Doctor Copernicus | John Banville | Could Life Really Have Been So Difficult?

Doctor Copernicus | John Banville | Scientific, religious, and political revolution

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Doctor Copernicus

	Doctor Copernicus John Banville Vintage, 1993 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976 this historical novel is based on the life of Nicholas Koppernigk, better known as Copernicus, whose ideas and writings shattered the medieval view of the universe. "Kepler", also by John Banville, won "The Guardian" Fiction Prize in 1981.

Could Life Really Have Been So Difficult?

Perhaps, the most salient quality of Mr. Baneville's novel is the medieval context in which it placed. This is a world where syphilis is a terminal and disfiguring disease, where bandits and brigands roam the countryside raping and looting at will. It is a world still lost in the dark caves of superstition and ignorance humanity retreats into when the lights of science and reason have been lost. Baneville's focus and adroit recreation of the perilous setting of late medieval Europe highlights the ultimate importance of Copernicus's astronomical theories and why they were so much more than some abstract academic exercise.

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Scientific, religious, and political revolution

This is the third Banville novel I have read and I find his writing exceptional and challenging. I first read The Sea and then Kepler. Doctor Copernicus, while less poetic than The Sea, is my favorite of the three.

I think it is significant that Banville in his Acknowledgments mentions Thomas S. Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution as a major source. This becomes evident in the second half of the book where Banville does an exceptional job of integrating into novel form Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution into the narrative structure of the novel. Yet, like the works of Iris Murdoch, the philosophy and science are woven seemlessly into the novel structure, never overpowering. John Banville will win the Nobel Prize for literature one day - mark my word.

There are several strenghts in this novel that I would point out.

First, Banville captured a medieval world of turmoil, disease, filth, ignorance, and death. Yet he also captures how exceptional intelligence may be embedded in this world, rise above squalor, develop an intellectual social network for passage of ideas, and produce a product that will communicate to the future ages. And yet, Banville's genius is also to negate these concepts by revealing that exceptional intelligence is still unable to grasp the thing in itself, the nature of reality. That human squalor is a reality in all times and that Copernicus distances himself from the human condition at a price. Copernicus is also a medical physician who is powerless against the horror of syphilis. Banville also allows us no illusion that science is a process of progress marching toward truth, but he has his character Copernicus recognize that his hypotheses in fact would soon be replaced by new truth systems and these new truth systems were only a micron closer to any final reality. Thus we are presented with a picture of human genius which is shown to be limited by the short life span of humans, our inability to focus and concentrate, the wild distractions of everyday life and the pain of the human condition.

The life of Copernicus takes place during a theological revolution with political ramifications. Copernicus lives in Ermland, a Germanic state ruled primarily by his uncle, the Bishop Lucas. This tiny state falls between the Prussian and Germanic Lutheran forces and those of the Teutonic Knights and the Polish Catholic king. Thus Banville has his Copernicus experience the terrors of a theological revolution, as expressed when Copernicus must list the names of the over 2000 victims of the struggle between the Germanic states and Poland for the tiny Baltic states that lay between them. Whereas Copernicus, a Canon of the Catholic Church, no longer believes in the Medieval construction of God, neither Catholic nor Lutheran, he does cling to the rituals of Catholicism and believes that some human truth resides in these ritualistic acts that are independent of the current theology but may be linked to an ultimate reality beyond human comprehension. Thus he knows the process of revolution and he knows the revolution that his work will stimulate and he knows the costs of revolution.

Banville creates a coldly calculating Copernicus, who uses the bright but egotistical Rheticus, to move his publications forward with strategic publications and timing. That this process was supported by Catholic Bishops would indicate that there is a sub-plot in the novel of subversion of the Lutheran faith and Germanic states by taking the manuscript deep into Lutheran territory for publication and distribution. Copernicus's theories were known and discounted by Martin Luther.

The form of the novel was marvelously post-modern, using a distant all seeing narrator in the early chapters, letters and correspondence in later chapters, the acount of the angry Rheticus in the third quarter of the book, and Copernicus' death bed hallucinations as the final chapter.

The character of Copernicus is dry yet we see how this orphaned boy, reared by the cold calculating Bishop Lucas, tortured by his hedonistic brother, and finally rejecting love that he feels for young Italian physician, prepare his cold soul for the distanced work of abstracting and producing his vision of a sun centered system of planetary motion. It is his angry rejected disciple Rheticus who tells us that the world has been fooled and that the Copernican model in fact does not place the sun at the center of the universe but only offers a model for planetary motion and that the sun now becomes a smaller force in a universe without a center. Thus the Biblical world becomes completely unhinged.

The character of Rheticus is wonderfully written for he is bright but egotistical and this leads to his downfall and his being used as the method by which Copernicus could publish in a politically treacherous time. The conversations between Rheticus and Copernicus reveal that Copernicus grasped the nature of scientific revolution and thus was able to see his own work as launching a coneptual revolution with wide ramifications which one day would be overthrown also.

This is an exceptionally well written novel, complex and rewarding.

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Early Banville

I decided to read this book because I very much enjoyed Mr. Banville's latest novel, The Sea, and I wanted to read some of his other work. As a physicist, I was immediately attracted to his three titles on some of the great scientists: Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. As Doctor Copernicus is the first book in the sequence, I started with it and found that I enjoyed it very much.

Of course, this book is very different from The Sea. Doctor Copernicus is one of Banville's early novels and it shows. It is a young man's book. His confidence as a writer is not as evident, his vocabulary is not so wide and the prose does not have the beauty and smoothness that it will come to have. On the other hand, this is a book that believably evokes the time period--the squalor even of the rich, the plagues & poxes, the political & religious intrigues. It is fascinating to submerge oneself into this world.

Mr. Banville also creates a number of excellent characters in this novel: Copernicus' brother, Andreas, and his uncle, the Bishop Lucas are two of the best though my favorite section is the one narrated by Rheticus, a fascinating man who had great influence on Copernicus' life and work. My only complaint is the character of Copernicus himself. Perhaps it is my own extensive experience with scientific history and biography, but the Copernicus Banville creates doesn't quite match up with the Copernicus I see in my head.

Still, how could I expect it to? This didn't stop me from enjoying the novel. I recommend it.

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Copernicus Ubermensch

Yes, I thoroughly agree with the other reviewers, this book is not Banville at his best. But, having said that, I must remind readers that Banville at his worst is a step above other writers at the top of their form. One might say, as a way of placing the book in Banville's oeuvre that this is Banville post-Nietzsche and pre-Proust. That is, this is Banville after he discovered Nietzsche (who, according to Wikipedia anyway, Banville regards as the greatest philosopher of our time) and before he discovered Proust, whose presence is so apparent in all of Banville's mature novels.

But what does this all mean for his representation of Doctor Copernicus herein? It means that Doctor Copernicus is a Nietzschean Ubermensch or Overman. He is, as one character herein explains, straight out of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, like a hawk gazing down at all the ignorant sheep of this world.

What this lends to the novel, in general terms, is a bleak, nihilistic view of the world, or, sticking with the German, Weltanschauung. Banville's Copernicus, like Nietzsche, doesn't believe that there is any absolute reality, even in his own seminal, mathematically elegant view of the world. There is no "thing in itself". There is only the creator, the Overman, and whatever values he posits on this bleak world.

And what do I think of it? Well, this view is contestable, perhaps a bit absurd, when it comes to empirical science and mathematics. But the world in which Copernicus lived was, to the modern reader, almost inconceivably bleak. It was headed toward the bleakest period in German history until the past century, the Thirty Years War, one of the most pointless and barbarous conflicts in human history. It left Germany a wasteland. The prose isn't up to the nuanced Proustian reveries of the mature Banville, but it can still sing. - But, again, what sticks with one after reading it, is a nihilistic, bleak picture of the world and of human endeavour, unredeemed by a delicious, oceanic remembrance of things past. It's not exactly a pick-me-upper.

I'll leave at that except to briefly point out that, early on in the tale, the young Copernicus is confronted with a logic problem by his teacher. The solution is not given in the book. For any compulsive puzzle-solver, like myself, this was a delight. It took me about 20 minutes to work out. Copernicus, young Ubermensch that he was, solved it, of course, instantly.

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Good, but Banville will do better in later novels

By now, I think I can recognize Banville's method. I've read all but "The Sea" and his first two novels; I tried "Birchwood" but found its Gothic gloom too dim. How does DC rank among his other novels? I found it matches "Kepler" not only in the obvious ways of scientific exploration within a dismal and largely uncomprehending society that lags considerably behind the driven pace that propels its restive intellectual misfits. In the use of exchanges of letters, of another perspective by a rival, and in the evocative opening and closing sections, the muddled middle is balanced by the clarity of the book's start and finish.

As with my reviews of his other novels, I will offer a sample of his prose style and his power of characterization. He introduces an early teacher of Copernicus: "his life was a constant state of vast profound annoyance. The ravages wrought by the unending war between his wilfulness and a recalcitrant world were written in nerveknots on the grey map of his face, and his little eyes, cold and still above the nose thick as a hammerhead, were those of the lean sentinel that crouched within the fleshy carapace of his bulk. He did not like things as they were, but luckily for things he had not decided finally how they should be. It was said that he had never in his life been known to laugh." (12-13)

Copernicus is another in Banville's long parade of unlikeable protagonists. The author seems more mired in the details that he brings into the Prussian/Polish/Italian/Teutonic Knights/papal power struggles that accompany first Columbus and then Luther's challenges to the status quo. That is, Banville in this rather early attempt at a historically grounded examination of one man's conceit and compulsion to expand upon and capture the visions in his mind more often than in his later novels gets too bogged down in minutiae. However factual the sources he consulted and adapted are, many of the diplomatic details, the sinister hangers-on, and the high-minded conversations only intermittently soar into the type of prose that, in the novel's beginning and end, remind you of the shifts that open Joyce's "Portrait" as well as a more accessible (barely at times) Beckettian attitude, one largely of contempt by the protagonist for his puny rivals.

This hubris, characteristic of a Banville figure, will bring Dr. C. down, and for a man who feels old at 28, the long slide does not make for a sympathetic or particularly engaging character study. Too much of the central part of the novel is taken up with languid descriptions and an air of lassitude. Less clearly even than in "Kepler," which is saying something, what Copernicus battled to present on paper remains too elusive. While this "failure to communicate" may be understandable in Banville's design to present the failure as well as the intermittent (and barely felt here) success of Copernicus, it does not make for much of a plot that pulls you in, much less a protagonist of interest to the reader.

The rival Rheticus comes to grouse and narrate for a time, as if Banville senses the doldrums, and the pace picks up considerably in the last two sections to match the opening's sense of wonder with a now dismal sensation of defeat in how one man tries to take on the whole universe and force it into his new conception of the nature of things. By no means a bad novel, and in portions rewarding, but not an equal to his later fictions of other bold failures and how they try to redeem themselves. And few novelists can match Banville's amazing ability to pull together in the last pages of his novels all of the themes and characters and poignancy that caps, it seems, his protagonists' declines and falls.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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