The Infinities

The Infinities
By John Banville
Picador £7.99, 300 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Banville’s prize-winning prose flags in The Infinities, a self-consciously clever novel dwelling on the pretentious side of ponderous.

Upstairs in a coma, old Adam smugly recalls his revolutionary invention of fuel derived from brine, and his tawdry affairs following his first wife’s suicide. Preparing to mourn, his family gathers below: his wife, Ursula, and his children, vapid young Adam and awkward Petra, together with young Adam’s amorous wife, Helen. The house is haunted by Hermes, our narrator, and his lecherous old father Zeus (who, masquerading as young Adam, ravishes an unwitting Helen). Casual allusions to future science jar with the Edwardian cadences of this mild Olympian mischief, and the meditative slant of Hermes’s erratic omniscience gives little zest to the novel’s slender plot.

Banville may direct his gods and characters with the odd “blast of divine afflatus” but, to this reader, it’s much ado about nothing, offering limited entertainment in return for its lofty conceits.