The Infinities by John Banville the Infinities by John Banville
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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Infinities by John Banville 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 The Untouchable (1997), the narrators' mandarin tones are also offset by their disreputable activities – art theft, murder, spying. Some of his books, such as The Newton Letter (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 The Sea 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.