The Newton Letter [Paperback]

Written in the first person, the nameless, fiftyish male narrator of "The Newton Letter" is an historian who has spent seven years writing a book about Sir Isaac Newton. Seeking a sanctuary to finish his work, he rents a small cottage at an estate in southern Ireland known as Fern House, "a big gloomy pile with ivy and peeling walls and a smashed fanlight over the door, the kind of place where you picture a mad stepdaughter locked up in the attic." It is a setting, and a story, heavy with gothic overtones.

In his words, "the book was as good as done, I had only to gather up a few loose ends and write the conclusion-but in those first few weeks at Ferns something started to go wrong . . . I was concentrating, with morbid fascination, on the chapter I had devoted to [Newton's] breakdown and those two letters [Newton had written] to Locke."

He becomes obsessed, however, not only with Newton's two letters to John Locke, but also with the inhabitants of Fern House: Edward, the often drunk master of the house; Charlotte, his wife, a tall, middle-aged woman with an abstracted air and a penchant for gardening; Ottilie, the big, blonde, twenty-four year old niece of Charlotte; and Michael, the adopted son of Edward and Charlotte.

The narrator soon becomes entangled with Ottilie in a mysterious way when she appears at his door. "It's strange to be offered, without conditions, a body you don't really want." But what, exactly, is the nature of his relationship with Ottilie? When he embraces her, he feels "the soft shock of being suddenly, utterly inhabited." In the pervasive aura of the gothic, the reader wonders exactly what is happening, for, as the narrator enigmatically relates in the middle of the novel while making love to Ottilie, "how should I tell her that she was no longer the woman I was holding in my arms?" It is a strange statement, presumably intended to refer to the fact that the narrator's true obsession is with the older, aloof Charlotte, even as he cavorts with Ottilie. The mystery is fed by the narrator's conclusion, where he speaks of brooding on certain words, "succubus for instance." It suggests, in short, a kind of surreal narrative imagining, where the realism of the narrator's struggle with his book on Newton is confounded by the incursion of the strange, enigmatic and, at times, dreamlike inhabitants of Fern House.

"The Newton Letter" is a powerful, intricate and allusive work of imagination that demands the reader's careful and thoughtful attention. Banville shows, with remarkable skillfulness, how the narrator's imagined history of the inhabitants of Fern House is undermined by successive, incremental discoveries of the reality of their lives. At the same time, Banville draws on the gothic to lend his tale an imaginative element that is both a counterpoint to the real lives at Fern House and a touchstone to the enigma of the Newton letters. Like great works of literature, "The Newton Letter" is an ambiguous text open to many interpretations, the writing an elliptical treasure that allows the reader's imagination to run free in the interstices of Banville's creative field.

Now let me go out of the way and say that the story of this book isn't very compelling. It's about some guy finishing some long and dull sounding book about Isaac Newton and all the things that went on in his life during the many years of composition. All this in under a hundred pages. But, of course, there is a very deep and very dark subtext lingering about, dealing with all those private torments and suicidal thoughts going through a boring, self-absorbed man while his life falls apart around him. And he's superficially indifferent to his personal failures, pouring his everything into his dry book on a crazy genius from 300 years before. It is a very sad story.

But the prose, the language, the rhythmic flow of every word inside this small masterpiece keeps the reader riveted. It seems that virtually every human emotion is explored (or explained) in this book. Jealousy and envy and hatred and deep, never-ending love swirl around and around and slap you in the face and make you feel, make you tear out your hair in anger and dry your eyes from ever-present tears (sometimes from laughter). And while this is far from Banville's best book (something that makes aspiring authors go through much of what the hopeless narrator goes through while dealing with someone who is his infinate superior), it is probably the best introduction to his style. Banville's best books are The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, Athena and The Untouchable, another depressing fact considering those are his four most recent efforts. I see Nobel Prize, finally deserving, going back to Ireland. God bless the Queen . . .