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Newton Letter, The

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"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 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.

"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.

You know, I have a thing for Irish writers. Call it a fetish, call it an obsession, but I think I'll settle for an enthusiastic appreciation. Banville is an author I've been familiar with since long before I seriously got into reading and whom, for some reason, I had never gotten around to. When The Newton Letter was reprinted, I went out of my way to aquire this (I think I pre-ordered this book here on Amazon something like six months before it was published, then got annoyed at a delayed date and picked it up elsewhere). Anyway, it's possible that there isn't a better writer in English than Mr. Banville.

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 . . .

"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 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.

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!!

This book straddles the line between Mr. Banville's early novels and his recent triumph with The Sea. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to stand up well to either.

I went into this book thinking that it was going to be another book with an historical basis in the life of a scientist like his early novels Doctor Copernicus and Kepler. Though set in modern day, the title of the novel seems to imply that this letter from the hand of Isaac Newton is going to play some role in the unfolding of the plot. That, however, is mainly a red herring and I was disappointed.

In fact, we have an author of a book on Newton traveling to the Irish countryside for what he hopes will be a period of focused work to finish his writing. Instead, he gets caught up in the intrigues of the family from which he's renting the cottage but these are mainly intrigues of his own making. The occupants of Fern House indeed have the ins and outs like any family group but the situations and motives put on them are mainly invented by this outsider who misunderstands nearly all of what he sees.

There is much truth in what Mr. Banville is trying to show us here and the brevity of the novel makes it a pretty easy pill to swallow. On the other hand, this book foreshadows The Sea in many ways: the more sophisticated prose and misleading plot being two obvious examples. Yet, being able to compare it to The Sea leaves this book wanting.

Great writers often suffer by comparison to their own work. It's unfair, but it's true. There are many other Banville novels I'd come to before this one.

An historian, on the verge of nervous and mental breakdown, is trying to complete a book on Isaac Newton in a rented cottage in Southern Ireland. The fact and circumstances of Newton's mental collapse of 1693 give him possibility to discern the vacuity of his personal psychological hellhole and urge him into interlacing of real and fictitious love affairs that lead through nothingness to rudiments of new hope and understanding.

The language of the book, its pseudo-Gothic shades of mystery and psychological descriptions of the heroes are excellent. But the plot is rather weak in comparison with such masterpieces as 'Flaubert's Parrot' by Julian Barnes or 'Headlong' by Michael Frayn written in the similar manner.

Towards the end of his already eccentric career, Isaac Newton wrote a letter to his good friend John Locke railing against the temptations of the day and threatening to quit his inquiries into science because of such temptations. Obviously inspired by this letter, John Banville's "The Newton Letter" is a short burst of a novel chronicling a brief period in a man's life when he undergoes an existential crisis similar to that of the aforementioned scientist.
Taking place in the English countryside, and inhabited by the somewhat standard Quirky English Family, the novel is narrated by a literary historian struggling to finish a work about Newton himself. Coming across Newton's letter and both puzzled and inspired by it, he considers giving up his own life's work, and his relations with the Quirky English Family at who's lodge he is staying unexpectedly affect his life and shape the decisions he considers making.
This book could easily have been hundreds of pages long as the characters Banville creates are intense sketches that hint of intriguing, possibly scandalous, back stories. Banville only gives us enough information to understand the narrator and his emotions, and Banville's decision to keep this book short yet intense lends it a power that probably would have been diluted had it been any longer.
"The Newton Letter" accomplishes quite a bit in its eighty plus pages and it is a testament to Banville's writing prowess that such memorable characters and such a memorable story is created in so little time.

This book was somewhat of a disappointment but, nevertheless, it is good reading. One goes have expectations before reading something and I am guilty. LFA

In this short novel, Banville explores themes that he will fully develop in his Booker Prize winning novel, The Sea. In many ways this book, following Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, leads to a transition in Banville's writing. He focuses far less on the historic and conceptual and focuses far more on the personal, the sensual, and the poetic.

Though the narrator is supposedly completing a book on Newton, the story never really deals with Newton except to mention the radical shift in focus by Newton away from physics and toward metaphysics. The story is really about the narrator's relationships with the family that is his landlords. He has an affair with a younger women, Ottilie, and yet finds that he is falling in love with her older aunt, Charlotte. He begins to weave a sordid story of molestation of Ottilie by her uncle, Edward, to explain the child that she has at age 16. Yet, in much of Banville, assumptions are dangerous and lead to convoluted fictions that burst when the real facts emerge. This is such a novel, however, written with superb skill and poetic language.