‘Mefisto’ by John Banville

A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; Picador; 240 pages; 2011.

First published in 1986, Mefisto is an early-career standalone novel by Irishman John Banville that focuses on identity, transformation, morality, chaos and redemption.

It’s a difficult book to review because it’s completely baffling in places, but it is underpinned by exquisite writing, intriguing characters and an edgy, almost Gothic atmosphere that makes for a compelling read.

It’s inspired by the Faust legend in which a scholar makes a pact with the devil, and treads some dark — and occasionally darkly funny — territory.

A book of two halves

In this strange and enigmatic tale, first-person narrator Gabriel Swan, a mathematics prodigy, befriends a mysterious red-headed man called Felix who leads him into weird situations.

The story is split into two halves, the first of which looks at Gabriel’s early life, a loner who is obsessed by numbers and logic but hides his talent for mathematics from his mother.

Sometimes at night I woke to discover a string of calculations inching its way through my brain like a blind, burrowing myriapod. A number for me was never just itself, but a bristling mass of other numbers, complex and volatile. I could not hear an amount of money mentioned, or see a date written down, without dismantling the sum into its factors and fractions and roots. I saw mathematical properties everywhere around me. Number, line, angle, point, these were the secret coordinates of the world and everything in it. There was nothing, no matter how minute, that could not be resolved into smaller and still smaller parts. (Location 402)

The second half examines his new life after he suffers severe burns in an explosion which leave him physically scarred. This disfigurement irrevocably changes Gabriel’s character because he now has to navigate a world in which his scars make him stand out, marking him as a physical freak as well as an intellectual one.

I could not lift my left arm higher than my shoulder, my right was a hinged brown stick. I had no nipples. Half the skin of my stomach had gone to patch my legs, my back. My face now was a glazed carnival mask, with china brow and bulging cheeks, hawk nose, dead eye-sockets. Above it the skull was a tufted leathern helm, the skin taut and glassy, like dried-over slime. (Location 1663)

New world order

When he’s released from hospital, Felix secures him a job for a cranky professor working on a bizarre and cryptic machine known as the “Reizner 666” (note the devil’s number) which is supposedly searching for the meaning of life. But because Gabriel’s mathematical mind seeks order, he can’t understand why the professor gets angry when Gabriel maps out patterns based on the great reams of figures the machine spits out.

He seemed to want only disconnected bits, oases of order in a desert of randomness. (Location 2195)

Later, when Gabriel develops a sexual relationship with Sophie — a deaf woman who depends on his easy access to pain medication to support her drug addiction — he begins to realise he cannot control the chaos around him.

Meanwhile, he grapples with the ongoing menacing threat that Felix — with the “shallow indents at his temples” — will return at any given moment to create more disorder, more chaos.

Unique style

Mefisto doesn’t follow a traditional plot, and even the narrative style is unusual, shifting between clear events and dream-like sequences, so it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. There’s no neat conclusion, either, and I was left with more questions than answers when I reached the final page.

But it hardly seems to matter because this book is one you read for Banville’s beautiful, sometimes labyrinthic prose style. It is his vivid metaphors and descriptive imagery that sets his work apart from that of other novelists.

For instance, he describes hours drifting slowly “past, white, slow, silent, like icebergs in a glassy sea”, compares the air whirring and clicking in Gabriel’s chest to “the sound of a rusty clock preparing to chime” and highlights how the buses “trundle through the streets, gasping and shuddering, like big, serious, labouring animals”.

And he makes us think about things in a different way.

I love how he delves into profound existential and philosophical questions, such as the nature of identity, memory and perception, and contrasts emotions with intellect.

In Mefisto, for instance, he walks a tightrope between the supernatural and science, and puts us firmly in Gabriel’s mind, making us privy to his darkest thoughts as a logical man tries to understand an illogical world.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

I’m still playing catch-up with my John Banville reading — I was supposed to read and review this one in April — but other things got in the way. Thanks for your patience.

♥ My scheduled May read is ‘Book of Evidence’, which I hope to review by the end of the month, and Cathy’s read is ‘Athena’.