The Remains of a Midsummer Day

 Have you ever thought of the evolution theory being a friendly gesture of the gods towards humankind eager for meaning? Or of a novel's narrator that would be not only omniscient but truly omnipotent?

Not? John Banville has done it for us already in his latest novel. The Infinities is a divine piece of a book. Surprisingly enough, this time the adjective is not a vague, clichéd expression of praise. On the contrary: it should be taken literally and applied in all respects.

The Godleys, an English family (kindly note the telling name), gather in their house in the countryside to face an event that will essentially change their lives. Adam Godley, the father of the family and a famous mathematician, lays in coma after a serious stroke and his death is expected every moment. His frail young wife, troubled adolescent daughter, self-disdainful adult son, beautiful daughter-in-law: they all await the inevitable. Nevertheless, during the course of a hot midsummer day, they tend to think of their own problems rather than of the dying man. Suddenly they find themselves at a loss. Inexplicable things happen, long memories peep out again, strange people emerge out of the blue.

Why? Who causes it? How? Well, the Godleys are not the only characters of the novel. There are other, let us say, agents that should not be neglected (nor even trifled with). The gods. Zeus, Hermes, Pan and others: mischievous, capricious, and all too humanlike - as we know them and possibly need them. Sometimes they make fun of the humans, sometimes they make love to them, but whatever they do, they are interested. They do interfere in the world, which is a pure shock not only in the context of the book but of the whole Western gods-lacking recent literature. What is even more astonishing is the fact that a novel narrated by the thief god Hermes deals with such fundamental postmodern, “godless” issues such as the notion of the parallel worlds or the impossibility to achieve any certainties in life. However, the Greek gods, bored (one would say to death, being it not so inappropriate in this case) by their eternal lives, trying to find either love or annihilation in the arms of the terrestrials and having a cynical comment always ready for everything, prove to be very apt (and immensely witty) mediators of such issues.

Apart from inventing divine witticisms, John Banville is a real master of the English language, able to capture by words all those things that are, in his own words, “unseen yet clammily palpable”. He manages not only to notice but also to preserve the most transient and almost imperceptible phenomena lurking under the surface of our everydayness: long past memories and nightmares, subconscious feelings, different sorts of light. As for the title, it is as ambiguous as the whole book itself: the infinities may stand for the gods, for the subjects of Adam's mathematical theories, or for the inexplicable and endless mysteries of human minds and emotions.

The reach of Banville’s novel is infinite indeed: it stretches form petty everyday nastinesses to vast fields of eternity, from a melancholy hint of a smile to bawdy sarcastic laughter, from light-hearted word play to profound insights in the nature of things. Reading The Infinities is like experiencing one of Hermes' caresses: it is at the same time astonishing, terrific and blissful, and it distracts the chosen, blessed mortal for many days.