Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} by The Infinities by John Banville. P oetry, Ezra Pound liked to say, should be at least as well written as prose. Irish novelist John Banville has dedicated his writing life to turning Pound's prescription on its head. Banville made his name with his third book, Birchwood (1973), which treated his country's history as a bewildering black joke rather than something to be handled with patriotic reverence. Younger Irish writers, such as Colm Tóibín, have attested to Birchwood 's bracing effect, but Banville was already moving in a different direction from most of his peers in Ireland, and indeed in many other places, with the great stylists of the mid-20th century at his elbow. Beckett's prose is plainly a cardinal influence, to which he's added the all-over descriptive polish, sensuous immediacy and functioning plots associated with Nabokov or Saul Bellow or John Updike. He's equally ambitious in the areas he goes to for metaphors and motifs: the Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare, 17th-century painting, German Romanticism; also mathematics, cosmology and physics. At its best, Banville's writing is good enough to assimilate his daunting models into a formidably stylish voice of his own. His most effective books are usually narrated by posh Irish or Anglo-Irish types whose lordly, Humbert Humbert-like airs are offset by baffled self-questioning. In The Book of Evidence (1989) and (1997), the narrators' mandarin tones are also offset by their disreputable activities – art theft, murder, spying. Some of his books, such as (1982), a novella, work just as well without these sinister touches. But their absence sometimes makes his more recent novels seem oppressively overwrought, as though his narrative energy has all gone into the thrillers he's started writing as Benjamin Black. Effects that fit neatly into an atmosphere of moral ambiguity and dread – the sharply perceived inanimate world and shadowy, stylised human figures; the inconclusive dialogue and static scene-construction – can come across as mannered when brought to bear on less dramatically troubled lives. His new novel, The Infinities , is his first since he finally won the Booker prize, for in 2005, and it serves as a kind of catalogue of his favourite themes and props. Its action takes place over a single day in a big, gloomy house in the middle of Ireland. The house, called Arden, is owned by the Godley family. The Godley patriarch and his son are both called Adam; "old Adam" is in a coma and, according to his physician, Dr Fortune, dying. (Banville doesn't stint on heavily symbolic nomenclature.) Ursula, old Adam's second wife, has been driven to drink and vagueness by her husband's remoteness and eye for the girls, and the Godley children are scarcely in better shape. Young Adam is a hulking but ineffectual man married to a startlingly attractive actress, Helen. His younger sister, Petra, is a twitching neurotic who's being courted half-heartedly by a self- serving journalist. Accompanied by two semi-servants, these inveterate non-communicators move awkwardly through the expectant hush that's descended on the house. The book's title is both a calculated paradox – does it make sense to speak of more than one infinity? – and, it turns out, a reference to a problem that dates from the early days of quantum field theory, when it was found that certain types of calculation gave infinite results. A process called "renormalisation" was invented to get round this difficulty, but the world in which Banville's novel is set is, so to speak, un-renormalised. Old Adam, a physicist-mathematician, has solved the infinity problem in a way that's not only led to some useful inventions – cars that run on brine, for example – but also proved the existence of parallel universes, a category that includes the one he inhabits. In this novel, Sweden is a warlike country, and evolution and relativity have been discredited. The Greek gods are also alive and well, and taking an interest in Arden House; the narrator introduces himself as Hermes, while Zeus, disguised as young Adam, ravishes Helen in the course of the opening chapter. Banville seems to have taken over this particular plotline from Heinrich von Kleist's play Amphitryon , which turns on the philosophical problems raised by the classical gods' ability to impersonate people exactly. The Infinities plays with similar themes: young Adam is given to worrying about "the mystery of otherness", and there's a question mark over the narrator's self-identity as well as, ultimately, the world's. At the same time, there are frequent reminders of the action's artificial nature, with the narrator acting as a kind of boastful dramaturge ("and it is I who have contrived these things"). "It is a nice conceit," the narrator says at one point, "is it not? I shall let him entertain it for the nonce." There are also allusions to Christian theology, Shakespeare and Nietzsche, aka "one of your most darkly glowing luminants". This elaborate intellectual structure rests on skimpy dramatic foundations, however, and the book only really sparks into life when old Adam is recounting his memories. Describing a gloomily preening man visiting a prostitute, not long after his wife's suicide, in ghostly, out-of-season Venice: this is the kind of thing that Banville does well. The rest of the novel moves at a very slow pace, and whether he's making puns ("this mess of frottage") or writing prose that scans like poetry ("To us your world is what the world in mirrors is to you"), Hermes, if he is Hermes, overwrites shamelessly. Banville has shown before that a heavy gloss of style doesn't have to rule out artistic restraint and some resemblance to a speaking voice, but, sad to say, he doesn't do so here. The Infinities by John Banville. A character in John Banville's new novel is compared to an over-cleaned painting, "brilliant and faded at the same time". That's not a remark that could apply to the book itself, whose brushwork is luminous, but everything in it does have a double texture, intensely realised but also distanced through mischievous planes of refraction. The atmosphere is strong but elusive. Certainly the book addresses the "infinities" of its title but it also observes the unities of dramatic construction, taking place in an Irish country house on a single summer day. Adam Godley, a brilliant and world-changing mathematician, has had a stroke and lies comatose in the Sky room at the top of the house. His wife, son and daughter wait for his death, with the mixed feelings that attend the end of any great man. The son has a lovely actress wife, the daughter a rather tepid fiancé, and the genteel housekeeper's family used to own the grand house. All this is realistic, if only in a specialised sense. All writers are realists, it's just that they have very different notions of what reality is. There are melodramatic possibilities in this – what to call it? – low-key Gormenghast scenario, even before the arrival of a mysterious stranger, but they never heat up, and there's no shortage of family-dysfunction issues – alcoholism, self-harm – but always bathed in a great calm light. Is it racism, is it Blarney libel, to remark on the huge advantage that Irish writers enjoy, with such a comfortable fit in their speech between high- flown and plain language? Perhaps it was the Joyce of Ulysses that showed the way. Here a fancy Latinate vocabulary ( bolus , lentor , caducous ) is ballasted by stark, primordial, well-nigh Viking words for everyday things, like the "tundish" in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , such as "naggin" or "skelp". Sometimes the style approaches verse of a slightly annoying kind – "Fine gods we are, that we must muster to a mortal must" – but more often stays on the right side of it: "The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels." Lovely, no? One distancing element at work is period, announced in the opening pages by a postman on a pony, and a steam train stopping mysteriously in the early morning near the house. We're in the unspecified past, with the plastic tubes in Adam's nostril the most modern objects on view. Then little discrepancies start to show up, such as a mention of recent English popes. The alternative-universe hypothesis is confirmed by a reference to Mary Queen of Scots as Gloriana, acceding after the execution of her treasonous cousin Elizabeth. The idea of the alternative universe is the science-fiction trope most congenial to the literary novel, low-tech even when, as here and in Nabokov's Ada , it deals with technology. On Nabokov's Antiterra , machines run on hydraulics rather than electricity, so that all the lavatories in a house flush before the arrival of an international hydrophone call. Here cold fusion is a reality, Wallace's theory of evolution has been discredited, cars run on brine and Venice is safe thanks to a giant breakwater powered by hydrogen. Reviewing Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union , I found fault with its alternative-universe scheme for not being spelled out, but here a similar inexplicitness helps the book's mechanism. The reader's peripheral vision is kept busy working out how things fit, or don't. A reference to someone looking like Albert Schweitzer seems to mean the same as it would to us (dignity, big white 'tache), while Schrödinger has suffered some of his own indeterminacy, so that his Cat is now ascribed to Schrösteinberg. The Godleys live in Arden House, but this can't exactly be a Shakespeare reference if Shakespeare didn't write pastoral plays (the only reference implies he was a biographer). Certainly Goethe is a forgotten figure in this world, eclipsed by Kleist, although there is a Faust theme nevertheless. It was Adam Godley who came up with the equations on which the technology was based, and also with the idea of an infinity of interpenetrating worlds, and he had supernatural help. The reference to Kleist isn't casual, since the story here is based on the Amphitryon myth, which Kleist dramatised more intensely than any (the competition includes Plautus, Molière, Dryden and Giraudoux). Godley's daughter-in-law is about to play Alcmene, the wife seduced by Zeus in the guise of her husband. This is also exactly what happens to her at the beginning of the book. Did I mention that The Infinities is narrated by Hermes the Greek god, and that the mysterious visitor is Pan, more or less? Pagan divinities haven't featured much in Irish literature since The Celtic Twilight , where they represent (as they do in Forster) impulse and absence of conscience. Again, perhaps it was Joyce who retuned the Grecian lyre to different frequencies: sharpness of outline, intellectual clarity. The gods in Banville's novel envy their creation, and are particularly baffled by love, and the way human beings "somehow became free to forgive each other for all they are not". Readers may find Hermes's narration easier to take than the appearance of Pan in the form of a fat bald man with a "pendulous bag of grey, froggy flesh under his chin". By rights The Infinities should be rather a hermetic exercise (though that word derives from a different god), but this is where the uncertain boundaries of John Banville's book pay such dividends, giving the sense of a fringed curtain blowing lazily back and forward between this world and ours, a movement like the book's breathing. The Infinities by John Banville. The Infinities. by John Banville. Title: The Infinities Author: John Banville Genre: Novel Written: 2009 Length: 256 pages Availability: The Infinities - US The Infinities - UK The Infinities - Canada Infinis - France Unendlichkeiten - Deutschland Teoria degli infiniti - Italia Los infinitos - España. - Return to top of the page - See our review for fuller assessment. Review Summaries Source Rating Date Reviewer Entertainment Weekly B 24/2/2010 Keith Staskiewicz Financial Times . 5/10/2009 Adam Thorpe The Guardian . 26/9/2009 Christopher Tayler The Independent . 11/9/2009 Patricia Craig Independent on Sunday . 20/9/2009 Joy Lo Dico London Rev. of Books . 11/3/2010 Colin Burrow The LA Times . 24/1/2010 Tim Rutten New Statesman . 3/9/2009 Alex Clark The NY Times . 5/4/2010 Janet Maslin The NY Times Book Rev. . 7/3/2010 Laura Miller The New Yorker . 5/4/2010 Daniel Mendelsohn The Observer . 4/10/2009 Adam Mars-Jones San Francisco Chronicle . 14/3/2010 Jacob Molyneux The Spectator A+ 2/9/2009 Justin Cartwright Sunday Times . 13/9/2009 Tom Deveson The Telegraph A+ 19/9/2009 Tom Payne The Telegraph . 27/9/2009 David Robson The Times . 12/9/2009 Matthew Dennison TLS . 18/9/2009 Giles Harvey The Washington Post . 6/3/2010 Troy Jollimore. Mixed -- though practically everyone thinks Banville had a good time with it. "Banville's lush, stylized language -- which usually has a sort of self-puncturing pomposity -- here feels overinflated and downright purple." - Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly. - Return to top of the page - The Infinities is yet another take on the Greek gods still being active in modern times, with Hermes as a narrator, hovering over the scene, "this voice speaking out of the void". The story is set in an isolated household, where the old father, brilliant and successful mathematician Adam Godley, lies dying, and family and a few visitors flutter about, concerned about their pasts and futures. As the dying man's names alone suggest -- he's Adam, and he is Godl(e)y -- Banville lays it on pretty thick; there's a son, too, also named Adam (suggesting the possibility of another start, and indeed by the end leading to one). Godley Adam's great insight was into the infinities, seeing what others had missed, "a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there". He is -- or was -- an originator: The Infinities by John Banville. Though John Banville likes to say that he writes in “a literary patois” he calls “Hiberno-English”, the Irish novelist and critic is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose. The Infinities — his 15th novel and first work of literary fiction since The Sea , which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize — is a dazzling example of that mastery, as well as of the formal daring and slyly erudite humor that make his novels among the most rewarding available to readers today. In the years since his Booker triumph, Banville has published two superb detective stories under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. The Infinities is emphatically a Banville novel and one that surely will delight his many well-deserved admirers. Adam Godley, a world-altering mathematician, is dying. While in the midst of a difficult bowel movement — Banville is a wonderfully elegant chronicler of his characters’ earthier moments — he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Now, in the “sky room” of Arden, his country house, he awaits death. His utterly dysfunctional family — an alcoholic wife, a lumpish son, a daughter given to self-mutilation, a couple of anxiously problematic pseudo-servants and a wretched disciple-cum-aspiring biographer — have gathered at the great man’s bedside. Banville fans may feel they’re — in one sense, at least — on familiar ground. Three of his previous novels have explored science and, particularly mathematics — (1976), (1981) and The Newton Letter (1982) — and it’s clear that the ambiguous ground between quantitative certainty and aesthetic assertion preoccupies this writer in a particular way. The formal structure of his new novel is the key to its narrative exposition. Banville evokes and simultaneously subverts the classical unities — all the action takes place in a single day; there is progress from light into darkness. Indeed, the first and most obvious of the narrative conceits is that the old, Homeric gods are once more alive and the storytelling voice is that of Hermes, who begins his tale with this luscious bit of exposition: Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy. Formally, The Infinities is — on one level, at least — a gloss on the German Romantic playwright Heinrich von Kleist’s retelling of the story of Amphitryon and indeed, within the first few pages, a lustful Zeus has descended to take the form of the younger Adam Godley and has ravished his beautiful, young actress wife, recently cast in a production of Kleist’s play. As it happens, though, it isn’t lust but love that befuddles the gods here. This love, this mortal love, is of their own making,” Hermes muses, “the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us?… It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral… Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not. Banville’s narrative is salted with clues to his intentions — historical and technological details are oddly off kilter. The elder Adam is dying with all the apparatus of contemporary state-of-the art medicine deployed at his bedside, while outside a steam-powered train stops each morning near his country house. The household vehicles are powered by a mixture of brine, and Mary Queen of Scots is mis-recalled as “Gloriana” — the victor over her cousin, Elizabeth. Adam the mathematician’s revolutionary contribution is the proof that Einstein et al were hopelessly wrong and that an infinite number of parallel universes exist. Hence this novel’s world, in which the classical unities are fulfilled utterly by the continued existence and intervention of the old gods. Adam’s insight is a revelation which — in post-modern fashion — nonetheless brings him little satisfaction: The majority of them I despised. How they fawned and flattered when they saw at last the irrefragable rightness of what I had made. But then, did I not despise myself, also, myself and my work, my capitalized Work, of which I am supposed to be so vain? Oh, not that I think my achievement is less than anyone else’s… only it is not enough for me. You take the point. The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived. In a recent interview, Banville remarked: I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing… For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing. The novelist’s work is to assemble a parallel universe out of such sentences, which is what gives The Infinities both its elegance and its force. ‘The Infinities’ by John Banville. Though John Banville likes to say that he writes in “a literary patois” he calls “Hiberno-English,” the Irish novelist and critic is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose. “The Infinities” -- his 15th novel and first work of literary fiction since “The Sea,” which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize -- is a dazzling example of that mastery, as well as of the formal daring and slyly erudite humor that make his novels among the most rewarding available to readers today. In the years since his Booker triumph, Banville has published two superb detective stories under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. “The Infinities” is emphatically a Banville novel and one that surely will delight his many well-deserved admirers. Adam Godley, a world-altering mathematician, is dying. While in the midst of a difficult bowel movement -- Banville is a wonderfully elegant chronicler of his characters’ earthier moments -- he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Now, in the “sky room” of Arden, his country house, he awaits death. His utterly dysfunctional family -- an alcoholic wife, a lumpish son, a daughter given to self-mutilation, a couple of anxiously problematic pseudo-servants and a wretched disciple-cum-aspiring biographer -- have gathered at the great man’s bedside. Banville fans may feel they’re -- in one sense, at least -- on familiar ground. Three of his previous novels have explored science and, particularly mathematics -- “Doctor Copernicus” (1976), “Kepler” (1981) and “The Newton Letter” (1982) -- and it’s clear that the ambiguous ground between quantitative certainty and aesthetic assertion preoccupies this writer in a particular way. The formal structure of his new novel is the key to its narrative exposition. Banville evokes and simultaneously subverts the classical unities -- all the action takes place in a single day; there is progress from light into darkness. Indeed, the first and most obvious of the narrative conceits is that the old, Homeric gods are once more alive and the storytelling voice is that of Hermes, who begins his tale with this luscious bit of exposition: “Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy.” Formally, “The Infinities” is -- on one level, at least -- a gloss on the German Romantic playwright Heinrich von Kleist’s retelling of the story of Amphitryon and, indeed, within the first few pages, a lustful Zeus has descended to take the form of the younger Adam Godley and has ravished his beautiful, young actress wife, recently cast in a production of Kleist’s play. As it happens, though, it isn’t lust but love that befuddles the gods here. “This love, this mortal love, is of their own making,” Hermes muses, “the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? . . . It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral. . . . Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self- obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.” Banville’s narrative is salted with clues to his intentions -- historical and technological details are oddly off kilter. The elder Adam is dying with all the apparatus of contemporary state-of-the art medicine deployed at his bedside, while outside a steam-powered train stops each morning near his country house. The household vehicles are powered by a mixture of brine, and Mary Queen of Scots is mis-recalled as “Gloriana” -- the victor over her cousin, Elizabeth. Adam the mathematician’s revolutionary contribution is the proof that Einstein et al were hopelessly wrong and that an infinite number of parallel universes exist. Hence this novel’s world, in which the classical unities are fulfilled utterly by the continued existence and intervention of the old gods. Adam’s insight is a revelation which -- in post-modern fashion -- nonetheless brings him little satisfaction: “The majority of them I despised. How they fawned and flattered when they saw at last the irrefragable rightness of what I had made. But then, did I not despise myself, also, myself and my work, my capitalized Work, of which I am supposed to be so vain? Oh, not that I think my achievement is less than anyone else’s . . . only it is not enough for me. You take the point. The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.” In a recent interview, Banville remarked: “I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. . . . For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.” The novelist’s work is to assemble a parallel universe out of such sentences, which is what gives “The Infinities” both its elegance and its force.