The Newton Letter

by John Banville

Book Overview

A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rent a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he need, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446392839
• ISBN13: 9780446392839
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Warner Books (NY)
• Length: 97 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Banville, not Newton, arrives

FINALLY, a true Banvillean work of art. Immediately previous to reading The Newton Letter, I had ploughed through Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, in which Banville, in which he later admitted was a misguided quest, attempted to incorporate the work of these scientists with their lives. Both of them are rather clunky works at best. There is no such attempt in the Newton letter, and I am more than a little taken aback at some of the other reviewers who take Banville to task for not concentrating on Newton and historical accuracy. This is not what Banville's about here. This is about a man writing a book about Newton, not about Newton himself, and, as such, presages Banville's mature first person poetic narrative reveries. All one has to do is to read The Book of Evidence, Athena, Ghosts, The Untouchable or, the only other Banville work some reviewers seem to have read, The Sea, to recognise this stylistic leap. The connexion with Newton (a fictitious Newton who, as Banville acknowledges in a final note, never penned the all-important second letter to Locke) is an authorial trope. Newton, in this supposed letter, states that he has lost the ability to communicate, either in Latin or in English, what he perceives. The same might be said for the narrator throughout this short book. He is never quite aware of who people are, of their pasts, their motives, their desires, inclusive of himself. And who of us is so thoroughly aware of what lies in the depths of others or of what lurks inside ourselves in our constantly shifting, transitory lives? Who of us can peer so deeply into ourselves or into the lives of others to truly know much at all about what roils inside? Above all, here, unlike in Doctor Copernicus or in Kepler, we have the first glimpse of Banville's sweeping, magisterial prose sustained from start to finish, with which I shall end this review, hoping it speaks volumes to the prospective reader: "Spring is a ferocious and faintly mad season in this part of the world. At night I can hear the ice unpacking in the bay, a groaning and tremendous deep drumming, as if something vast were being born out there. And I have heard gatherings of wolves too, far off in the frozen wastes, howling like orchestras. The landscape, if it can be called that, has a peculiar bleached beauty, much to my present taste. Tiny flowers appear on the tundra, slender and pale as the souls of dead girls. And I have seen the auroras."

A Powerful, Intricate, Allusive Little Novel

"The Newton Letter" is a mere eighty-one pages, a good thing since this imaginative and masterfully written, but often cryptic, novel needs to be read at least twice (if not three times) to fully appreciate John Banville's enigmatic, introspective tale.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

Simply the Best

I had borrowed this book from the library a long long time ago and I somehow happened to pick it up after like 3 books and read it in a span of two days! This was the first time I was venturing to read a Banville and thank god, I did decide to pick it up. A short novella - around 97 pages and riveting!This book is a letter written by the narrator - who is nameless and has entered the Irish countryside to finish his book on Newton only to discover and re-discover his own denied passions and emotions. His cottage is situated in a place called Fern house where he encounters a strange lot of people - Edward, Charlotte, Edward's Sister Diana and her husband Tom, Ottilie - Charlotte's so-called niece and little Michael. As the narrator gets engrossed in their lives, he loses focus of the book, only to drown it. This is a classic juxtaposition of how Newton one fine day gave up on science and took to alchemy. This book is one of a kind and when I say this, I really mean it. Banville conjures a mystery, a love story, a discovery sometimes and beauty of language so rare these days in most novels - and where else can one find such a combination and being told in 97 pages!! Wow!!

Two Mysteries

"The Newton Letter" is a novel of twin obsessions: a writer attempts to discover the cause of Isaac Newton's nervous breakdown in 1693 even as he is drawn deeper into the secrets of a family with whom he lives on a dilapidated Irish estate. The first obsession involves truth; we are told of Newton in 1693 that, "[H]is greatest work was behind him . . . He was a great man now, his fame was assured, all Europe honoured him. But his life as a scientist was over." and from this characterization the hapless writer struggles to construct a reason for the scientist's decline, allowing him to complete his book and to leave his dead surroundings. But even as he approaches this truth he is held back by a second obsession, one precipitated by love - the writer's affair with the young Ottilie and his yearning for the older, distant Charlotte. Banville uses the gothic, decayed setting and the elusive characters to explore the forces which drive humanity: those which provoke us to achievement and those which drive us to despair. It is worth noting that Banville has previously written of scientists and astronomers - "Doctor Copernicus" (1976) and "Kepler" (1981) - and with Newton he continues to mine the dichotomy that exists between the pure, objective truths of the heavens and the broken, imperfect reality of life on earth. With his impeccable gift of description and his sheer joy for language, John Banville has concocted a tale which both entertains and provides impetus for reflection. One has come to expect no less from him.