Johannes Kepler wants to unite the heavens in a glorious mathematical and astronomical harmony, and he has the genius to do that very thing. Everything else about his life is out of tune, from his own abrasive personality to his marriage and his religion, as well as his reliance on wealthy patrons to fund his scientific endeavours and with whom he is always at odds or out of step.

I think Banville's books are less about either the explicated sciences or the accurate biographies of these men, but about their hidden inner lives as they grapple with the huge questions of the universe and discover that they can gain knowledge but not meaning or understanding, and they are forced to question the worth of this undertaking when set against the banal vicissitudes of life and the looming certainty of death.