Customer Reviews

Dark Matter the Private Life of sir Isaac Newton

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

History, rather than the future seems to be where Kerr feels at his most comfortable and demonstrates himself a cut above most thriller and mystery writers. I wasn't a big fan of his novel The 2nd Angel. But his Bernie Gunther series of novels, collected as Berlin Noir, are something else again. I can't begin to remember how many people recommended that book to me, and I have never understood why he has never written another. That aside, this book shows Kerr on his best form since Berlin Noir. At once reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and The Name of the Rose, I enjoyed this novel enormously. It is highly intelligent without being pretentious and extremely readable without ever being predictable. Above all it is informative as well as being entertaining. I am now going to buy a biography of Sir Isaac Newton and find out more about England's greatest scientist. Full marks to Kerr for a really clever idea.

I've read Richard Westfall's bio of Newton - a real monster - and I thought Kerr got him pretty well right. The point is that Newton was a very hard man to get to know, a real mystery. One of these other reviews grumbles that Kerr's portrait of Newton is less than inaccurate. Which part? Newton not being a heretic? He was. Newton not being an alchemist? He was. Newton not believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ? He didn't. Newton not working at the Royal Mint? He did. Newton caring very little for other people? He didn't. Newton being obsessed with empirical method? He was. If anything I got a better impression of Newton the man, than was to be found in Westfall's bio. Frankly if I had a criticism of this book it is that it seemed a little too accurate, sometimes at the expense of making the hero - Newton - seem rather unheroic. I guess this is what happens when you spend so much time with math. It turns you into a cold fish. The other reviewers got it right. This is a classic mystery novel. Best of all, it's beautifully written and easy to read.

DARK MATTER by Philip Kerr is a tale of epic opportunity, but meager result. Kerr attempts to flesh-out a dark, brooding mystery in dark, brooding Central London during the dark, brooding 17th century. A reader could get the feeling that Mr. Kerr was trying to set a certain mood...

The story observes Sir Isaac Newton through the eyes of his apprentice, Christopher Ellis, both "real" people. Newton is, of course, brilliant but also comes across as quite conceited, unfeeling, and not in the least bit charming. One could hope that the Newton character could be likeable, even in an eccentric manner, but Kerr's Newton gives the reader no reason to cheer, or care. Ellis is his swashbuckling sidekick who's good with a sword and better with the ladies. Yes, Ellis is, in fact, THAT cliched. In both cases, the characters move about London with relatively little believable motivation (Newton: pursuit of counterfeiters; Ellis: pursuit of some "tail"). Even with poetic license on his side, Kerr's revelations into the mind of what could be the world's most brilliant scientist are remarkably shallow and unimaginative.

The prose is positively painful. One might imagine Kerr hunched over a thesaurus looking up words that sound old. From the first page, one can tell the reading of DARK MATTER will be an effort: "...a little consideration of heavenly deliverance might have helped me to channel my anger against Papist tyranny instead of the man who had impugned my honour." (And that's not even the whole sentence.) I'll admit the effort was valiant, but it lacks the rhythmic flow of literature of the day, and ends up stilted, staccato, and awkward. The unevenness of his effort is evident, never more dramatically than in the midst of Ellis' flowery description of a particularly attractive (and married) woman, he throws in a comment about her "boobies". Great literature, to be sure.

With shallow characters, a mad-lib mystery plot, and over-formal, pretentious prose, DARK MATTER was a major disappointment.

A mystery which should keep even the most jaded reader intrigued and involved, Dark Matter begins like a typical Sherlock Holmes mystery, with Sir Isaac Newton interviewing Christopher Ellis to work as his assistant as Warden of the Royal Mint, and deducing all manner of personal information from clues he notices on Ellis's person.

But here the similarities end. The murders which Newton and Ellis soon investigate are part of a much broader picture of intrigue than anything in the Sherlock Holmes series, here involving the recoinage of England's silver and gold, battles against smugglers and counterfeiters, the enmity and warfare between England and France, the continuing hatred between Catholics and Protestants in both countries, the missing treasure of the Knights Templar, and alchemy, astronomy, scientific study, and even the ciphers developed a hundred years earlier by Rene Descartes.

Newton remains throughout the novel as a somewhat mysterious character, formal, scholarly, honest, and industrious, but personally remote, even from his niece, with whom he lives. Ellis, on the other hand, quickly engages the reader with his innate charm and physicality--he's an ebullient 20-year-old, "..."

As this surprisingly compatible team investigates several grotesquely staged murders, while battling the political status quo at the Tower of London, where the Mint is located, the reader is taken on a wide-ranging and colorful tour of the city from its royal houses to its bawdy houses, its churches to its opium dens, and its bookshops to its prisons. An informer with a steel nose, a man half eaten by a lion in the Tower, a goldsmith smuggling silver to France, and real characters, such as the vulgar Daniel Defoe and the likeable Samuel Pepys, keep the reader constantly engaged.

The author cleverly and unobtrusively provides several recaps of the action and what it means within the context of the narrative, just at the point when the story may become a bit confusing, clearly remembering that the reader may be unfamiliar with this period and its history. He does burden his story with a large number of characters who appear only briefly and provide scant information, but this is a minor quibble in this ambitious and entertaining novel of enormous scope and historical perspective. Mary Whipple

Phillip Kerr is better known for his Bernie Gunther detective stories especially his Berlin Noir: March Violets; The Pale Criminal; A German Requiem trilogy, but I found Dark Matter to be a thoroughly enjoyable dip into the historical detective genre. Kerr uses Sir Isaac Newton's appointment as Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 as the takeoff point for a murder mystery that involves the pursuit of counterfeiters and a more serious conspiracy to foment an English Protestant version of the St. Bartholomew's Massacre.

Kerr employs many historical characters and scenes. His narrator is Newton's real-life assistant Christopher Ellis. The seemingly inevitable and overused comparison of any detective duo to Holmes and Watson has some merit here. Newton is the idiosyncratic genius and Ellis is the useful aide de snoop (Although it is hard to imagine Watson doing what Ellis does with Newton's niece.).

The Mint is located at the Tower of London and Kerr gives nice description of the Tower's layout in that day as well as the tensions dividing the Royal Mint and the Royal Armoury. Newton and Ellis traverse London's seedier spots such as Newgate Prison, Bedlam, and assorted knocking shops (complete with opium den). The reader meets a number of fascinating historical characters. To name a few: a slippery Daniel Defoe; Cambridge professor, mathematician, and cryptographer John Wallis; the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, and Titus Oates, fabricator of the historical `Popish plot' and freed by a royal pardon, returns in the novel to gin up more anti-Catholic hysteria.

Kerr also examines Newton's anti-Trinitarian Arian religious views, which nearly land him in very deep water (in the novel as well as in real life). Newton's scientific interest in alchemy assists him in uncovering `coiners' as he pursues his duties during the Great Recoinage (the government's attempt to stabilize and normalize the currency).

Pursuing what appear to be four murders related to the Mint, Newton uses his skill and intense labor as a cryptographer to discover that not one, but rather two criminal enterprises are at work. While both crimes are solved, I particularly appreciated the way Kerr wove actual events into his in depiction of the disparate fates of the well-connected and the ordinary criminal. For example, Titus Oates really did receive an unexplained boost in his royal pension from 5 Pounds per annum to 500 Pounds!

Unlike some historical fiction which use a well-known historical event simply as a jumping off point for a routine detective story, Dark Matter makes good use of both large events and historical details, characters colorful and compelling, and a sense of time and place to create a superior historical detective story. In the end, however, Kerr falls short of a five-star effort because he puts too many objects in motion. Perhaps Kerr's momentum could have been better conserved with a little more focus gravity of his subject.

Readers may also be interested in a 2009 work of nonfiction, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson.

I borrowed this audio book from the library, assuming it without really even checking the cover was some kind of a biography of Newton. When I realized it was actually a Sherlock Holmes / Watson type detective thriller, I was initially disappointed and planned to return forthwith, since I'm not really into fiction for the time being. But, I had listened to just enough to make me curious about what was going to happen next, and before I new it, I was hooked. I'm glad in retrospect that I gave this book a chance, because it turned out to be thoroughly entertaining, through and through. Written from the point of view of Newton's assistant at the mint, Christopher Ellis, and superbly narrated by John Lee, this book is worth listening to just for the wonderful usage of the English as it was spoken at the time. When it comes to good writing, this is what I'm talking about. The descriptions of the strumpets, jades, whores, wenches etc. is titillating and a bit shocking. The cruelty of the punishments dished out to the victims of the justice system in that day are horrifying, yet appealing to that part of all of us which lurks beneath the intellect. The love affair between Newton's niece and Ellis handled beautifully, and the culmination of their infatuation is graphically and entertainingly described. Along with the gruesome murders, and action sequences, this book actually delivers a bucket full of sex and violence. Still, the nicely developed plot and the elevated use language makes this book an extremely satisfying read - or I should "listen" in my case. Which leads me to John Lee, whose rendition is about as good as it gets. I agree, though, with a reviewer who stated that the sex and violence need not have been so thoroughly described. It seems a contradiction that such a well-researched and written book should delve so often and so descriptively into the baser matters. It's actually kind of shocking. Toward the end, there emerge some parallels to the DaVinci Code, and the Ellis's questions and speculations in that area eloquent and pleasing. This book is certainly infinitely better written than the DaVinci code. Having read the reviews, I think I'll have to look into Kerr's noir trilogy. I'm quite certain based on this novel that they, too, will prove to be eminently worthwhile.

...I liked it. Is it the definitive biography of Newton? Well, no, but if that's what you're looking for, why would you read a novel? It is, I think, a good stab at making a living character of Newton--which is saying something considering the pains Newton took to hide just about every personal detail of his life.

The murder mystery/forensics aspect seems to me just the stage dressing behind the portrayals of the characters. Newton and his spunk-bucket niece Catherine are the most fully delineated, followed by pretty nearly everyone else, followed by the narrator, Christopher Ellis. Ellis is the most one-dimensional character, perhaps because he's the only one Kerr had to create without the springboard of reality. (There was a real Christopher Ellis, but apparently almost nothing is known about him.)

As to the writing itself, Kerr does pretty well at keeping the flavor of seventeenth-century English without making the text impossible to wade through, and throws in a few clever allusions along the way. My only beef is that he uses whole quotes by and about Newton without paraphrasing. That comes across as jolting and stilted; it would have been better had Kerr springboarded off them as well, working them into his own writing style and keeping them fresh.

I know this sounds like a lukewarm review, but I really did like the book! It's not a heavyweight, but it's diverting and entertaining, and besides there's plenty of ponderous stuff about Newton out there. Let your hair down, relax, and enjoy it.

You don't often read a thriller or mystery novel that leaves you feeling like you've learned something as well as having been thoroughly entertained, but this is that book. Excellent.

The book, Dark Matter: The Privet Life of Sir. Isaac Newton was a very interesting book. I read through the first 250 odd pages with excitement and enjoyment. However, once the book reached page 300, it felt like the author realized he had to finish it and then quickly tied up all the lose ends almost to neatly. My other main problem with the book is something, which I encounter with the vast majority of modern fiction, and that is sex. There seems to be this idea that a book must have at least one scene during which people must engage in the act, now I understand that on occasion this is important to the plot or the character development, however, must we actually be subjected to a detailed analysis of the actions preformed? This book would have been better, and the characters as well developed had we not been 'privileged' to their sexual activities. Still on the whole, it was an enjoyable book, with strong characters, and an interesting plot.

This is the first novel by Philip Kerr that I have read. I was attracted to this book by the subtitle: "The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton." As a teacher of math and physics, how could I resist a book that uses one of my heroes as a main character? Of course, I should have remembered the old adage about the disappointment in meeting your heroes.

In this novel we find Isaac Newton as the Warden of the Royal Mint. The story is told through the eyes of Christopher Ellis, Newton's assistant. The two men are investigating illegeal coining which leads them to a plot to overthrow the government. Needless to say, they save the day.

The storyline of this novel is filled with murders and intrigue--interesting enough for an easy-to-read thriller. And Kerr does a good enough job giving us a sense of London at the close of the seventeenth century. What was missing, for me, was Newton.

In many ways, despite the subtitle, Newton is a secondary character in this novel after Ellis. This is fine, on one level, but when Newton does appear he comes off as more of a poor man's Sherlock Holmes than a unique character. Perhaps I have studied histories of Newton too much to be an objective reader, but the Newton Kerr brings forth in his novel is difficult for me to reconcile with what I have always imagined Newton was like. Not that Kerr gets facts wrong, he doesn't. It just feels wrong to me. And so it was difficult for me to enjoy this novel.