"True, he was as fascinated as everyone else when the Godley Interference Effect arising from the field equations of the Brahma theory - that Effect the reality of which is even still hotly contested by the determinists, the priests, and the simple-minded, as we all know all too well - showed that every increase in our knowledge of the nature of reality acts directly upon that reality, and that each glowing new discovery we make brings about an equal and opposite darkening, the punching of a hole in the wall of the great sphere that is time and space and all besides." (p.90)
"As he went under the stone arch-the low, weather-worn gate had a rusted bolt but no lock-he experienced an odd effect. It was a shiver, or a kind of shimmer, as if he were not he but his own reflection passing through a flaw in a windowpane, or better say rippling over a crack in a full-length mirror. And stranger still, what emerged at the other side was not quite him, or was him but changed, being both less and more than he had been, at once diminished and at the same time somehow added to. The thing took no time at all, was over in the space of the blinking of an eye, yet the effect was palpable, and profound. Something had touched him, and left its indelible mark" (p.21)
The physical, psychological and phenomenological world are all one, and interact in mysterious ways.
In the old house, the wife of Adam Godley is still alive, living alone in her bedroom, in the presence of her dog. It is unclear whether she suffers from memory loss, dementia or other ailments, but in any case the inspiration for wonderful lyrical paragraphs such as this one.
"So here they are, woman and dog, the two of them, sharing the vast stillness in which the dog pants softly the way car engines used to pant, pant and shudder, when they still ran on petrol, when she was still a girl. It is as if everything everywhere has stopped, as if the earth has been abandoned. She tries to say the dog's name aloud and some sound comes out, some strangled sound that he seems to recognise, and slowly he lifts his big square head and looks at her, with a calm and disenchanted eye, telling her in a silence more eloquent than any words how it is with him, with her, with all the abounding world." (p.65)
The points of view alternate between Mordaunt and Jaybee, both presented with their respective arrogant and disrespectful view on life, harsh, selfish, with caustic thoughts written in a scathing and judgmental language. There are love affairs, there is theft, there are mysteries and documents hidden in secret cupboards. There is tension all around between the characters, their feelings and their actions.
But be that as it may, the Brahma theory still acts on all characters, and especially on Mordaunt, as if his prison sentence had only been a kind of interval between two states in the free world, but also as a kind of hard to grasp mystical experience.
"On that other side, everything had been different, no, everything had been nothing, everything including himself. Nothing. The experience had been, he realised, not an experience in life, and not in death, either, but an absence, an interval, a caesura, whatever to call it, such that the minutest particles fall into, fall out of, when they perform that famously impossible leap from one go-round to another, the riddle of which was solved and so simply by Adam Godley's interference equation. And a mark had been left on him, the indelible mark of Lazarus. The life that up to that moment had been a matter of sprawling possibilities had come suddenly to seem as narrow as the chiselled notch between the two bleak dates on a gravestone, an instant of an instant. He had died, and had lived. Impossible, and yet it had happened" (p. 241)
At the end of the novel, the couple living on the estate invite all their friends and neighbours and acquaintances to a big garden party. Mordaunt's and Jaybee's relative alienation increases. Even if both are completely different characters, they occupy some kind of mirror image of each other, different yet ressemblant. Mordaunt reflects on the guests at the party:
"And yet how nebulous these people were, not like people at all, really, even though he was familiar with at least some of them. The high full clouds imparted to the air a silvery shine, and the figures moving in it moved vestigially, like wraiths, or like the figures crowding in the background of a dream. Their voices too sounded frail in all that space, and instead of speaking they seemed to make a kind of twittering, as a flock of birds will make, settling upon the darkling trees at eventide. Yes, the day moves on, the sunlight comes and goes, the clouds make their stately, indifferent rearrangements, and the world wanes. (p. 298)
Banville creates a very complex narrative and compositional structure, with absolutely brilliant stylistic mastery of the language, deadly in his observations of human nature, and lifting the 'murder' story to a different level, one in which philosphy and the deeper nature of world also find a place. The main character's psychological distance to his world, his sociopathy, is also the main weakness of the novel. It's hard to have any emotional connection as a reader with the characters. It's all interesting to watch, interesting to read, and you want to know how all things will unfold, yet it's hard to even care what will eventually happen to the people in the novel. Distance is both the subject of the book and its hurdle.
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