Review: “The Infinties” by John Banville
The concept of John Banville’s The Infinities – Greek gods amusing themselves with a family while narrating the events – sparked my interest as soon as I heard about it. I wanted to love the book. I tried to love the book. But I couldn’t, a fact that, quite possibly, reflects on my abilities as a reader more than the abilities of the author. Banville writes beautifully but often I found myself tangled in his prose. Phrases that should have been simple enough (ex: “To us your world is what the world in mirrors is to you”) were usually lost within long passages of meandering descriptions. Events or places were frequently described in great detail that served no apparent purpose in the overall story arch leaving me to feel as if there were some profound meaning that I was unable to grasp, some grand point that hovered just outside my comprehension.
This is not an action novel. Everything that takes place here is within the thoughts of the characters. That fact alone is not a criticism; I was looking forward to how it all played out. Unfortunately, interactions are emotionless. The cast with all of their severe flaws should have been wonderfully complicated and troublesome but instead were colorless, save for a few (all too rare) scenes. The pranks the gods play are relatively tame. Banville commented in an interview that he used Heinrich von Kleist’s play Amphitryon as inspiration (and it is actually referenced within the book). However there was no comedy of errors in “The Infinities”. And though Banville says all his books are humorous, I found very little here. Perhaps that’s a result of my American tendencies to get distracted by details such as “tyre” instead of “tire”. Perhaps it’s because after re-reading passages for the first few chapters, trying to tease out the significance, I grew bored and began skimming for actual meaning while missing subtle points that would have made the novel worthwhile. I have read glowing reviews and profound summaries of this novel. The last few pages did make me sit up and take notice so that I finished thinking “Wait. Maybe that wasn’t so bad” instead of “Whew! That’s finally done!” I’m even tempted to re-read it if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I haven’t become completely lazy in my reading habits and do, in fact, have the capabilities to recognize whatever philosophical gist lay at the core of the pages.
