Doctor Copernicus by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Accidental Hero

What was it that inspired this book? Apparently not its subject. As portrayed by Banville, Copernicus is hardly a prepossessing character. Emotionally he is vacant and incomprehensible - at times irrationally loyal to his brother, at other times completely indifferent (ditto for his cousin-housekeeper-concubine), alienated from his female siblings for reasons that are vague, essentially friendless with a chip on one of his tradesman’s son’s shoulders toward the aristocracy, and on the other toward the better placed intelligentsia of the period. Intellectually he is a desultory scholar. His concern with astronomical theory is intermittent and hardly the driving force of his life. He is a dabbler who reacts to conditions, both of the mind and of the body, usually passively, as they arise. Although a minor cleric as cathedral canon in a Catholic region, he has no point of view on faith or the church (or on science for that matter) except as a possible impediment to the publication of his ideas.

The best that can be said of Banville’s Copernicus is that he is no fanatic, religious or humanist, in a time of fanatics. He is a medical doctor without empathy, a perennial student without a clear subject, a competent bureaucratic administrator but without perspective or judgment, a diplomat with little diplomacy, a lawyer without a practice. He is a grey personality, having no clear direction in his life except a desire for reclusion and anonymity. The world of the Reformation, global exploration, the humanist Renaissance, and Prussian militarism swirls about him but raises little concern except when he is confronted directly by their effects - and even then he barely registers a response. The overall picture is one of an accidental intellectual hero, detached and aloof to the point of psychotic depression. Not therefore an obvious candidate for a biographical novel, or a promising beginning to Banville’s Revolutions Trilogy that moves from Copernicus, to Kepler to Newton.

There is much ‘throbbing’ by dogs and silences in Banville’s prose, and frequent allusion to the seductive evils of the time - nominalism, Gnosticism, solipsism, and clerical homosexuality - which pervade an otherwise brutal European existence. There is the typical Banvillian expansion of one’s vocabulary with words like ‘jesses’. ‘prog’, and ‘biood-boltered’. But there isn’t much attention devoted to the intellectual challenge Copernicus confronted in overcoming the remnants of scholasticism. Banville seems to be anachronistically anticipating the ‘reality vs explanatory’ schools of quantum theory rather than developing the issue of the biblical authority for an earth-centred cosmos.

In short, Banville doesn’t give the reader a reason to be interested in Copernicus’s life other than that he is an historical celebrity. Perhaps that is the only justifiable reason. If so, is it reason enough? That science and scientists can be excruciatingly prosaic?

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