Doctors and Narrators

"... old Adam had been subject ... to a steady softening of the brain due to a gradual extravasation of blood in the area of the parietal lobe ..." Are these lines spoken by Abraham Verghese's narrator or John Banville's? One would think they belong to Dr. Verghese's fictional world and his physician narrator, Marion Stone. But in fact they are from Mr. Banville's The Infinities, and spoken by his divine narrator, the old Greek god Hermes. The winged-one goes on to confirm that he does indeed "have ... some expertise in matters medical, to meliorate the more obstreperous of my attributes."

Banville tells a funny story about himself and his commitment to writing unapologetically literary fiction (when he's not writing crime novels as Benjamin Black). When he explained to his London publisher that the narrator of his latest novel was the messenger of the Olympian gods, his publisher replied, "Another crowd-pleaser, John?"

In fact, The Infinities may be something of a crowd-pleaser, after all. I see from my proof copy that Knopf is going with a first print run of 75,000--which is quite a vote of confidence in a nuanced work like this. The confidence is well-placed. I've been reading Banville for more than twenty years, and he is in rare form here. Hermes is an inspired choice of narrator (if he "really" is the narrator ... but that's another story). Banville has always gone for narrators who are, in terms of voice, arch and sly and slyly humorous. Hermes, I would suggest, is the arch-arch narrator. In an earlier novel, Ghosts, the narrator identified himself as "little god." Well, now we have a big god, and his vantage point is perfect for the irony and the lightness-of-touch and the flighty omniscience that are the hallmarks of a Banville fiction. Mr. Banville doesn't do ploddingly constructed characters. In that British TV interview I referred to in an earlier post, he talked of the way--indeed, he marveled at the way--characters just "whip themselves out of words."

I think Banville put his finger on an important truth about fiction there: The only thing that really matters is what happens on the page. It's a truth that was central to the work of Houston's own Donald Barthelme (whose fictions, it seems to me, were trying to approach the condition of abstract art). Banville's Hermes describes himself as "this voice speaking out of the void." That phrase is both a homage to Banville's literary hero, Samuel Beckett (and Barthelme's, interestingly enough) and a good working definition of all fictional narrators. They are all voices speaking out of the void.

Posted on Thu, February 18, 2010 by Robert Cremins

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