John Banville is probably best known for his Booker Prize winning 'The Sea', and for being one of a generation of wonderful Irish writers who can be a bit too clever for us ordinary mortals. Some of my customers complain that they need a dictionary to accompany his books. I can't say I blame them. More recently he has also written detective thrillers set in 1950s Ireland under the pseudonym Benjamin Black which, being less intellectual, I thoroughly enjoy.
I approached 'The Infinities', which recently came out in paperback, with some trepidation. It tells the story of the final days of Adam Godley, surrounded by family in Ireland, told from the viewpoint of the Greek God Hermes, who happens to be overseeing matters and wickedly throwing various spanners into the works.
Would I be wowed or overwhelmed? I certainly started off wowed! How about this for an opening of any book, describing dawn?
"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."
or the running of a tap-
"The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels."
Bliss - and you know you are starting on a pleasurable experience.
It is, in more ways than one, Divine. Banville takes each of the characters, over the course of the single day that the book encompasses, and mentally disects them, almost to the point of torture. He uses Hermes to twist them and discover their darkest truths and desires. It is dreamy, almost other worldly and at times painfully lucid, with a surprise around every corner.
Exultant and absolutely brilliant.
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