9. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 235-273

From "Benny Grace hears the thunderclap and smiles. ..." to end. 

_____

The Jovian thunderclap is followed by pouring rain. Hermes watches as Benny crosses the music room, and notes that "not all his fly buttons are done up." And he muses on the nature of the role of the gods among mortals:

Everything is to be put back exactly as it was before us, no stone left unturned, no angle unaligned, all divots replaced. This is the rule the gods must obey. Did I say gods, did I say obey? Fine gods we are, that we must muster to a mortal must. But even our avatar, the triune lord of a later epiphany, forfeits the omnipotence you ascribe to him in the simple fact that the thing he cannot do is will himself out of existence.... It is all a matter of demarcation, the division of labour, one job one god. We too have our hierarchies, our choirs, thrones, all that. Seraphim. Cherumbim. 

And then he pauses, realizing that he is "mixing up the heavenly hosts. My mind is going, going." He rambles on confusedly about this world being "a world of mirrors," which leads him to the observation that mirrors are silvered with mercury. "Mercury! My other name, one of my other names."

And suddenly the I of the novel becomes old Adam again, the phrase about replacing divots having reminded him of the time when he lived near a public golf course and, "on those days when my mind seized up and I could not work," he would walk across it and replace bits of torn-up tuft. He reflects that he was devoted to pure science and didn't care about its applications. "And apply they did, adapting my airy fancies to invent all sorts of surprising and useful gimcrackery, from the conversion of salt water into an endless sources of energy to rocket ships that will fly the net of time." And then Adam merges with Hermes again: "We are all alike, all we Olympians." Adam/Hermes thinks of Benny, who is coming to where Adam lies: "I feel suddenly a sad fondness for him, poor unlovely outcast creature, as I felt earlier for my son -- I must be softening, here at the end." The voices of the two narrators merge.

Benny climbs the stairs and peeps into the room where Ursula is stretched out on a couch, clutching the red satin pillow that Rex chewed up, with young Adam sitting by her, stroking her forehead. And the narrator, whoever he is, suggests, "Let us leave them there, the three of them, for now, the languishing lady and attendant man, and the listener by the doorway, a meddling jester." He turns his attention to Helen, who has arrived at the kitchen, soaking wet from the rainstorm. Duffy and Ivy are there, the former looking "like a man who has been accepted in a proposal he cannot remember having made." Ivy goes to get a towel, leaving Duffy, somewhat embarrassed by the way Helen's wet clothing clings to her. When Ivy returns with the towel and starts to help Helen dry off, Duffy makes his escape.

Petra, it turns out, was in the woods and witnessed what happened between Roddy and Helen. She assumes that the two are lovers, and is upset: "Roddy was the one who was supposed to take her hand and lead her into the sunlit uplands of the future." In her room, she takes a green silk kimono from a drawer, "an ancient piece, brought back from Japan by her father long ago." She puts it on, along with a ring "set with a flat black stone in which an initial letter is carved" -- the ring given to Helen by young Adam with the initial A that we saw earlier. From the window, she watches her brother get into the station wagon with Roddy, who is carrying his suitcase, and drive away. Then she takes a razor out of a hiding place in the chest of drawers and cuts her arm. "The underside of her arm is cicatriced all along its length, the crescents of healed skin brittle and shiny, like candle wax."

Ursula wakes up with a headache and can sense that someone -- she assumes it is her son -- is there beside her. She thinks about how she talked with him earlier but can't remember what she said, and vows, "She must stop drinking, she must give it up altogether, for everyone's sake including her own." And she worries about how she might misbehave at her husband's funeral. Then she realizes that it's not her son sitting there but Benny Grace. He tells her that Adam left to take Roddy to the station. She worries, "'He'll think me rude, not to see him off. He wants to write Adam's biography' -- she laughs softly -- 'imagine!'"

The she apologizes for having been rude to Benny earlier, and reveals that Benny and a woman -- presumably Madame Mac -- have been supporting them.

All that awful money, years and years of it, just appearing in the bank every quarter without explanation, and Adam not saying a word so that she had to be silent too, no mention permitted, no acknowledgement, even though it was what they were living on, since Adam despite all his fame and his great reputation no longer earned anything, since he no longer worked. 

She wonders if Benny and "the woman" did something to Adam, "did they damage him." And she asks if it's true that, as Adam said, "by the age of thirty he had finished all he had to do." Benny remains silent until he finally says, "I spoke to him.... -- He spoke to me!"

He means Adam, of course. Petra had come to his room -- "That young scoundrel Wagstaff must have said something hurtful to her, or else said nothing at all, which I imagine would have been more hurtful still" -- and then Rex had jumped up on the bed and "flopped down beside me with a grunt and a sigh. I did feel his brute warmth. At first I did not recognize the feeling, I mean the feeling of feeling, and thought I was only imagining with an intenser acuity than heretofore." He's not entirely certain, however, that he actually spoke to Benny.



Meanwhile, young Adam returns from the station and finds Helen in the kitchen looking for her ring. They fix a drink and talk about Roddy. She tells him that Roddy tried to kiss her and she slapped him. And Hermes reappears to comment, "So you see, old Dad, she will not love you. We are too much for them; they prefer to settle for their own kind."


Petra is bandaging her wounds when she hears Ursula calling for young Adam and for Ivy, and the telephone ringing. She stows away the kimono and the razor, and checks to see if the room is in order. "She loves herself, a little." She meets Helen on the stairs and gives her the ring, which she says she found in the kitchen. "Who is Z?" she asks. Helen tells her it's an A, but Petra show her that if you turn the ring a certain way it's a Z. "Ah, crafty old Dad!" Hermes interjects.


They are joined by young Adam, Benny, Ivy and Duffy. Adam asks Petra to join him, and they go upstairs, reappearing with old Adam being carried by his son and Petra with the bottles and tubes to which he is attached. Dr. Fortune arrives to find them in the music room, where old Adam is stretched out on a sofa with his eyes open, looking out into the garden. Petra is standing to one side and he "sees at once by her pallor and the leaden shadows under her eyes that she has been cutting herself again." The repaired radio is on the mantelpiece: "From there it issues ancient music of pipes and plucked strings, tiny and far, as from another world." And Hermes sees the "shiny green shutters" again.

Benny has disappeared, however. He "has stepped back into that old rackety machine to be winched up into the flies" -- the machina has carried away the deus.  And Hermes assures us of a happy ending: Adam and Helen move to Arden; Petra stops cutting herself and "we shall find someone else for her to love and be loved by in the short time left to her." Old Adam will find "a final note written by Dorothy his dead wife, exonerating him of any blame for her sad end." And Zeus bids goodbye to Helen, who is pregnant.

It's a "happy ending" written by a novelist who doesn't really believe in happy endings. Mock-sentimentality.

8. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 195-234

From "No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal ..." through "... Oh, Dad."

_____

Things begin to get even more confusing in this chapter, in which the narrator shifts from old Adam to Hermes without a clear break between the two, reflecting, I suppose, the merging of "infinities" that is at the heart of Adam's theories. "My equations," he tells us, "spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there." Adam thinks again of his relationship to Benny Grace: "I raged for certitude, he was the element of misrule." More and more, Benny seems to be the yin to Adam's yang, the id to his ego. And Adam now regrets what he (they?) achieved: 

A savour had gone out of things, the air was that much duller, the light that much dimmed. We could not comprehend it, at first, this darkening of the world that was our doing -- it was, after all, the opposite of what we had intended.... My final series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes, was the combination that unlocked the sealed chamber of time. The sigh of dead, dank air that wafted back in our faces from the yawning doorway out of what had been our only world was not the breath of new life, as we expected, but a last gasp. I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail.

And so this great discoverer has wound up enclosed in his own body, in the attic of an isolated house, some distance from an isolated railway station. (At Arden there seems to be no telephone, no television, no Internet, no connection to the outside world but a broken radio that young Adam is trying to repair.) He thinks of himself and Benny as "the overman in his overman's cape and tights flashing through the ether with his fat sidekick clinging on for dear life to his neck. Or was it the other way round, him flying and I clinging on, for dear life." ("Overman" is of course the literal translation of Nietzsche's Übermensch, here given the garb but not the name of Superman.) He recalls adventures with Benny -- the overman in the underworld -- among "drabs and cutpurses and the odd Gretchen searching forlornly for her Faust." (Earlier, Hermes described himself as "Faust and Mephisto rolled into one.")  

Then Benny introduces him to Madame Mac, whose relationship to Benny remains unclear: Benny calls her "my old lady," which could be mother or mistress or wife. They met in Rome, where Adam is receiving "the Borgia Prize, founded in memory of gentle Cesare, peacemaker and patron of natural sciences and the arts." (This is not quite the reversal of history that Banville executed with Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, but few would refer to Cesare Borgia as "gentle.") Madame Mac turns out to be a large woman whose hand, when he shakes it, "had the cartilaginous smoothness and faint heat of a bird's claw," and whose "face, appeared wider than it was long, with a great carven jaw and an almost lipless mouth that seemed to stretch from ear to ear and managed to be at once froggy and almost noble. Her skin was greyish-pale and looked as dry as meal." She is the widow of "the honourable Mr. MacSomebody, a wealthy invert with delicate lungs, ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Somewhere to the Holy See." She has devoted the wealth she inherited from him "towards the betterment of mankind in general and in particular the encouragement of the physical sciences." 

The next time he sees Mrs. Mac (though he's confused about whether he saw her more than once) she is dying in an Alpine sanitarium (cf. The Magic Mountain). Benny reassures him, "'There is no need for you to worry,' he said, frowning in the direction of my knees. 'Everything will be all right.' How portentous he made those simple words sound. I nodded, still saying nothing. Why was he reassuring me, when he was the one who would shortly be bereaved?" Why indeed?  The episode trails off into enigma, as Adam's thoughts turn to Ursula and their children. He notes that he "never allowed Ursula to meet Benny or Madame Mac," possibly because "she is something of a priestess of the pure, and in those two, or in the idea of them at least, she saw personified, I think, all the temptations of the base world and its steamy pleasures." Not that he tells us of any steamy pleasures involving Madame Mac. As for his and Ursula's children, they "were a surprise to me.... The boy I found particularly alarming, and not just because he was the first.... The girl was altogether different, lying there still and watchful.... By the time she arrived the boy was a big fellow already, cautious, secretive, solitary. He was frightened of me, just as I was frightened of him." 

Did I, do I, love them? ... Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods -- well. Perhaps that is my trouble, perhaps my standards are too high. Perhaps human live is simple, and therefore beyond me, due to my incurable complicating bent.

As we recall, Zeus had his own problems as both parent and child. And the identification of Adam with Zeus gets a little snug here. 

He admits that he has not been a good husband. (Zeus had that problem, too.) "I mean, my wives have not been fortunate in me. One I drove to drown herself, the other I drove to drink.... I treated my children as adults and my wife as a child.... I do not know when she began to drink in earnest.... She is discreet, none more so; she is an artist of discretion." 

And then there is a gradual transition. He says, "I cannot think any more, for now." And he reflects that "Adam is the one who will care for Ursula when I am gone.... Look at him now, following her into the kitchen." Which of course the Adam who is dying in the upstairs room can't do. Yet we get a precise account of what's going on in the "big stone room" down to the "Faint putrescent smell of gas from the stove." This begins a segue to Hermes's point of view. Adam mentions Benny's statement that old Adam would not die, but Ursula is vague and disengaged, so he leaves the room. Ivy enters, and tells her that Duffy has proposed marriage, which puzzles Ursula: "About what?" she replies. And Ivy leaves the room to hide her tears. 

Or rather, Hermes, who has suddenly and abruptly taken full control of the narrative again, hustles her out of the room. "O Hecate of the triple way, is it all my fault, for taking on Duffy's form and giving poor Ivy the notion taht she was being significantly spoken to in that moment over the milk jug? If so, I shall have to speak to him, too, and put some mettle into him. I thought it was all fixed --what were they doing at the lunch table if not fixing it? My name must not be Hermes after all." So his name is Adam? And all of this business is taking place in the mind of a comatose man? It's a possibility.

In any case, Ursula is confused: "Lately she has been having what seem to be hallucinations -- she prefers to think of them as waking dreams." She goes back to the dining table to clear away what's left there and finds Helen sitting "in a cane armchair in front of the glass wall, smoking a cigarette and looking out into the garden frowningly." Benny and Roddy are out in the garden. Ursula chides Helen for smoking in the house, and Helen responds that she doesn't protest when Roddy does it. Ursula says that Roddy's a guest, and Helen changes the subject to Benny, asking who he is, "What does he want?" "He wants Adam," Ursula replies, then grows confused: "Oh, I don't know what I mean. He's just someone Adam knew." When Ursula tries to take away the ashtray, "Helen snatches it aside and glares at her." Ursula notices Helen's ring: "some kind of whitish metal set with a flat lozenge of polished black stone in which a curlicued initial A is carved." But when she suggests that the A stands for Adam, Helen corrects her: "'No,' with a shake of the head, quick, dismissive. 'Amphitryon. The title of the play I'm in. Or it could be A for Alcmene, my part. He said it was for luck but in the theatre you're never supposed to wish anyone luck.... He's such a sap,' she says complacently, suppressing a yawn, 'your son.'" 

And then there's another blurring of narrative identity. Hermes (?) follows Ursula and Helen to the kitchen:

I glide invisibly behind them along the passageway, still sniffing after Helen's feline scent. Who am I now? Where is my Dad? Enough, enough, I am one, and all -- Proteus is not the only protean one amongst us. 

In the kitchen, Hermes feels Zeus plucking at his sleeve: "I can feel my father's burgeoning itch as together we rush after her from the kitchen into the music room and out by the french doors where she almost collides with her husband coming in from the lawn." She is startled by what he has to say: that he's been thinking about their moving to Arden. She greets the suggestion with scorn and tells him she's going for a walk. When he asks if he can come with her, she replies, "Your mother is drunk again.... I think you had better look after her." For a moment she thinks he is going to hit her. "You see how my Dad does it, putting all sorts of fancies in their heads to distract and confuse them? She begins to recall something from her dawn dream of love and then does not." And so she keeps going and Adam lets her go. 

She notices Benny and Roddy watching her, and she stops to ask Roddy for a cigarette. As she and Roddy walk away together across the lawn, she asks about Benny "-- who is he, do you know?" But Roddy says only, "When you came along he was in the middle of telling me some rigmarole, about Greece, I think it was, about being up in the mountains there, doing something or other. I could make no sense of it." As they walk along together, she thinks of herself as "strolling along this path under trees in the middle of a summer afternoon, like one of those women in Chekhov" and that Roddy "seems ... more like a character in a play than a real, living person." 

She is convinced that by an accumulation of influence the parts that she plays, even when the characters are petty or wicked, will gradually mould and transform her into someone else, someone grand and deep and serious.

She meditates on her "affinity" to Roddy, that he is "hollow, a thing of potential more than actual presence" and that she too is "pure potential, in a state of perpetual transformation, on the way steadily to becoming herself, her authentic self." She looks back at the house, which she sees as 

more like a church than a house, but a church in some backward, primitive place where religion has decayed into a cult and the priests have had to allow the churchgoers to worship the old gods alongside the new one.

And she finds that they are nearing the wood she had seen from the bathroom window, "the one she has never been able to find before." They enter it and find "a little bower, under a low, vaulted roof of ivy and brambles and sweet woodbine and other things all tangled together." Roddy identifies it as the location of "the famous holy well." It is a "pool of water, brimming and still, like a polished dark metal disc set on the ground." There are rosaries and pictures of people hanging on the bushes around it, and Roddy tells her that the locals come there to pray and that old Adam had tried to keep them from doing so -- another attempt to isolate the place. 

They sit on a bench there and Roddy asks her, "Do you not feel the presence of the god?" Except that Roddy seems not to be Roddy anymore; his "voice when he speaks is large yet makes a soft, a tremulous sound."

"You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you'll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You'll thnk you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you'll weep for nothing, pine for what's not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you."

Roddy has been possessed, but by whom? He kisses her, to her surprise, but suddenly the spell breaks. He realizes what has happened and wonders, "What is that medleyed music in the air, of pipe and tabor, bugle and flute, what voices chanting as the radiant cavalcade departs?" He apologizes. She slaps him. "He is only himself now, the god having abandoned him." But as he tries to speak, "A whiplash crack of thunder sounds directly overhead and seemingly at the level of the treetops." And Hermes thinks, "Oh, Dad." Is the thunder Zeus's angry response to someone else's moving in on Helen? Like Pan?

7. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 176-194

From "My father does not like at all the prospect of this late-afternoon lunch ..." through "... but no one has an answer to offer her."

_____

The gods are rather puzzled by the human phenomenon of dining: "How much and how often they eat fascinates and rather appals us, for whom a sip of ambrosia and a prophylactic pinch of moly taken every aeon or so suffice both to quell our peckishness and keep our peckers up." But now Hermes notices that something seems to have happened in the garden -- there is a "feverish atmosphere" in the room, and Benny seems to be the focus of it. He surmises that Ursula, who is not present, "said something to Benny after I left.... She has the inveterate drinker's weakness for blurting out baldly things that are at once consternating and lugubriously comic." And he decides she is off somewhere "administering to her self a steadying drop" from the bottles she hides "in the disused washroom behind the scullery." (This, incidentally, explains young Adam's flashback yesterday to the bottles hidden in the shrubbery.)

Ivy Blount enters with the roast chicken and studiously ignores Benny's attempt to help her bring it to the table. Petra enters, but when she finds herself sitting next to Helen she moves to sit next to Benny, who "gives her a conspiratorial smile, arching an eyebrow." Ivy brings in the rest of the food and Adam sharpens the carving knife before Ursula appears, her manner confirming to Hermes that "there must have been an altercation on the lawn -- I wonder what she said to him?" Ursula protests that Ivy has served cabbage with chicken, and Ivy announces that she has has invited Mr. Duffy to lunch.

Hermes takes Rex's point of view on the scene: He regards himself as watching over them. Old Adam was "unpredictable ... he shouts, and more than once has aimed a kick. The girl Petra is to be wary of, too; she smells of blood. But they all need careful watching. They are not so much dangerous as limited, which is why, he supposes, they are in such need of his support, affection and praise.... There is a thing the matter with them, though, with all of them. It is a great puzzle to him, this mysterious knowledge, unease, foreboding, whatever it is that afflicts them, and try though he may he has never managed to solve it."

Hermes wonders if Rex can "detect the difference between Benny and me.... I being all spirit and Benny, in his present manifestation, all flesh.... Yet surely Rex should know Benny for what he is. The animals are said always to recognize their panic lord and bow down before him." Benny, meanwhile, is

addressing the table at large, telling over yet again the tale of his great friend and colleague Adam Godley's triumph on that day, which seems no longer ago than yesterday, when it came to him as a flash of lightning that in those dark infinities which had been disrupting his sums for so long there lay, in fact, his radiant solutions.

But no one is paying attention to Benny; they are all waiting for Duffy, and Hermes feels uneasy about his posing as Duffy earlier in the day: "I suddenly recollect those shiny green shutters on the windows of Ivy's cottage. Do they presage something, sinister and insistent, like themselves?"

Duffy arrives, having "put on his Sunday best, which is a much washed and faded slate-blue pinstriped suit." Petra, to everyone's surprise, rises and takes his hand and brings him to the table. Ursula greets him, "somewhat thick-tongued," and tells Adam that "Mr. Duffy ... will take a drumstick, I'm sure." Duffy's arrival has been an anticlimax, and even Rex, "abruptly losing interest in everything, Duffy included, flops over on his side with a sigh and closes his eyes."

Adam is feeling that odd euphoria-like sensation again, Helen is talking to Roddy, and Petra watches them "with narrowed eyes." Adam has taken on the role of his father at table, causing Hermes to reflect on fathers and sons:

Not that I know so very much about the subject. I speak of my father and of me as his son, but in truth these terms can be only figurative for us, who are not born and do not die, for birth and death are the sources, it seems, out of which mortal ones derive their sensations of love and loss. The old stories tell of us coupling and begetting, enduring and dying, but they are only stories. Like old Adam in the bosom of his family, we are not here sufficiently to be ever quite gone.... we are, at once eternal and evanescent.

Talk goes on at the table until Benny suddenly says, "Oh, no, he won't die ... no, no." Even Rex raises his head and looks at Benny. The table goes quiet, and Hermes observes, "this must be what is called a panic fright." He also notices that Duffy hasn't eaten his "single slice of chicken, which was all that he got" -- a contradiction of the detail, repeated earlier, that he was given the drumstick.

There is not doubt whom it is that Benny Grace was speaking of, whose demise he was denying, or at least the imminence of it.... My kinsman Thanatos, son of Night, in his black robes, with sword unsheathed, has stepped into their midst out of the shadows where he has been hiding all along. It is his sudden coming that wakened Rex the dog, who rises cautiously now and stands at point, nosing the tensened air.

Hermes is annoyed at Benny's presumption. "Since when has he become the lord of life and death, Mr. Benny so-called Grace?" He thinks that the gods should let the humans "have a taste of immortality, see how they like it. Soon enough they would come to us mewling and puking in their pain, beseeching us to finish them off." And he recalls the story of Alcmene, visited by Zeus in the form of her husband Amphitryon, which led to the double conception of "a pair of twins, Iphicles, who was Amphitryon's son and therefore not much heard of again, and Heracles, whom my Dad was pleased to call his own." And how Hermes and his "sister Athene, that headache," kept Heracles from killing "Pluto, the killer of men." Zeus "wished them all, girls and boys alike, adults in their prime, oldsters and crones, all to know what we know, the torment of eternal life."

Everything at table quiets down again, except Petra, who wants to know "why it is that tumours are always compared to citrus fruits."

6. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 142-175

From "What indeed? Were I able I would rear up ..." through "... my Dad shambling eagerly in her warm wake."

_____

There's a disjunctive moment when the "I" of the novel suddenly shifts from Hermes to the old Adam, lying in his bed and becoming aware of the presence in the room of Benny Grace, with whom he has a "long and intricate" history. "Has he come to harangue me in my last straits, to tell me I am going about dying in the wrong way?" He remembers a terrifying nightmare from early childhood in which he was alone on a bare rock in a becalmed ocean, frightened that everything would tip and cast him into the abyss. The association with Benny, however, is unstated.

As he thinks about "this damnable false night in which my wife has condemned me to live," Petra goes and opens the curtains. "Perhaps that is Ursula's intention, keeping me in the dark so I will not notice the light failing. But I do not want to breathe my last in this room." He feels the vibration as Benny approaches the bed. Benny notes that Adam hasn't changed: "'Still the black hair,' Benny says, 'the noble profile.' Again he gives his snuffly laugh. 'The original Adam.'"

Adam calls Benny "my shadow, my double, my incorrigible daemon," and recalls that they met "in the far north" when "Bellicose Sweden ... was on the warpath again, united in yet another expansionary struggle with her encircling neighbours." He doesn't recall what country the meeting took place in, but he remembers sitting next to a woman named Inge or Ilsa -- "I shall settle for Inge." He became aware of Benny "as a pair of hoof-like feet and two fat thighs clad in rusty black ... and those whorled ears daintily pointed at their tips." Adam was still in mourning for Dorothy.

This was in the early days of the great instauration, after we had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck's constant for what it really is.... I was in the vanguard of the new science and already an eminent figure.... My Brahma hypothesis ... posited the celebrated chronotron, ugly name ... for an exquisite concept, time's primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation.

It was Benny, he notes, who called it the "Brahma hypothesis" and the "chronotron."


Benny leaves the bedside and goes to the window where Petra is standing, "and begins to explain to her my theory of infinities." Adam notes, "From the day she was born I favoured her over my son, that poor epigone -- he was here earlier, blubbering by my bedside --- yet now I think I was perhaps as unfair to her as I was to him, in singling her out as I did." In Adam's "theory of infinities ... everything endlessly extends and unravels, world upon world." Benny tells Petra that Adam resolved the problem of "the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else's equations and made them null" and that he posited "an infinity of infinities ... all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there." So in the world of this novel, Mary Stuart beheaded Elizabeth Tudor, cars run on seawater, the Greek gods are hanging around, and Robert Oppenheimer failed to create the atomic bomb.


Anyway, at this first meeting with Benny, Adam goes with him to waterfront bars and winds up "panting, in wild disorder, with a split lip and a sleeve torn half-way out of my jacket." And the next day he flies south in a seaplane with Inge. But Benny kept turning up.

I did great things. I scaled high peaks -- such silken ropes, such gleaming grapnels! -- and always he was there, scrambling behind me. That was then. I made a world -- worlds! -- and afterwards what was there left to do but wile away the day of rest, the interminable, idle Sunday that the remainder of my life has been. So why has he come?

And so ends the second division of the book.

Hermes, it seems, has been asleep -- "Must have dropped off for a minute there. I am getting as dopily drowsy as my old Dad." Benny has gone out into the garden and has taken off his shoes and socks, revealing that his feet are like pig's trotters, blunt and pink with the toes all bunched together and the nails thick and tough as horn." Lunch is being prepared and Ivy Blount is setting the table in the conservatory, whose glass panes Hermes describes because he knows "the secrets of every trade and skill; I am, you might say, a Faust and Mephisto rolled into one." Ursula is in the kitchen, peering out at Benny and recalling "the first time Adam told her about him. Deep winter on Haggard Head and the two of them standing side by side in his study." (Haggard Head, which sounds like a place name, is unlocatable.) "Until today she suspected he was Adam's invention, an alibi for his love affairs." Adam had told her Benny was "a mischief maker and a rogue" and that he "was the part of himself he had suppressed in order to become what he became."

She thinks about what will happen when Adam dies: "there are the children to consider; she will have to take care of them, Adam no less than Petra. She thinks Adam's wife will leave him.... Petra would grow increasingly crazed but perhaps more quietly, more secretively, while Adam would pass his days pottering about the house, mending things that do not need to be mended." Young Adam comes in and stands behind her with his hands on her shoulders and they look out at Benny, who has covered his bald head with a handkerchief knotted at each corner. Adam remembers -- apropos of what? -- when he was a boy he discovered dozens of empty whiskey bottles in the hedge near the unused privy behind the house. When they talk about the fact that Benny and Roddy will be there for lunch, she says, "A full house!" and adds, "Your father won't be pleased."


"Speaking of fathers, mine is waking up, at long last," Hermes interjects.


Ivy enters with a satin pillow that Rex has chewed up. Ursula observes that Rex "has been impossible since Adam's illness." Young Adam goes back to work on the radio he was tinkering with earlier, though he has decided it's futile: even if he repairs it, his father won't be able to listen to it. "They will never speak again, the two of them, his father will never have another opportunity not to call him by his name." He decides suddenly to go out and talk to Benny, hustling his mother along with him. Zeus joins Hermes in watching what's going on.

How glad I am that only I can see him, in the preposterous get-up he insists on as the father of the gods come to earth, the gold sandals, the ankle-length, cloud-white robe held by a clasp at one shoulder, the brass hair and wavy beard and lips as pink as a nereid's nipples. Honestly.

But Zeus is less interested in what's going on with Adam and Ursula and Benny than in where Helen is, so Hermes -- "Only sometimes am I omniscient" -- goes to look for her. He finds her just as she comes across Roddy, who "is handsome, too, in a thinned-out, strained sort of way. He has the appearance of a painting that has been over-cleaned, brilliant and faded at the same time."

They are in the music room, where they talk about the play that she will be acting in: "She cannot think, she says, why the play is called after Amphitryon, since Amphitryon's wife, Alceme [sic], her part, is surely the centre of it all." (The misspelling of Alcmene, otherwise properly spelled in the novel, is unexplained.) She tells him that the version they're doing is set at "Vinegar Hill, at the time of the Rebellion," which took place in 1798, and reinforces the suggestions that the setting of the novel is Ireland. And she tells him that the play "was written only a hundred years ago, I think, or two, in Germany." Kleist's Amphitryon was written in 1807, and the suggestion is that Helen's beauty is more substantial than her brains. (Earlier, in the section narrated by old Adam, we were told that though Goethe is "entirely forgotten now," Kleist is "sublime.") As Helen leaves the room, "what she takes to be Roddy's eyes on her is in fact my Dad shambling eagerly in her warm wake."

5. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 111-141

From " Meanwhile, on a blast of divine afflatus, ..." through "... what spirits guard the way?"

_____

Hermes informs us that he is "wafting Adam the elder across the seas to where together we shall invent Venice." I suppose he means that metaphorically -- he will help the comatose Adam remember his visit to the city -- although it's best not to be too sure about that. It is in the winter forty years earlier, just after the death of Adam's first wife. Dining alone, he is approached by a man named Zeno, who claims to be a count and takes him to an old house where there is "an enormous chopped marble head of Zeus" sitting on a table. As Adam is waiting for a woman, a prostitute called Alba, he feels "a gust of what seems to be, of all things, euphoria ... as if he had wanted his wife to die, as if he had longed all along to be rid of her. This is surely an appalling thought and yet, at the mercy of grief the inquisitor, he is compelled to think it." When he kisses Alba, "he knows at once that she has been with another man, and recently -- faint as it is there is no mistaking that tang of fish-slime and sawdust."

They have sex, and he talks to her about his wife, Dorothy. Then he wanders through the house and finds Zeno in what seems to be the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk -- Zeno has a stomach ulcer. Adam sits at a table and starts to cry, and Zeno puts his overcoat over Adam's shoulders. We learn that Dorothy had been secretive and somewhat scattered: "She took up projects -- gardening, exotic cookery, carpentry, even -- but quickly tired of them." And that she committed suicide, putting stones in her pocket and drowning herself. "And the girl, now, the girl in Venice, Alba, was she Dottie's ghost, come back to comfort him?" Hermes asks. "Perhaps she was. Sometimes a soul will be be permitted a brief return from Pluto's domain ... , but I do not know if she was one of them -- I only conduct them thither, not thence" -- with the exception of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Adam saw Alba once again, years later, in another Italian city. "She was in a wheelchair, being pushed by another young woman." Adam thinks he recognizes that young woman, that she was there when he haggled with Zeno about the fee.

This vignette about Adam in Venice has the self-contained quality of a short story, not a chapter in a novel. It also ends the first section of the book.

The second section begins with Rex, the dog, spotting a stranger -- a short, fat man in "a black suit and a white shirt open at the collar" -- walking toward the house. Rex barks at the man but wags his tail when the man pats him on the head and calls him by name, which surprises Rex. "The stranger has a strong dark juicy smell, very pungent, redolent of far away.... He has a bald pate ringed by a laurel-wreath of shiny black curls, an unhealthy-looking, bulbous face, white as a plate, and a nose like a broken little finger; his chubby, babyish hands seem pushed like corks into the ends of his fat arms." Rex follows the man to the house.

Petra is working on her almanac of diseases, "her encyclopaedia of human morbidity," in the morning room. She hears Rex bark and looks out to see the man coming up the driveway, so she goes down to open the door just as he is starting to knock. "There is the sense not of a door having opened but of a panel being slid aside between two worlds." He sits down and says, "Your name.... I know I should know it." She tells him it's Petra, and he says, "That's right." She tells him her father can't see anyone, but the man ignores the statement and asks for a drink of water.

Whoever, whatever, he claims to be, I, Hermes the messenger, I know who he is. Et in Arcadia ille -- They told Thamouz the great god Pan is dead, but they were wrong. If he misbehaves, as I know he will, I shall box his ears, the scamp.... 

But boxing his ears might be something of a trick, we learn, for Hermes goes on to say that the gods "are all one in our separateness." Their "denotations ... are a kind of penumbra, one might say, surrounding and testifying to the presence of an ineffable entity." Old Adam had a similar problem communicating his ideas, speaking "that which cannot be spoken, at least not in the common tongue[.] He sought to cleave exclusively to numbers, figures, concrete symbols. He knew, of course, the peril of confusing the expression of something with the something itself."

Because for both of us this essence is essentially inessential, when it comes to the business of making manifest. For me, the gods; for him, the infinities. You see the fix we are in.

The stranger, Pan, goes under the name Benny Grace. Upstairs, old Adam has sensed his presence.

The gods that oversee his world are not divine, exactly, the demons not exactly devilish, yet gods they are and demons, as palpably present to him as the invisibles he has devoted his life to studying, the particles thronging in boundless space and the iron forces marshalling them. For all the famed subtlety of his speculative faculties, his is a simple faith. Since there are infinities, indeed, an infinity of infinities, as he has shown there to be, there must be eternal entities to inhabit them.

Benny Grace reminds Petra of Mr. Punch and wonders if he will beat her mother, who "presses them all down, all of them here in the house, even Pa, though he may not know it. She does not intend to, but she does, blowing aimlessly this way and that, like the wind over a cornfield." She shows Benny into the downstairs living room, and Ivy Blount brings him a glass of water on a brass tray. Hermes disguises himself as Duffy and casually walks past the window.

Petra knows that Ivy is listening outside the door and when Ivy drops the brass tray in the hall, Petra follows her downstairs to the kitchen were young Adam is repairing an old radio. "He is good at fixing things. This is another reason for his sister to admire him, and to envy and resent him, too." He tells Petra that Ivy "ran through here as though she had seen a ghost." Petra tells him about Benny, though she hasn't caught his name. "He told me but I didn't hear -- he talks like Popeye." He follows her upstairs to the living room, somewhat nervously to his surprise: "He lives in the world as she does not; he should be used to unexpected occurrences, things going wrong, people turning up out of the blue."

Benny Grace introduces himself to Adam, who tells Benny that his father is in a coma and has had a stroke, and asks how Benny got there. "He is also aware of the volume at which he is speaking but cannot seem to lower it. Why are they all shouting like this at poor Benny? -- it almost makes me feel sorry for him." Benny evades Adam's question, but Adam asks Petra to take him upstairs to see their father.

4. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 81-110

From "Adam feels like Adam on the first day in the Garden. ..." through "... That is what she will do."

_____

Young Adam drives to the train station "in his father's ancient station-wagon ... one of the original Salsol models, fitted with a prototype salt-water converter." We learn a few pages later that because of old Adam's "notorious Brahma equations" and the resultant "discovery of cold fusion," "the greater part of the world's energy nowadays is derived from brine." And that "Wallace's theory of evolution" has been overturned. Otherwise, things seem pretty much the same wherever (and whenever) this story is taking place.  

Adam is in a very good mood, thanks to the sex he has recently enjoyed with Helen, but Hermes observes that he's generally optimistic: "He believes unshakeably in the possibility of the good ... as a thing in itself, active and forceful, and independent of any agent." And that "good and evil are two species of virus competing against each other for hegemony in the heart of man," a belief that, Hermes notes, "is a not uncommon delusion among many millions since the days when the pale Galilean walked amongst you, or from earlier still, from the dawn of that awful day when Moses came marching down from the mount" -- in other words, from the dawn of monotheism. "Thou shouldst have stuck with us," Hermes complains, and sets forth an argument for sticking with the old gods who offer nothing much other than stories about why things work the way the do.

Above all, we would have you acknowledge and accept that the nature of your lives is tragic, not because life is cruel or sad -- what are sadness and cruelty to us? -- but because it is as it is and Fate is unavoidable, and, above all, because you will die and be as though you had never been. That is the difference between us and your mealy-mouthed Saviour, so-called -- we do not pretend to be benign, but are playful only, and endlessly diverted by the spectacle of your heart-searchings and travails of the spirit. 

Just like some novelists.

The train station is isolated -- it isn't near a town or anything else of significance -- and Adam has a while to wait for the arrival. He is wearing an uncomfortable pair of tweed trousers that he found. His decision to put them on "seemed the necessary thing, at the time. This is another mark of his inherent and humble piety, this sense he has of the sacramental in even the smallest, most absurd, of actions." The trousers aren't his father's, and he doesn't know whose they may have been. He thinks about his marriage and his awareness "of an increasing vagueness, an increasing insubstantiality, in his life with Helen." Hermes mocks "the mountains [humans] make out of the molehills of their passions."

The train, "one of the new-fangled models that run on steam," arrives and Roddy Wagstaff gets off: "Tall and slender and slightly stooped, Roddy has the aspect of a film heart-throb of a former time." He carries a silver cigarette case and "a petrol lighter of the same antique vintage as the silver case." As they ride back to the house, they talk about Petra and her collection of diseases, "an almanac of ailments in which she aims to list, complete with clinical definitions, all the illnesses known to afflict mankind." Adam urges Roddy to take Petra somewhere -- "She's too much on her own. It is not good for her." Roddy, who "has the manner, by turns prickly and jaded, of a much more elderly man," shrugs off the suggestion. Adam doesn't know how Roddy makes a living -- he writes, for "broadsheet newspapers and ... the glossier magazines, on abstruse subjects -- Byzantine ceramics, American vernacular furniture of the nineteenth century, contemporary monastic life on Mount Athos -- but these can hardly provide an income sufficient to keep him in the Turkish cigarettes and silk foulards to which he is so partial."

On their way home, they take Hunger Road, which "dates from the famine times," another indication of the setting (Ireland) that hasn't yet been made explicit. It follows the river, and Adam goes off into a reverie about where the river ends and the estuary begins. He decides that "the question is premised on two, man-made, terms -- river, estuary -- whereas in fact there is but one body of water, commingling here at the whim of unceasing flow on one side and of changing tides on the other; any separation is a separation made only by the action of his asking. This is strange." And yet not so strange for a son of old Adam, who was the boy who worried about when the flour mixture would be mixed. Then he realizes that there is a distinction not man-made: "The river is fresh water but the sea is saline." (Here Hermes mentions old Adam's contribution to the cold-fusion breakthrough.) And that the river's outgoing flow and the tide's incoming flow are opposing force. But he's no closer to the answer to the original question: "where do they merge, exactly?"

Roddy, whose manner has been described as "languid rudeness," mentions his fondness for Adam's father and then says, "I know what you think of me." This surprises Adam, who claims he doesn't know what he thinks of Roddy, "'or of anyone else, for that matter.' ... Adam has the unsettling sensation of having been engaged in a far more extensive, far more rancorous exchange, involving him but carried on somehow without his full participation." When they reach the house, Adam asks Roddy to be nice to Petra, which startles Roddy.

Ursula has been in the Sky Room clipping old Adam's fingernails, and fighting "the unnerving feeling" that he is watching her from under his eyelids. She reflects that "She might have been his daughter rather than his wife, and even yet there are times when she feels like his child," which embarrasses her as "a terrible notion," one that she "would never confide ... to anyone." She contemplates his fingernails, having thought of clipping them as "a shivery business," and reflects that she has "read somewhere that they were originally tufts or pads of hair that became fused and hardened, in the same way that thorns on roses are supposed really to be leaves that over aeons coiled themselves tighter and tighter until they were sharp as needles." Hermes feels compassion for her -- "Her mind has not allowed her yet to grasp the full extent of the calamity that has befallen them" -- and folds his "invisible wings about her sad, sloped shoulders."

Both husband and wife have been solitary creatures -- Adam "had the ability to withdraw from his surroundings" and she "was the bird who builds its net behind the waterfall and perches there quite placid, amid the constant crashing, the spume, the flashing iridescence. Adam was the one who drew her, briefly, into the cataract." And she thinks of water as "his element, his emblem, for her." They met when she was nineteen and both were standing on a bridge that spanned "the famous tidal bore" -- the incoming wave from the sea entering the estuary, the subject of young Adam's reverie as well. They went to a pub where she ordered gin, which she had never tasted before.

Despite the gin she saw through him straight away, saw through the hairline crack running athwart the carefully fashioned mask that he was holding up to her, saw right down to all the things that were coiled and curled inside him like those unimaginably tiny strings he told her people used to think the world was ultimately made of.

(String theory seems to have gone the way of "Wallace's theory of evolution.") He talked about his late wife, Dorothy, and she found out that "He was older than her father. She did not care."

For Petra, things "seem perfectly ordered [that] are for others all jumbled and strewn," and she spends a lot of time "interpreting herself" for other people: "Everything she thinks and intends must be translated into an approximation of their language before they can understand anything of what she is saying." Time either "drags itself painfully along" or "speeds past," and her father "said she was quite right, that time is not uniform and only dull people imagine it is so." They once talked of this "beside the holy well in the little hollow of brambles and holly that has been here, her father says, since the Druids."

Time, her father was saying, looking upwards and scratching his chin through his beard, time has tiny flaws in it, tiny slippages, that in the very beginning hindered the flow of formlessness and created form. In the same way, he said, that your nails catch on something made of silk, with little hooks you did not know were there until they snagged.... Flaws in the matrix, temporal discrepancies. So at the start, when there was still nothing, the world was, you could say, hindered into existence.

Petra thinks of Roddy as "debonair ... so smooth, so poised and yet so concentrated and determined, too." She finds other men "disconcertingly repellent.... She thinks of puckered anuses, oniony armpits, disgusting tufts of curled-up, glistening hair -- she cannot stop herself -- of stuff under the flaps of their prepuces, up their nostrils, between their toes. Roddy, however, comes to her as bland and unblemished as a shop-window dummy." His opposite is Duffy: "The thought of Duffy's rancid bachelor bed makes her tremble with revulsion, but with something else, too, something to which she cannot, will not, put a name." Hermes says that Petra "is the one of the household who is dearest to us. And because we love her so we shall soon take her to us, but not yet, not yet." Petra has also seen or sensed or remembered something which might be a ghost in the hallway, "a man, heavy-set, scowling, ... in old-fashioned clothes and high boots.... She is sure the man is one of Ivy Blount's forebears."

3. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 57-80

From "Old Adam plunges, a pearl-diver ..." through "... 'That milk,' I said, 'is gone sour.'"

_____

Old Adam recalls his boyhood "in the humpbacked town above the estuary." It's a beautifully detailed vignette whose verbal finesse evokes Joyce's Dubliners. And while it verges on nostalgia, with memories of blowing soap-bubbles with a clay pipe and his mother's weeping three tears into the flour mixture for the cake she is baking after his father's death, it also provides a vivid contrast between the texture of human life and the disembodied existence of the gods. It also neatly characterizes Adam, whose awakening mathematical passion is reflected in his absorption in precisely mixing the flower, salt and baking soda in the bowl his weeping mother hands him.

Every grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly, the particles of salt and baking soda spaced just so throughout the flour, each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it, a solid, three-dimensional white field supporting a dense and uniform lattice of particles of other shades of white. And what about the flour itself, no two grains of which were alike -- how could that be completely mixed, even if there were no other ingredients present in it, making their own pattern? And how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved? -- how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder? 

The gods brought order out of chaos, and now Adam is trying to do the same.

His "lavishly ugly" aunt arrives to help complete the Christmas dinner that Adam's mother has insisted on having despite her husband's death, and she brings him a box of puzzles made out of twisted wire. Adam solves them easily, "which caused his aunt to sniff and frown and make a humming sound." He is able to separate the puzzles because "his mind would become for a moment a limitless blue space, calmly radiant." And he demonstrates a similar facility with magic square puzzles, which make him think, "How could fifteen be different from fifteen? And yet the difference was there, a sort of aura, unseen but felt, like air, like warmth -- yes, yes, we gods were with him even then." He is a boy tormented by the "impossibility of accuracy" and the nature of time:

Does time flow or is it a succession of stillnesses -- instants -- moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbreaking wave? Or is there only one great stillness, stretching everywhere, in all directions, through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite, listless sea? ... Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate. 

Meanwhile, Zeus "is in a sulk" because young Adam and Helen are making love. And love, Hermes tells us, "is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death." Love is something the gods "did not intend, foresee or sanction." And their attempts to simulate it are debilitating and exhausting, which is why Zeus is sulking. "Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known."

The exaltation of sex -- or as Hermes refers to it, "this mess of frottage" -- into love baffles the gods: "how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not." Hermes thinks he knows, and that Zeus fails to recognize, that "They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one's eyes. It is immortality they are after." Zeus had left Hermes in charge of making sure that "he was not disturbed at his illicit amours" -- copulating with Helen -- so it is Hermes who made sure that Adam was wakeful and left his wife's bed.

Helen, we learn, has miscarried a year ago, but she has managed to reconcile herself to the loss in part by transferring some of her maternal emotions toward Adam, who "wants to be his father, reducing life to a set of sums. But Adam is softer than his father, and younger than the old man ever could have been, and love, not logic, is his weakness." Zeus has made her think that he is Adam while at the same time wanting her to think he is her lover and not her husband, so he tries to persuade her to remember him as separate from Adam -- and fails. Hermes observes,

It seems worse for him each time, which is supposed to be impossible since nothing may change in our changeless world, either for good or ill. Perhaps he really is dying, perhaps the pursuit of love is killing him, and this is why he so fiercely persists, because he longs for it to kill him. A dying god! And the god of gods, at that! Ah, mortals, hae a care and look to your souls, for if he goes, everything goes with him, bang, crash and done with at last, his Liebestod become a Götterdämmerung. 

Hermes has played hooky from his duties, however, and visited Ivy Blount in her cottage, disguising himself as Adrian Duffy, the cowman. Ivy is suspicious of Duffy because she suspects he is after her cottage, "a grim two-storeyed edifice with a steep-pitched slate roof and narrow, arched window-frames painted a shiny and peculiarly unpleasant, even sinister, shade of blackish green.... Those green window-frames are still troubling me, I wonder why." We learn that although "Ivy's face is long and sharp and her unruly brown hair resembles a rook's nest [and] the first blush of youth has long ago faded from her cheeks, she is possessed of a peculiar, subtle beauty." Moreover, she "has a sweet voice, ... light and mellow" and "used to speak three or four languages, thanks to her time at a Swiss finishing school" that she was forced to leave "when the family's fortunes went wallop."

Hermes/Duffy takes a swig from a mug of milk that turns out to be sour. "I had never tasted sour milk before; I shall not taste it again." We learn that Duffy, too, has a cottage on the other side of the hill that he used to share with his mother, "a rough-edged baggage generally considered to have been a witch" until she died last year. Duffy/Hermes tells her it needs a new roof, which confirms her suspicion that he has his eye on her house. So she thwarts any designs he may have made: "'If you have something to say to me,' she said, in a voice that had a noticeable shake to it, 'come out and say it, then.'" But Hermes "had nothing to say. I was just amusing myself, toying with one of my creatures, as so often is the way."

2. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 28-56

From "And look, here he is, old Adam ..." through "... take a gander at what these your little ones are up to."

_____

I have begun to wonder what this novel would be without the ... well, let's call it "the gimmick" for the nonce -- the gimmick of the lurking and narrating Olympians. Would it be anything more than yet another novel about a dysfunctional family?

Hermes is snooping about in old Adam's mind, what's left of it, observing that the ego is what remains:  "What of his work? What of his work. He cares nothing for their so-called immortality if he is not to be here to savour its vaunted consolations." He is also afraid of being buried alive. And Hermes reveals that old Adam was a child, he used to ride the train that passes the house and look out and dream of living in it. And that he is tormented by "the thought of all that he had and did not prize as he should have when he had it." He thinks of his daughter-in-law, Helen, and then of something that the young Adam thought of earlier when he was looking at the boy on the train: the mystery of otherness.

He asks, how can people go on being fully real when they are elsewhere, out of his ken? He is not such a solipsist -- he is a solipsist but not such a one -- that he imagines it is proximity to him that confers their essential realness on  people.... He speculates sometimes if his early espousal of the theory that posits our existing in the midst of multiple, intertwined worlds was prompted by nothing more than the necessity for somewhere for people to be when they are not with him.... Look at him now, unable even to know if his daughter-in-law, like Schrösteinberg's anxiously anticipant cat, is conscious or not, down there in her sealed chamber.

Wait a minute. Schrösteinberg? You mean Schrödinger? Are we getting a hint here that the "reality" depicted by this fiction is not the "reality" of our experience?

And then old Adam thinks of himself as having "re-entered the embryonic state," that dying "will bring him not to the next world but to a state of suspended pre-existence, ready to start all over again from before the beginning."

Hermes goes back downstairs to the kitchen and the ranting Petra, who stops talking when her mother complains of a headache. Ivy Blount, the "unofficial cook, housekeeper and, as Duffy the cowman darkly asserts, taken-for-granted skivvy," arrives. And we learn that the place is called Arden House. Ivy, who "gives off a faint odour of roses and dishwater," brings with her "a recently throttled chicken" and a basket of eggs. Ursula recognizes the chicken as one she was fond of when it was alive, but decides it will do as lunch for "that fellow Wagstaff." The dead chicken prompts Hermes to observe:

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas. We have stronger stomachs, stouter lungs, we see it all in all its awfulness at every moment and are not daunted; that is the difference; that is what makes us divine.

Ivy, we now learn, is the former owner of this house. Old Adam bought it from her, "at a knock-down price, twenty years ago." But Hermes tells us more about her:

It is said she is a direct descendant of Charles Blount, eighth Lord Mountjoy and first Earl of Devonshire, that eccentric soldier whom Mary, Queen of Scots, great Gloriana, on her accession to the English throne after the beheading of her cousin, the upstart and treasonous Elizabeth Tudor, sent over at the dawn of the seventeenth century to pacify this most distressful country.

So we're in Ireland? But it was Elizabeth who was Gloriana and the beheader of Mary, Queen of Scots, not the other way around. Now we have to wonder about Hermes's accuracy or veracity. Or whatever.

Meanwhile, young Adam goes upstairs -- reluctantly -- to see his father, reflecting on how "no one would ever dare climb to his father's room without knocking first" and that "the Sky Room was the forbidden place where his father worked." He also remembers the dream that awakened him this morning: "the cries of battle, the bronze helmets flashing, the blooded dust," in which he was carrying something "-- a wounded comrade, a corpse, perhaps?" Evidently Ares is lurking around too. He thinks about the fact that he and his father share the same name, yet his father never called him by it that he can recall.

He finds the curtains shut tight, and wonders why his mother moved old Adam up here, out of the bedroom they shared. And he reflects on his father's fame:

When he was famous first, caricaturists pictured him in a monk in a windowless bare cell, wild-eyed and hydrocephalic, hunched with his pencil over a gridded page of parchment; also as a spaceman in a globular helmet popping out of a hole in the sky, as a mad professor with electrified hair meeting and merging with himself in a mirror, as an entire crew of identical sailors marooned each one in solitude on his own earth-shaped island afloat in a sea of inky darkness.

Evidently identity and otherness is a major theme in this narrative.

He has an eerie sense that there are people hiding in the room, "getting ready to spring out at him, whooping and jeering and laughing." And figure of his father, stretched out in a stiff, hieratic pose beneath the covers, reminds him of when he buried Petra in the sand at the beach. He recalls that by the time he was twelve he was already larger than his father, and how he imagined "that he was not his father's son at all but the outcome of a desperate adventure entered into by his mother to pay his father back for the many affairs he was said to carry on." Hermes thinks of planting in Adam's mind the idea that his father was Zeus, but decides that no one would ever think that Ursula was "my heavenly father's type." (Hermes, like Adam, has an as-yet-unarticulated problem with his father.)

Like Ursula, Adam nurses the unthinkable thought: that he wants his father dead. "The thought comes to him unbidden; he is shocked not to be shocked." And then he realizes that he is crying. Which pleases him -- it's almost as if he has done something he was obliged to do.

As Adam goes downstairs to the room where Helen is sleeping, Hermes gives us a description of the house, "built on four sides around a big, square space two storeys deep." It is twenty miles from the sea. The walls are "clad in slotted wooden laths.... What caprice led Ivy Blount's great-grandfather, the whimsical St John Blount, to have half the house's wall-space covered with this cheap wood battening." It is something of a firetrap: Ursula calls it a "great gazebo -- nothing but tinder." Is this detail planted for a purpose?

His arrival in the room awakens Helen, whose beauty "strikes him as if for the first time." And Hermes notes, "Hear my old Dad licking his chops in the background?" Her eyes are "dark blue and deep as the Grecian sea itself. And her beauty makes Adam feel as if "he is standing astride the hub of a great steel disc that is spinning at an immense speed and that at the tiniest ill-judged action on his part will begin to wobble wildly and a second later fly off its spindle with terrible shrieks and clangs and send him failing into darkness and irreparable damage."

Helen is confused: She thought he had been there making love to her. She gets up to go to the bathroom, saying, "I'm sopping," a word that takes a moment to penetrate Adam's consciousness. Hermes follows her to the bathroom, where he gives a delicate, slightly Joycean account of what she does there -- her embarrassment at "the splashings and ploppings going on underneath her," which she fancies "can be heard all over the house." She looks out of the window at a "field of thistles" and "a circular dark wood that seems to huddle around itself in fear of something" -- a field and a wood that "she can never seem to locate" when she goes outside -- "not that she would spend much time searching for them. It is just another of the place's many small but exasperating mysteries. She is a city girl and finds the country side either dull or worrying, or both." The sounds she hears in the house make her wonder, "Why is it that people heard from afar like this, in distant rooms on other floors, always sound as if they are doing things -- confiding, fighting, striking loud deals -- far more interesting than the mundane things that they are really engaged in?"

She reflects that old Adam "lusts after her -- lusted, now -- she has seen him eyeing her when he thought she was not noticing," and that he "is nothing like his son" -- there is something "uncanny" about old Adam. And then she realizes that there are no traces of the love-making that she believes she has just experienced and wonders if it was a dream: "Surely not. Surely something so intensely felt must have been real. Hermes observes as she washes up: "The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels," and as she begins to reflect on the "remembered pleasure that seems a part of pain," Hermes observes, "She would swoon if I were not there to hold her up with arms of air. This is how it always is when Dad has done what he does with a girl, the old lecher."

Adam has dressed when she returns to the bedroom. She observes that his "eyes are pale too, a limpid blue, like her own, but uncanny, somehow, uncanny, that word again. In her dream he was himself and yet not, a figure of cold fire, burning her; his mouth was gold." We learn that she has played Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie, but now she is playing Alcmene, on whom Zeus fathered Heracles. She also becomes a maenad as she "takes her husband's head between her hands and presses his face to her breast." And Hermes taunts his father, "come put on your horns and take a gander at what these your little ones are up to."

1. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 3-27

From "Of the things we fashioned for them ..." through "... into the presence of his earthly father."

_____

Adam Godley and his wife, Helen, go to see his father, also named Adam, who has suffered a severe stroke and is presumed to be dying. The story is narrated by the Greek god Hermes.

I suppose if you're going to have an omniscient narrator, a god is a pretty convenient one to work with. Hermes begins by describing the younger Adam being awakened by the dawn -- "Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works." (What are the others?)  Hermes has no hesitation in entering the consciousness of his characters: He notes that the "pyjamas" Adam's mother has given him to wear are too small. "But that is the way with everything in this house, everything pinches and chafes and makes him feel as if he were a child again." Adam, Hermes tells us, is "not yet thirty."

The house is near the railroad tracks, and it begins to shake with the arrival of a train that stops by the house. His mother has always complained about that, and the fact that "your father in his wisdom insisted on us setting up home practically on the railway line." Adam thinks about how he doesn't want to deal with his mother, who "is absurdly young, hardly twenty years older than he is." (We learned a page or two ago that the elder Adam was married twice, and that young Adam was born late in his life.) He looks out the window at the train and sees a small boy aboard it staring at the house, craning to look at it as the train moves off.

He thinks again of the child on the train and is struck as so often by the mystery of otherness. How can he be a self and others others since the others too are selves, to themselves? He knows, of course, that it is no mystery but a matter merely of perspective. The eye, he tells himself, the eye makes the horizon. It is a thing he has often heard his father say, cribbed from someone else, he supposes. The child on the train was a sort of horizon to him and he a sort of horizon to the child only because each considered himself to be at the centre of something -- to be, indeed, that centre itself -- and that is the simple solution to the so-called mystery. And yet.

He goes into the hall where he sees his sister looking in a closet under the stairwell. "She is nineteen and so much younger than her years, and yet possessed too of an awful ancientness -- 'That one,' Granny Godley used to say of her darkly, 'that one has been here before.'" Her name is Petra, and he calls her Pete. She explains that she's looking for mousetraps. She has shaved her head and the hair is growing back, "a bulrush-brown nap that covers her skull evenly all over. Her hands are the scrabbly pink claws of a rodent. The mice, her brother thinks, must recognise one of their own." He asks her if "the Dead Horse," his nickname for her boyfriend, is coming today, and she says she supposes he will.

Adam, who is not usually up at dawn, "thinks of Helen his wife asleep up in the room that used to be his when he was a boy," and Hermes observes that it's good "that this young husband does not know what my doughty Dad, the godhead himself, was doing to his darling wife up in that bedroom not an hour since in what she will imagine is a dream." Adam hasn't seen his father yet, and is annoyed that his mother brought him home to die. He and Petra go down for breakfast.

Hermes interrupts to introduce himself and to explain that the old gods "never left -- you only stopped entertaining us." They get involved with humans occasionally "out of our incurable boredom, or love of mischief, or that lingering nostalgia we harbour for this rough world of our making." He explains that they went to a lot of trouble making this world

-- planting in the rocks the fossils of outlandish creatures that never existed, distributing fake dark matter throughout the universe, even setting up in the cosmos the faintest of faint hums to mimic the reverberations of the initiating shot that is supposed to have set the whole shooting match going.

(The reference to the fossils recalls the theory of Edmund Gosse's fundamentalist father, that they were put there to test humankind's faith.) Hermes expresses disgust at what humans have done to their creation, and notes that "we too are petty and vindictive, just like you, when we are put to it."

He tells us that the senior Adam had suffered a stroke while on the toilet -- "as if one of us had absent-mindedly laid a too-heavy hand upon his brow. Which is perfectly possible, since we are notorious for not knowing our own strength." He is now in the Sky Room, which has windows on three sides now covered by heavy curtains. The room, designed by "the famously eccentric St John Blount," has a conical roof with a weathervane in the shape of Hermes himself, which is "disconcerting" when the narrator realizes it.

Ursula, the wife of this Adam and the mother of the other, enters and listens to make sure he's still breathing, then closes the curtain that had been letting in a shaft of light. She thinks about how the family physician, Dr. Fortune, "who looks like Albert Schweitzer," had protested moving him here. The nurses disapproved too. She senses something in the room and wonders if it is the ghost of his first wife or of "his long-dead mother, Granny Godley the old hag." Hermes tells us that she dislikes her name, and that her husband had told her about the martyrdom of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins. "When the children were small they called her La, and still do. Adam is Pa and she is La." She was ill during her pregnancy with Petra, whom no one expected to live. "But live she did, and was called Petra, another stone dropped into Ursula's already heavy heart." She touches Adam's hand and his eyes open. Dr. Fortune has told her that he isn't conscious of anything, but she wonders, "why then does he look at her now with such seeming fury?"

She goes downstairs where younger Adam and Petra are eating breakfast in the kitchen, and the elderly Labrador, Rex, is lying on the floor. Petra tells her that her boyfriend, Roddy Wagstaff, "the Dead Horse," will be there soon -- "although everybody knows it is not she but her famous father that Roddy comes to visit." Ursula says they'll have to have lunch for him, and Adam suggests they take him into town, which causes Petra to sarcastically suggest that they "bring Pa and prop him up at the head of the table and feed him soup through his tubes." Petra's leg is jigging up and down nervously under the table. Her father's illness has been "a calamity commensurate with the calamitous state of her mind." Her voice is "goitrous with sarcasm." Ursula recalls how Granny Godley had latched on to the children: "She thinks of Adam growing up in the humid conspiracy that was his Granny Godley." Then when Petra was born, she was "clasped jealously in [her] bony embrace."

Hermes reflects that he has "contrived all these things."