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The Infinities

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John Banville

The first sentence is beautiful:

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

A central conceit of the novel is that the story is narrated by the gods – the Greek gods. And so the musings of the immortals are interspersed in the sequence of events. An old scientist called Adam is on his deathbed, his mind drawing closer to the eternal perspective. He was a renowned mathematician / theoretical physicist whose abstract works have given rise to a whole new range of technologies. But this is only touched on lightly (too lightly, sci-fi is taboo). This world is far from futuristic — it’s set in a Big House, with drawing rooms, lawns, servants and tweeds and cravats.

Banville – as usual – touches on elusive thoughts and ways of being human where contemporary fiction rarely ventures.

Rad on …

Between the motion

And the Act

Falls the shadow

as T.S. Eliot put it, and that’s the node Banville hacks away at. His prose is rich with ideas and allusions. The god’s eye view injects an intellectual playfulness into the novel.

A pied horse kicks up its hoofs as they pass by, gallops friskily a little way, stops and turns its head and looks back at them boldly, showing them its behind and flicking its tail from side to side.

This however doesn’t look much like a god’s eye view — with its sex / shame overtones bubbling straight from John’s subconscious. I would have wished for more joy, light, and piercing insight in these gods. Something far beyond the human.

When old Adam recalls a visit to Rome he thinks of:

in all the rooms a worrying fecal smell, and the unseen below-stairs staff audibly at their larks.

When he visits Venice it’s engulfed in drizzle! And when he pours a glass of water – you guessed it – it’s cloudy. In the universe as represented by Banville, we can acquire all the mathematical skill we desire, marry a beautiful woman, read great poetry, travel to Venice, Athens, and Stockholm: but we can never escape the itchy tweed trousers and oniony armpits. Grimy facticity waits to drag us down into our itchy, smelly bodies.

The intensity of things in themselves on the other hand you might also call it.

So it’s like a challenge, to enjoy the thrill of Banville’s dancing thoughts as he seems simultaneously hell-bent on sticking the reader’s nose in the toilet bowl.

But for all that, it’s intensely fascinating and well worth the moments of god-like exhilaration, or the calm tableaux settings. This is a very visual novel. At times the feeling of reading it is more like watching a large and complex painting. There are things depicted which you feel must have significance: a small boy staring out from a train window, a clock face reflecting the dawn sun, a plucked chicken on a bench, bare stairs leading out of the frame, a man with a battered suitcase mopping his face with a hanky.

It’s definitely a work I’ll read again, and read new meaning into it.

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Fjord of Killary

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Kevin Barry

I love Kevin Barry’s short stories and I should have got around to reading this one in The New Yorker a lot sooner.

The narrator, Caoimhin, leaves the big city to take up work as a hotel manager in a small town in the west of Ireland. He is college-educated, a minor poet, and exhaustion has begun to rise in him like dry rot. He has not written a line in five years.

“They were all nut jobs,” he says of the locals at the start. “Maudlin bastards.”

The locals (or drinkers as we might equally call them) build a cosy life for themselves centered on the hotel bar. They argue endlessly of how long a journey might take from one town to another. But they are aware of the forces that negate humanity. It’s in the hammering rain / rising waters / the howling dogs. “It had the look of death’s dateless night out there.”

Read on …

This is how the local undertaker describes a man he buried some weeks before: “He went into himself. He didn’t talk for a year and a half and then he choked on a sausage. You’d visit and he’d say nothin’ to you, but he’d know you were there.”

Their lives are put to the test. The storm rages outside and the water rises to the third step. Voices are lowered to whispers. At last they are forced to retreat to the upstairs.

The story brings to mind another time when a flood posed a question mark over humanity. That other crisis led to a new covenant. This time the refuge is a small upstairs bar where Caoimhin plays nostalgic 70’s pop and serves free pints. He comes to the realisation that these people are the only humanity he has, the only humanity to whom he can address his writing.

He experiences a profound sense of Acceptance. “I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.”

He renounces his inner turmoil, his dissatisfaction with the world. Things have always been the same since the inn was established in 1648 and will always be the same. His creative acts can only have meaning in relation to the people who surround him. When he has accepted that, it will set him free to write again. All the madness that went before is dismissed as ‘the gloom of youth.’ He will not “go into himself” like the un-named man the local undertaker buried the week before – a man whose age is significantly given as one year older than the narrator.

The subtle horror of the story is left entirely implied.

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All About Life & Death

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Cho Chikun

A very reliable guide from someone who’s been through it all. Covers more than 200 patterns on the cusp of life and death.

Other interesting titles include:

Takao’s Astute Use of Brute Force
by Takao Shinji
Killer of Go
by Sakata Eio
A Monkey Jump Workshop
by Richard Hunter
Mastering Ladders
by Thomas Wolf
Cosmic Go
by Sangit Chatterjee and Yang Huiren.
The Way of the Moving Horse
by Janice Kim

Click the cover for the full-size sumptious cover image.

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Dorian

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Will Self

It’s loosely based on Wilde’s original, updated to 1980’s aristocratic, gay London. In a clever tweak, Dorian doesn’t just retain his good looks, he is the only one who doesn’t fall to the ravages of AIDS.

Just so you know what you’re in for if you start this novel:

While Dorian resumed lounging, Wotton crossed to where a table-top fridge resided on a gilt-painted escritoire. He opened it and retrieved a hypodermic, its plunger extended, its barrel full of red blood. ‘As if in anticipation, I was actually having a hit when the constabulary called on the related matter. I popped it in here to stop it clotting … there!’ With one fluid motion Wotton commenced injecting the room’s colour scheme into his main line. ‘Ah!’ he grunted. ‘Fixing coke is the perfect modern pleasure, because even as you do it you want to do it again. It’s like powdered greed dissolved in desire. All of human striving is here – measured out in millilitres.’

Dorian affected to ignore Wotton’s moustache of chemical sweat, just as he blanked the Z of pink water that the bandit sprayed on the wallpaper with his hollow épée.

Supercilious, bleakly camp prose, where the highbrow is gleefully shoved up the arse of the lowbrow. It never lets up. Even in the scene where Wotton dies – and after 250 pages you get fond of the old bugger – when his wife picks up the phone to inform the doctor:

The automatic switchboard put her on hold and she listened to the Four Seasons for what felt like three of them.

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Hinterland

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Edited by Karla Schmidt

This is an anthology of 20 sci-fi stories by German writers, some well- established, some new. They were all inspired by the music of David Bowie.

I translated Wulf Dorn‘s story for the English-language version.

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The Devil’s Carousel

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Jeff Torrington

This is a loosely-connected series of stories set in the Centaur car plant somewhere in northern England. We are immersed into the world of that factory: the assembly line is the widow; management level are collectively the Martians, and I never figured out exactly what Zombieland is, but it’s where particularly boring work is done.

The antics on the production floor are fascinating, but it’s a planet to itself. The Martians are on another planet, and spouses are there to be taken for granted in the few free hours away from work. In part there’s a delight in the subversive humour of the factory floor, the colourful characters and repartee. But the same sardonic narrative voice goes on to describe petty thieving, suicide, and a mental breakdown. The laughs become uncomfortable laughs. There are no hearts of gold here. There may be a message here about the dehumanising effects of capitalist society, but the narrative voice is too fatalistic to have belief things can be better.

Read on …

This is a voice that rarely reaches the bookshelves. Without looking at the author’s bio, you just know it’s based on personal experience – not just a few months of the daily grind, but years and years. This is a cynicism and wit which has developed to cope with a life sentence on the factory floor.

His prose too is a tool that he has developed for his purpose. It’s a magical mixture of defiant wit, rather awkwardly-constructed sentences, and shopfloor slang. Hammered to perfection overt decades, but not glossed.

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