A new John Banville novel is as great a pleasure as a new
Nabokov once was. Banville is Nabokov's stylistic heir; he's the greatest living
artist of English prose. I'm
delightedly immersed in The Infinities,
his latest, whose conceit is that the gods of Olympus have never gone away but
watch over us yet; the novel is narrated by one of them, Hermes. In the hands of a lesser artist this would be an irritating affectation, but Banville is a greater, not a lesser, artist. It works.
I pop two gleaming gems out of the Knopf edition:
"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." (p. 35)
"He is reminded of Venice–why? Surely a Venetian ceiling
would be awash with lozenges of water-light, a shimmering, amoebic pulsing, and
not, as here, soft-grey and crumbly-seeming, like mould." (p. 31)
He's so good it's amazing he's actually won any awards, let
alone the Man Booker (2005, for The Sea).
Here's my essay on the man and his work, awhile
back.
