all characters (both young and old) viewed through the eyes of young (not so experienced or insightful) people.  That’s a pretty shallow and uninteresting perspective, and not at all what I expected.

Now here's a shortstop

Yes, there are some interesting literary references.  Nice to see serious and literature and sports mixed in the same book.  The writing itself is serviceable, occasionally clever, but never beautiful, inspiring, or original.  The plot presents one totally implausible event after another.  Sorry, but things just don’t happen that way in real life, and this tries to be a totally realistic book.  There are no fantasy elements or literary pretenses that ask us to suspend disbelief.  It’s life viewed by a 15-year-old, and not a particularly smart one at that.  There’s just way too much packed into the plot, and none of it gets the deeper more considered treatment that it deserves.  Characters are empty vessels for the demands of the plot.  None of it is convincing from an emotional viewpoint.

I just don’t get it.  It’s pleasant enough.  I would have enjoyed it on the beach 45 years ago.

Sorry to be negative.  It’s pretty unusual for me to be so disappointed.  I choose my reading carefully and I’m conscientious about finding the rewarding aspects of what I read.  Came up pretty much empty here.

There’s always next season.

The Big Picture

The filmmaker and writer John Sayles has produced a fascinating book in ‘A Moment in the Sun’.  Part historical fiction, part set pieces, part social commentary, part short stories, it’s huge (almost a thousand pages).  There are many characters, and quite a few of them appear only briefly, never to return in the narrative.  They’re there to make a point, to illustrate a particular place and time.  Many of the characters are two-dimensional, and not very interesting as people.  But the overall effect is dazzling.

Big, but well printed and bound. Good exercise.

Sayles makes no bones about his political leanings.  The book could be seen as a literary corollary to Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’.  Sayles and Zinn would probably agree that traditional textbook history is more propaganda than truth. Every grand historical figure in Sayles's book is cast in an unfavorable light.  Their achievements are portrayed as self-serving, their motivations far from generous, and their breakthroughs almost accidental.  But for Sayles and Zinn the real triumphs belong to the little people, the ones that suffer relentless hardship and deprivation but sometimes manage to survive with dignity and a measure of grace, and whose accomplishments though modest are often honestly earned.  At other times they are ground to bits by the unyielding and unforgiving machinery of economic growth, capitalism, and politics.

The book is narrowly focused on just a few years, 1897 to about 1902.  But within those few years the breadth of view is vast.  Sayles covers the Yukon gold rush, frightening racist political developments in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Spanish-American War in Cuba, U.S. intervention in the Philippines, the development of African-American divisions in the U.S. armed forces, New York City, several important technological developments, prison life, yellow journalism, and various entertainment venues.  I came away much better informed about that time even though Sayles doesn’t attempt to teach history directly.  Through the experiences of the characters (both major and minor) we come to understand the historical context.

Any writer who can produce such a long book and keep the reader interested, informed, and entertained pretty much throughout must be doing something right.  I got through the book in a little under a month, and that included a decent amount travel when time for reading was limited.  It’s quite possible to put the book down for a few days and pick it up again without losing much.  The structure is flexible, maybe even loose.  Some of the set pieces are brilliant.  And Sayles has a wonderful ear for dialogue and dialect.  Many of the scenes are very cinematic and would work well on the big screen.  Or maybe a 100-part mini-series on PBS.  Or maybe not.

In some places Sayles’s political agenda is applied with a heavy hand.  We’re hit over the head repeatedly with certain concepts and views, and that got tiresome for me in a few places.  But should you have the same reaction, just read on.  You’ll soon return to more imaginative writing and some fresh ideas.  Sayles’s makes some obvious though not explicit references to contemporary events.  There is an account of water boarding in the Philippines that exactly parallels our own experiences in the war on terrorism.  Interesting how little things change.

It’s hard to come away from reading this book with much traditional patriotic pride.  It’s not a pretty picture on the grand scale.  Ours is an aggressive and arrogant country that has continuously nourished those in power from the sweat and misery of others both here and abroad.  The amount and severity of violence and racism is disturbing.  The ignorance of the masses is discouraging as is the ease with which they are manipulated by those in power. But our cult of the individual does allow for a remarkable degree of individual freedom, even if most of the available paths lead to degradation and pain.   We work incredibly hard and we constantly push forward.  There is always hope.  Things are always changing.  It is possible to rise to the top.  But should you be trampled by the crowd instead, society won’t hold out much of a safety net.  It’s a high stakes game, and we are hooked on the thrill of playing.

I read much of the book while traveling in Germany and Switzerland, where the individual is much less important and the collective good is more highly valued.  So different, and fascinating to observe while reading Sayles.  As much as I admire the more civilized European approach, as an American I don’t think I could always abide the limits and restrictions that come along with that more sophisticated approach.  Or maybe it would just take some getting used to.  After all the Europeans fought each other in bloody wars for century after century before finally realizing that they might be better of trying to cooperate and share the limited resources at their disposal.  Can’t be sure that this new approach will work either.  Things can get ugly pretty quickly.

Sayles has managed a historical novel with echoes of Dickens, Balzac, and Zola.  It’s more historical and less literary than their works, but give it a try.  Enjoy the writing.  And you’ll probably learn something along the way.