Mefisto by John Banville Search Amazon for other books by or about John Banville. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

John Banville is one of the great contemporary authors and his books are always fascinating and beautiful things to read, albeit that it is not always immediately clear what is really going on or with what freight of meaning the author has loaded the text. Mefisto is his adaptation of the Faustus legend to modern Ireland. A boy, Gabriel Swan, is a talented mathematician far beyond anything his small town parents and neighbourhood can understand or indeed accommodate. He comes across Professor Kosok, a would-be mentor or role model who is equally a mathematician and a seeker of order amidst chaos. Rejected for his beliefs, the Professor's goal is both seductive and chilling, since it is the creation of order from chaos that was one of the chief pretexts for supporting fascist parties including the Nazis. Yet Gabriel still seeks the need to make sense of the world and his place within it through the medium of numbers. This is where the slightly older Felix comes in: Felix is angular and slippery and has a way with outrageous jokes and language. Through Felix, who is of course the Mephistopheles figure, Gabriel (no name, of course, is given by accident or in any kind of naïve way) is offered the opportunity to satisfy both his mental and his physical needs, first through Sophie, who can neither hear nor speak, then through the drug addicted Adele, who clearly has her own issues. In the same way that Marlowe's Dr Faustus and Goethe's Faust both behave once they have been given what they believe is to be the key to their hearts' desire, Gabriel too finds that his imagination fails his vaunting ambition and that which he desires is shabby and compromised.

All of this is managed both with a delightful delicacy of language and also as it were within a mirror: it is possible to make out what is going on but there is a remove or some other intermediation which makes meaning and reality able to wriggle away into some other kind of dimension. This will not appeal to everyone but does demand a thoughtful response and, ideally, the time and opportunity to read the book again in contemplative mode. Well, of course, there is no real reason why all of the meaning of a text should be inscribed as it were on its surface and easy to see for everyone immediately. Meanings are embedded within the contexts in which texts are written and can, therefore, only be fully understood with careful study and consideration. If life were easy, everyone would have figured it out by now.