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A review by blackoxford
The Infinities by John Banville
4.0
A Divine Perspective
Whenever I feel the need for a smooth read, for that sensation of floating into soft, elegant prose that requires no effort to appreciate and absorb, Banville is my go-to guy. Nobody does it better. And that includes a tale narrated by a Greek god about one of an infinite number of simultaneous universes is which the subtle differences from our own create an intriguing context for considering things like... well, infinity.
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, sets the tongue-in-cheek tone: “But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail—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 immortals set the game up. We merely respond, mostly inadequately.
In such a world, “The secret of survival is a defective imagination... The unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot.” So we create consoling stories, like the Brahman Hypothesis, about the ultimate particle of time, “the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation.” Turns out that the hypothesis looks pretty pragmatic since it has led to automobiles powered by salt-water, the success of cold fusion, and hydrogen-fuelled machines (Oppenheimer failed in his attempt to create the bomb). But that’s just the gods having a laugh: “For what is spirit in this world may be flesh in another. In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled.”
Adam (how could it be any other?) is the one who figured it all out. “—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—well, you can imagine the effect.” But Adam is dying, and his son (the Second Adam as St. Paul would call him of course) understands almost nothing about either the nature of the universe, or his father.
Adam fils, however, has a very private, a very personal conviction, “He has a secret, one he will tell to no one, not even his wife, for fear of ridicule. He believes unshakeably in the possibility of the good... For him, good and evil are two species of virus competing against each other for hegemony in the heart of man, with good managing to hold the upper hand, though barely.” This Adam has no real story to tell about this intuition. He can only live out its implications and hope that others ‘get it’.
The gods know this is silly but wish they could be like the second Adam.
Whenever I feel the need for a smooth read, for that sensation of floating into soft, elegant prose that requires no effort to appreciate and absorb, Banville is my go-to guy. Nobody does it better. And that includes a tale narrated by a Greek god about one of an infinite number of simultaneous universes is which the subtle differences from our own create an intriguing context for considering things like... well, infinity.
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, sets the tongue-in-cheek tone: “But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail—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 immortals set the game up. We merely respond, mostly inadequately.
In such a world, “The secret of survival is a defective imagination... The unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot.” So we create consoling stories, like the Brahman Hypothesis, about the ultimate particle of time, “the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation.” Turns out that the hypothesis looks pretty pragmatic since it has led to automobiles powered by salt-water, the success of cold fusion, and hydrogen-fuelled machines (Oppenheimer failed in his attempt to create the bomb). But that’s just the gods having a laugh: “For what is spirit in this world may be flesh in another. In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled.”
Adam (how could it be any other?) is the one who figured it all out. “—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—well, you can imagine the effect.” But Adam is dying, and his son (the Second Adam as St. Paul would call him of course) understands almost nothing about either the nature of the universe, or his father.
Adam fils, however, has a very private, a very personal conviction, “He has a secret, one he will tell to no one, not even his wife, for fear of ridicule. He believes unshakeably in the possibility of the good... For him, good and evil are two species of virus competing against each other for hegemony in the heart of man, with good managing to hold the upper hand, though barely.” This Adam has no real story to tell about this intuition. He can only live out its implications and hope that others ‘get it’.
The gods know this is silly but wish they could be like the second Adam.