books:

	Kepler: A novel John Banville Vintage, 1993 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The author shows us a Rabelaisian world...chaotic, muddled, and dirty. Kepler's famly mirrored this disorder, and he retreated into his own cerebrations for relief.

Kepler took the theories of his time and stood them on their head. He extracted truth from superstition and the story, in Banville's hands, is a triumph, heroic and exuberant." (E.R.S. Reviews)

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Excellent Biographical Novel

Close on the heels of finishing Banville's novel Doctor Copernicus, a story based on the life of Nicholas Copernicus, I started reading this novel on the life of Johannes Kepler. I had enjoyed Mr. Banville's book on Copernicus but I found that I enjoyed this book on Kepler even more. In terms of structure and power of prose, the two books are much the same but in Kepler Banville seems to know his man much better.

Doctor Copernicus powerfully evokes its time period and setting but it does so at the expense of the main character in some ways. Here, Kepler and his story seem to be more the driving force which made for an even more interesting read. Many of the main conflicts of Kepler's life are here--his struggles with Brahe, his problems with his wife, his mother's trial for witchcraft, his endless search for riches & fame along with truth--and they are brought out well through the eyes of the main character.

Banville's mastery of beautiful prose my still lie in the years following this early novel; however, he was a writer of incredible power from his earliest books. For someone interested in science as I am, reading this book is a no-brainer: it needs to be read. However, any reader will find much to enjoy here.

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Astronomy and Counter Reformation forces in Kepler's life

John Banville is an exceptional writer and his biography of Kepler is excellent. Banville is able to show the frustrations in the career of an exceptional thinker and also to capture in beautiful poetic language the three principles that he developed that influenced future scientists.

Banville does a good job of showing the conflicting religions of Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism that were practices throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The more northern the state and the more remote, the more likely that the Lutheran faith was practiced. Kepler was a Lutheran but it would be difficult to claim that the followed entirely the teachings of Martin Luther but used his own perceptions and experiences as a mathematician and scientist to interpret the gospels. He was born in Germany but taught in a Lutheran school in Graz Austria, a town that underwent forced conversions to Roman Catholicism during the counter Reformation.

Kepler is known for developing the three laws of planetary motion, his support for Copernicus, his use of the vast observations of Tycho Brahe to prove his points, and his laying the groundwork for Newton. Banville deals with the principles in a poetic language that explains the principles to the non-scientist reader in the language of myth and dream and lyric.

Kepler was hired as the assistant to Tycho Brahe, the Danish scientist who used systematic observations of the stars to establish a vast amount of observational data of the heavens. Kepler used the 10 years of observing Mars to make his breakthrough discovery that the planets do not travel around the sun in a circular path but in an ellipse. Tycho Brahe was looking for a smart assistant to help carry his work forward, Kepler was not able to agree with Brahe but was able to use the tables developed by Brahe and his assistants to prove his own theories. The novel shows that great men with great minds have difficulties following each other. Jung was forced to break with Freud and thus Kepler was forced to break with Brahe. Kepler did inherit Brahe's position as Imperial Mathematician for the Holy Roman Empire, a position for which he rarely was paid and for which he had to produce astrological charts for fortune tellers for Emperors and Generals.

Brahe is an interesting character in the novel. He wishes to use Kepler's mind and work to support his own theories and did not realize Kepler's level of brilliance and independence. Brahe lost his nose in a duel and used a gold and silver prosthetic nose. Brahe was the first to use nightly systematic observation of the heavens with recorded results over long periods of time. This resulted in his being able to be the first person in 1600 years to identify a new star in 1572, which ran counter to Church teaching that the heavens never change. Brahe was allowed to work in isolation in a castle on a Danish island, a small paradise, until he ran afoul of the Danish king and was exiled to Bohemia.

Kelper was able to also demonstrate that the planets speed up as their elipse nears the sun and then to slow down as they travel further from the sun. He was also able to develop the period formula for the elipse of each planet. His theory that a unifying force the force of gravity.

Kelper's life was sad in many ways, considering that his first marriage was unhappy since he never met the social expectations of his wife Barbara. They lost small children to disease which broke Kepler's heart. Kepler's mother is a cruel sarcastic woman who dabbles in healing which eventually gets her accused of witchcraft. He serves two Holy Roman Emperors, both of whom fail to pay him correctly. He is often under religious persecution for his Lutheran belief in a Roman Catholic court. He is in debt most of his life and yet despite all the challenges, Banville is able to show who Kepler was able to detach himself and think through complex astonomical issues to their end using mathematics, geometry and observation.

This is a thoughful and satisfying book.

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Elliptically told, fitting Kepler's own perigrinations

This earlier historical novel in the scientific series Banville wrote in the 80s sparkles with detail. Especially in the first section, you feel the damp of a castle, the gloom of a chamber, and smell the slops and suds. It's slow going at the start, "Mysterium Cosmagraphicum," as Kepler squares off against Brahe, and tries to gain favor with the Emperor. But this part, in hindsight, dazzles the most for the density of texture, in the prose and what it describes. You glimpse the tension between teaching schoolkids basic skills and Kepler's longing to plunge into elevated research--certainly I could relate to this as a teacher! Banville sketches easily the battle between living in a decaying world and pondering in an ethereal realm timeless (so Kepler thinks) truths.

Part II lacks a title but shows how Kepler the husband must deal with the mundane among an increasingly perilous era when witches are burnt and Protestants are expelled, and how he must make a living thanks to the formidable tension created by his relationship with his father-in-law and his wife. The household and domestic strife both ring with recognizable scenes, despite the superficial differences in decor and diet, and show Banville's ability to capture drama in the everyday affairs that we too share, if in less fraught situations. Throughout the novel, a loved one's loss and the ebb and flow of intimacy within a family as expressed through Kepler's ruminations make for eloquent, yet unadorned prose that convinces you of its truth.

Part III, "Dioptrice," focuses upon his mathematical ambitions and the possibilities and competition opened up by Galileo and his telescope. Here again, the exile from favor he endures balances well with the cosmological theories he seeks to verify slowly and painfully.

For "Harmonia Mundi," part IV takes the form of not only letters to colleagues and friends relating his discoveries, but these letters, from 1605-11, form themselves an arc or an ellipse! I've never seen this before in a book. The letters start in 1605, progress chronologically to 1611, and then slowly retreat again from the verification of his contention that planets move elliptically back gradually to 1605.

For part V, fittingly titled "Somnium," the later years of Kepler are movingly described as once more he must wander out of favor with the imperial contenders within an ideologically divided Central Europe.

This book moves at an uncertain pace, mimicking its protagonist. At times, it drags, perhaps intentionally illustrating the frustrations frequently felt by Kepler within a society that does not understand his devotion to the stars or his introspective fits and starts of genius. You get--to my surprise--few of the details of Prague parading itself that I had expected, given how in the non-fictional "Prague Pictures," (also reviewed by me on Amazon) written two decades after "Kepler," the struggles of Kepler and Brahe are grippingly told by Banville in exactly this Czech context.

The prose does not leap out as vividly in later sections as the former ones, but one quote remains in my mind. Banville provides Kepler's recollection of the loss of his virginity to a teenaged girl he meets at a pub. "Yet beyond the act itself, that frantic froglike swim to the edge of the cataract's edge, he had found something touching in her skinny flanks and her frail chest, that rank rose under its furred cap of bone." (38) The female body and the sexual act have been depicted millions of ways perhaps in literature; at this late state, Banville still can make such familiar scenes vivid again.

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Elliptical Prose

A short review, for a change: I agree with the other reviewers that these "scientific" novels of the early Banville do not hold an early Renaissance tallow candle to his later work.--Please see my review of Doctor Copernicus in re this lack--but just to reiterate, Banville is still Banville, in a celestial sphere above the scrum of other writers.

Yes, as one reviewer has noted, the letters in Harmonia Mundi, the fourth part of the novel, form a chronological circuit of some sort. Call it an ellipse if you must, but methinks this is a wee bit of preciousness on Banville's part.

The other reviewers have covered all the other, ahem, shall we say, foci? - Good period detail (q.v. C.V. Wedgwood's account of the Thirty Years' War if you want more horrors from this ghastly period of history.), interesting insights into Kepler's moods, states of mind etc.

And, most of all, Banville's elegant prose in embryonic stage. How would you describe a layer of fallen snow? Banville describes it thus:

"Cold it had been that morning, the sky like a bruised gland and a taste of metal in the air, and everything holding its breath under an astonishment of fallen snow."

Even in these early works, Banville can still astonish.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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