Where to start? I actually finished this a few days ago but haven't known where to begin my review. Banville's writing is precise like a surgeon's but carries as much feeling as I think it's possible to cram into each and every sentence. You might, if he were writing in a different genre, accuse him of tremendous over writing. However, he makes no pretences about the fact that his characters' their stories, and their interactions are almost incidental.
Do we ever actually get to know them well enough to become attached? Well, I was somewhat attached to Hermes but not the mortals Banville constructs the tale around. The Infinities is a modern parable, an approach to examining humanness that owes as much to Bunyan as it does to Moliere or Socrates and the characters have such loaded and unsubtle names as Adam Godley, Benny Grace, Petra and Helen (of Troy, the temptress of both men and gods).
As a parable it's allowed to be contrived - and the fact that gods and sprites appear in it doesn't excuse contrivance - but this, amongst a number of other challenges make it a far from satisfying read. As someone who reads widely across fiction and non fiction, I'm not sure whether people who thought this so amazing simply haven't seen the tropes on display here done better elsewhere (Vellum and The Master and Margarita both spring to mind).
Unusually I think this book might need a second read to pull out some of the more interesting ideas about identity but in the end I was disappointed in the people, the world they seem to live in and the gods themselves appear only as faded hedonistic octogenarians. The last isn't a flaw but it is quite tedious but that might, in itself, be a good review of the booked. Not bad but fairly tedious.
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