The Infinities By John Banville (Picador, £14.99)
John Banville’s new novel is in part a sacrilegious riposte to the modernist notion of the invisible, indifferent author. It is narrated by the playful and melancholy figure of the god Hermes—a deity who cannot help dabbling in mortal matters, while at the same time deploring the carnal excesses his father Zeus visits on humanity. It’s a conceit that could become tiresome in other hands, but Banville is a writer of such deftness that The Infinities is simultaneously a sly disquisition on death, divinity and the nature of fiction.
This is not the first time such a device has touched Banville’s fiction. In 2005’s Booker-winner, The Sea, Banville explored the effects of a kind of divine intervention on a more subtly metaphorical plane; his narrator, Max Morden, recalled a fateful summer spent with a family of “gods,” the Graces. But a delicious literalism also links the two novels, not least at the level of names. The protagonist of The Infinities—if that is the word for a man felled by a stroke, who spends most of the novel in bed—is one Adam Godley, an eminent mathematician whose son, another Adam, is married to Helen, after whom the elder Adam also lusts (it is Helen who is memorably ravished, as if in a dream, by the old goat Zeus). The dying Adam is married to Ursula, an alcoholic with a propensity for “not being entirely present.” Their 19-year-old daughter Petra is a self-harming depressive who desultorily amasses data for a projected almanac of all known human diseases.
Around this family of fretful ciphers, who have gathered in expectation of old Adam’s imminent demise, circle various threadbare individuals who seem to exist on the brink of caricature. Petra’s “young man” (they do not seem to be lovers) Roddy Wagstaff is an aspirant fop of sexless mien and airy, weightless aspect. The housekeeper, Ivy Blount, seems to have wandered in from some “big house” melodrama of a century ago. And the fat, sweaty Benny Grace—“sunk in the puddle of himself,” writes Banville—is a suspiciously benign presence as Adam nears his end: the old man’s longtime benefactor who now insists he will not die.
Even allowing for the presence of ludic and lascivious deities aloft in the air about them, the names of Banville’s characters and their surroundings ought to alert us to the fact that we are not exactly in the Ireland of the recent past, as it sometimes seems. For a start, the Godleys’ house is called Arden. The Shakespearean citation is only the first of Banville’s erudite ploys; the more telling echo is of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Ardis” in his 1969 novel Ada, itself an oddly unworldly family chronicle. The sense of unreality becomes all the stronger when Banville notes in passing certain historical and technological commonplaces of his fictional world. There are anti-gravity trains, cars that run on salt water, “rocket ships that will fly the net of time.” Mary Queen of Scots, we learn, usurped and beheaded Elizabeth I, Goethe has been forgotten in favour of Kleist and Sweden is “on the warpath again.”
The Infinities, it turns out, is not taking place in “our” world at all. Adam Godley’s singular achievement as a thinker has been to posit the existence of alternative universes: a slightly clunky and obvious trope that nonetheless allows Banville to play seductive games with the nature of narrative. Competing worldviews—divine, scientific, novelistic—abut and overlap each other; “everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate.”
Hermes the storyteller tries hard to maintain his narrating voice, but it constantly threatens to become that of the character he happens to be channelling; “I must stick to the third person,” he laments. In a crucial but almost unnoticed shift towards the end of the novel, his place is taken as narrator by the dying Adam himself, the stunned and “vegetate” hero grasping at the last the reigns of the novel, in the face of a decidedly untheoretical death of the author.
As ever with Banville, all of this, domestic and fantastical, is rendered in prose that is rarely less than scintillating. He is sometimes accused of a weightless eloquence, of prizing a deft syntactic swerve over the mechanics of plot, or adjectival niceties over solidly realised persons. But this is to miss his central theme, which is precisely his character’s shuttling between the word and the world, between the pleasures and horrors of being embodied and the solacing (or debilitating) distance of art, science, thought.
The Infinities is full of small descriptive astonishments—grass sparkles, “as if with malice.” Banville describes Helen’s miscarried foetus as “a little soft limpet clinging to the wall of the womb, blind and bewildered,” and the tubes that feed the bedridden Adam as delivering “insipid wheys and saps” to his desiccated body.
The other common objection to Banville’s fiction is what is called its coldness, by which I suppose is meant everything from his unforgiving word choices—unforgiving, that is, of character and reader alike—to his narrators’ heartlessness with regard to the life or death of others and sometimes themselves.
For those who cannot stomach his practiced asperity, schooled on Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, The Infinities toys with the idea of a happy ending, but reminds the unwary “that to make a happy ending we must stop short of the end.”
John Banville’s new novel is in part a sacrilegious riposte to the modernist notion of the invisible, indifferent author. It is narrated by the playful and melancholy figure of the god Hermes—a deity who cannot help dabbling in mortal matters, while at the same time deploring the carnal excesses his father Zeus visits on humanity. It’s a conceit that could become tiresome in other hands, but Banville is a writer of such deftness that The Infinities is simultaneously a sly disquisition on death, divinity and the nature of fiction.
This is not the first time such a device has touched Banville’s fiction. In 2005’s Booker-winner, The Sea, Banville explored the effects of a kind of divine intervention on a more subtly metaphorical plane; his narrator, Max Morden, recalled a fateful summer spent with a family of “gods,” the Graces. But a delicious literalism also links the two novels, not least at the level of names. The protagonist of The Infinities—if that is the word for a man felled by a stroke, who spends most of the novel in bed—is one Adam Godley, an eminent mathematician whose son, another Adam, is married to Helen, after whom the elder Adam also lusts (it is Helen who is memorably ravished, as if in a dream, by the old goat Zeus). The dying Adam is married to Ursula, an alcoholic with a propensity for “not being entirely present.” Their 19-year-old daughter Petra is a self-harming depressive who desultorily amasses data for a projected almanac of all known human diseases.
Around this family of fretful ciphers, who have gathered in expectation of old Adam’s imminent demise, circle various threadbare individuals who seem to exist on the brink of caricature. Petra’s “young man” (they do not seem to be lovers) Roddy Wagstaff is an aspirant fop of sexless mien and airy, weightless aspect. The housekeeper, Ivy Blount, seems to have wandered in from some “big house” melodrama of a century ago. And the fat, sweaty Benny Grace—“sunk in the puddle of himself,” writes Banville—is a suspiciously benign presence as Adam nears his end: the old man’s longtime benefactor who now insists he will not die.
Even allowing for the presence of ludic and lascivious deities aloft in the air about them, the names of Banville’s characters and their surroundings ought to alert us to the fact that we are not exactly in the Ireland of the recent past, as it sometimes seems. For a start, the Godleys’ house is called Arden. The Shakespearean citation is only the first of Banville’s erudite ploys; the more telling echo is of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Ardis” in his 1969 novel Ada, itself an oddly unworldly family chronicle. The sense of unreality becomes all the stronger when Banville notes in passing certain historical and technological commonplaces of his fictional world. There are anti-gravity trains, cars that run on salt water, “rocket ships that will fly the net of time.” Mary Queen of Scots, we learn, usurped and beheaded Elizabeth I, Goethe has been forgotten in favour of Kleist and Sweden is “on the warpath again.”
The Infinities, it turns out, is not taking place in “our” world at all. Adam Godley’s singular achievement as a thinker has been to posit the existence of alternative universes: a slightly clunky and obvious trope that nonetheless allows Banville to play seductive games with the nature of narrative. Competing worldviews—divine, scientific, novelistic—abut and overlap each other; “everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate.”
Hermes the storyteller tries hard to maintain his narrating voice, but it constantly threatens to become that of the character he happens to be channelling; “I must stick to the third person,” he laments. In a crucial but almost unnoticed shift towards the end of the novel, his place is taken as narrator by the dying Adam himself, the stunned and “vegetate” hero grasping at the last the reigns of the novel, in the face of a decidedly untheoretical death of the author.
As ever with Banville, all of this, domestic and fantastical, is rendered in prose that is rarely less than scintillating. He is sometimes accused of a weightless eloquence, of prizing a deft syntactic swerve over the mechanics of plot, or adjectival niceties over solidly realised persons. But this is to miss his central theme, which is precisely his character’s shuttling between the word and the world, between the pleasures and horrors of being embodied and the solacing (or debilitating) distance of art, science, thought.
The Infinities is full of small descriptive astonishments—grass sparkles, “as if with malice.” Banville describes Helen’s miscarried foetus as “a little soft limpet clinging to the wall of the womb, blind and bewildered,” and the tubes that feed the bedridden Adam as delivering “insipid wheys and saps” to his desiccated body.
The other common objection to Banville’s fiction is what is called its coldness, by which I suppose is meant everything from his unforgiving word choices—unforgiving, that is, of character and reader alike—to his narrators’ heartlessness with regard to the life or death of others and sometimes themselves.
For those who cannot stomach his practiced asperity, schooled on Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, The Infinities toys with the idea of a happy ending, but reminds the unwary “that to make a happy ending we must stop short of the end.”
