SUNDAY

PLAIN DEALER

Books

CLEVELAND, `FEBRUARY 27, 1977

Copernican gothic: The bad old days

DOCTOR COPERNICUS, by John Banville; Norton, 242 pp., $8.95.

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By Laura Jane Stillman John Banville has made a gothic novel out of the life of Copernicus. It has the right gloomy atmosphere, the characters behave in a suitably ambiguous way, and suspense is provided by the question, "Will he or won't he publish his book?"

Of course the book was the great 16th-century astronomer's mathematical proof that earth and planets revolve around the sun at that time a truly heretical idea, for everyone knew that all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth.

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Copernicus had studied in Italy, mastering canon law, medicine, mathematics and several languages, as well as astronomy. He was a brilliant scholar and a conscientious administrator in his post as canon of Frauenberg Cathedral in Ermland, a tiny state between Prussia and Poland.

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Wars and the quarrels of princes occupied most of his time, along with ministering to the sick and tending the affairs of the cathedral.

But he lived alone in a tower in the cathedral wall, and there he could indulge his passion for astronomy.

As it turned out, his great. work, Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, was not published until the last year of his life, even though many scholars had known about it earlier and he had been urged to publish by a cardinal and a pope.

Certain facts about his family and friends are known, but most of his correspondence has disappeared and very little is known about his personal and emotional life.

It is that life that John Banville has tried to reconstruct.

He has researched his subject well and skillfully plunges the reader into the horrors of life in the 15th and 16th centuries. In fact one almost drowns in the filth, the brutality, the vulgar talk, the rigid class system, the murderous wars sweeping the countryside. I emerged feeling grateful for the 20th century. We live in paradise. But can it be true that in that time everybody was paranoid?

In this book it seems so. Everyone is plotting or suspecting plots. All is dark and mysterious. Banville makes of the young Copernicus a sensitive, poetic creature, haunted by nameless dangers.

Banville has necessarily had to invent. Copernicus does come through as a living character, and so do

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John Banville

various others. What bothers one is the nagging question, "Is it true?"

Is it likely, really, that Copernicus held off publication because he suffered from existential despair? Or that his disciple, Rheticus, to whom we owe the publication, behaved like a madman? Or that Copernicus had a homosexual love affair in his youth? Why make Copernicus' brother suffer from syphilis when what he had (I looked it up) was leprosy?

The novel's baroque style has to be admired for the spell it casts, even though one longs for a blue pencil. And it does, for a while, transport the reader from the 20th century.

One oughtn't, though, to take it for history.

Laura Jane Stillman, a free-lance reviewer, lives in Akron.