The Infinities
By John Banville
Picador, 300 pp, Hardcover, £14.99
ISBN 978 0 330 45024 9

The kernel of John Banville’s The Infinities comes from a Heinrich von Kleist play, Amphitryon (in turn a salute to Molière,) in which Jupiter and Mercury visit the home of the titular Greek general so that Jupiter might, disguised as Amphitryon, seduce his wife Alcmene. Antics (as is usual in cases of hidden identity) ensue.

In Banville’s version, we are set in a world slightly different to our own, where cold fusion works and Sweden is an aggressive military power. Amphitryon is Adam Godley, whose father, of the same name, has had a stroke and is vegetating in the top floor of his country home, where he lives with his quietly alcoholic wife Ursula and disturbed, delicate daughter Petra.

The elderly and patrician Ivy Blount, whose ancestors built the Godley home, remains as a kind of housekeeper and lives in an adjacent cottage. Duffy, an older man who lives nearby, assists with the caretaking. It is Midsummer’s Day, and Adam the younger comes to his family home with his beautiful wife Helen, an actress playing Alcmene, in anticipation of his father’s death.

The gods from Kleist’s version remain, wearing their Greek names. Hermes is our sometime narrator, sliding between first person and an almost omniscient third, which allows us access to the thoughts, memories and private lives of the Godley family. As he sheepishly admits, “Only sometimes am I omniscient.”

Other characters whose lives are meddled by the gods include Roddy Wagstaff, a fastidious would-be biographer of Adam the elder who is supposedly interested in Petra, and Benny Grace, an old colleague of Adam the elder’s, who also happens to be the Greek god Pan, again, in disguise.

The Infinities continues in the same vein as Banville’s earlier work, favouring themes of identity, belonging, and mortality. The antic comedy of all the meddling deities allows for a fresh look at these universal and heavy subjects.

The gods must take on human guises if they are to interact with the human characters, whether to stir up trouble or to steer them towards resolution, yet they are still, despite their power and omniscience, outsiders puzzled by their creatures.

Banville’s human characters, too, have difficulty with the world in which they live. Adam the elder, in his comatose musings, reflects that he was “condemned to a life into which he feels he does not properly fit.” Helen wants to be transformed by acting “until she has achieved her true look, her real face.” Petra is perhaps the most entirely a-tilt in her world; “It is as if she were written in a primitive script of straight lines and diagonals (…) She knows the world is not as she conceives it (…) Some parts of it are missing and some are there are there only because she has put them there.”

Each character struggles to maintain the cohesion of their inner self while interacting with the people in the world before them. Society is an unwelcome task, inspiring despair and frustration. As we see the egotism, fears, and dysfunctions of the characters, we are also privy to their loyalties and interconnections, and how equally baffling they are to the humans and the gods observing them.

Although his style, characterizations, and thematic concerns remain constant, The Infinities departs from Banville’s earlier work in that it is much kinder, probably due in part to the classical comedy at the base of the idea. Banville’s philosophies and ominous hints of what happens beyond the day in question cast a shadow, but the narrative still holds a sly humour (sometimes drawn quite broadly), and his narrator determines, rather unusually for Banville, that “they shall be happy, all of them.” This does mean that the ending falls apart a little – the last five sentences and final line of dialogue are particularly ungraceful.

Banville’s skill with language, on the other hand, remains consistently brilliant. He sometimes mischievously descends into the poetic contemplation of the scatological or grotesque, but this is neatly balanced by his ability to create an aphoristic and memorable phrase. One can appreciate to the point of delight this kind of intense attention to language.

Reading a lot of Banville is not unlike being stuck in an art gallery containing only Monet’s haystacks. Banville paints characters with similar voices and preoccupations, examining the same central problems from a slightly different perspective, in a slightly different light. His language is always poetic and dense, the characters usually either cruel and egotistical (male), or innately damaged (female), with a thematic focus on identity and destiny.

Despite the somewhat juvenile recurrence of scatological observations, the sometimes confusing narration, and the bizarre romantic collapse at the end of the story, Banville always demands much of his readers, which can be intensely refreshing, surprising, and intellectually gratifying.