The Infinities

"I quite like this book. It’s an adaptation of a play called Amphitryon , which is more famous as a Roman comedy by Plautus than in any other guise, although Molière and Heinrich von Kleist adapted it. And it’s also about the possibility of parallel texts. Banville takes the plot of this ancient play – about how Zeus seduces in disguise the wife of Amphitryon, a woman called Alcmene, and begets Heracles from her, his divine child – and updates this to the present. The hero is a famous mathemetician called Adam Godley (a significant name, obviously) who has come up with an equation to connect all the parallel worlds that could exist in the Einsteinian universe. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter At a certain point in the narrative, you then realise that although it looks like England we’re in one of those parallel worlds, the possibility for which physics has imagined. In this world, for example, Mary Queen of Scots triumphed over Elizabeth I and Scandinavia is a kind of Middle East. This becomes a clever way of suggesting that other versions are possible, while embodying the plot of the original play in the novel – there’s a beautiful daughter called Helen who is the object of the erotic attentions of Zeus himself, although she thinks it’s her husband, as it is in the play. It’s a lot of fun. Yes, quite. So you have characters from Greek myth not only in the story, but narrating it. It’s very clever, and looking back on it I find it more successful than Zach Mason’s book, where the cleverness gets to be a little wearisome after a while. But in Banville it works, and shows that this thing can be done and ought to be done. I’m a great advocate for three plays by Euripides that to my mind are never sufficiently adapted. They are what we call Euripides’s romances – the Ion , the Iphigenia in Tauris and the Helen . These plays remind you almost of the Shakespearean romances . People are left on a desert island or a strange shore, their mates are far away trying to find them and are also eventually shipwrecked, there are misrecognitions and mistaken identities, and eventually it all comes together in a happy ending. I think that’s one of the reasons why people don’t like to put them on – because of their notions of what a Greek tragedy should be. They think it should end with lots of bodies on stage. But these are very psychologically subtle plays about identity. I would give an eye to see a beautiful production of them. Nobody knows better than classicists to avoid that kind of question. I can’t sit here in my living room on the west side of Manhattan, opining about what’s going to last. Things that last last for all kinds of reasons, and only one of them is how good they are. Things survive by accident that don’t get eaten by rats, or by computer viruses that haven’t even been invented yet because the computers they will eat haven’t been invented yet. So there’s no guarantee. Sappho composed poems that were collected in nine volumes in the Alexandrian library, of which we have exactly one complete poem left. I bet there were some good poems among the other eight volumes too. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So quality isn’t a guarantee, and that’s a lesson worth remembering if you’re a writer as well as a critic. If you sat there and made a list of the hundred greatest novels today – as people love to do – and people looked at that list a thousand years from now, they would be laughing their heads off. Yes, absolutely. They have value because they’re there. The process of canon formation itself is fascinating – we project a certain value onto what survives that maybe it shouldn’t have. In ancient times already, each of the three major tragedians had a school text of seven plays. But another bunch of plays by Euripides just happened to survive on a manuscript. And some of them are not so great, according to the strict notions that we have about what makes a good tragedy. So there’s no way to say what’s good, what’s not good, why it survived, and whether it survived because it’s good. There’s a lot of classical dreck out there. But we’re happy we have it, because we’re interested in the culture."