I have read two outstanding books this summer. This is one of them; the other is Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (reviewed on page 42).

As I read The Infinities, with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J.M.Coetzee with his bleak, pared-down, elemental view of the world, had ever read a Banville, and if he had, whether he had envied him his astonishing powers. It seems to me very odd indeed that this book is not, according to the Booker judges, one of the 12 best books of the year. It may be one of the 12 best books of the decade, or even of several decades.

The plot is both extremely simple and vastly complicated. In an unprepossessing house somewhere in Ireland — all we know is that it is not near the sea — a famous mathematician and physicist, of the higher theoretical variety, Adam Godley, lies dying of a debilitating stroke in a room at the top of the house. His drunken second wife, Ursula, his autistic daughter Petra, his stolid son Adam with his lovely wife Helen, are in attendance. A mystery figure, possibly Pan, appears. He seems to have shepherded Adam senior’s career. Two sullen and faintly crazed and wonderfully drawn retainers wander around. But also present in the ether are the gods, and in fact the book is narrated by Hermes. At first I thought this was a rather irritating conceit, but Banville’s intention is to suggest, by comparing the lives of the gods — unhappily immortal and incurably bored — with the lives of man, that our conceptions of life and death, spirit and substance are hopelessly inadequate. The gods meddle in all their lives and Zeus takes a particular interest in the women of the household because he is ‘maddened by prurience, like an old dog scratching his fleas.’

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