paul j. griffiths

John Banville’s new novel, The Infinities, is in every way pagan: it takes place in a world very like ours, but not quite ours, in which the Greek gods are active (its narrator is Hermes, and Zeus cuckolds one of its protagonists), quantum theory has been shown to be a hoax, there appears to be no electricity, and the “pale Galilean” (Banville uses Swinburne’s phrase: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean / and the world has grown grey with thy breath”) has rather less importance than he does for us. Heinrich von Kleist lurks in the background. What presses upon me is that Banville’s prose conjures beauty (emphatically not sublimity) with such shivering intensity that it seemed to me in reading it I might break into pieces. I won’t quote examples: they need context, and you should, anyway, read the book yourself. I don’t know of any contemporary Catholic writer, in poetry or prose, who can do what Banville does with English prose — perhaps there has been none in English since Gerard Manley Hopkins. But why? Ought Catholicism not sensitize us to beauty with a depth and to a degree that paganism cannot? Ought that sensibility not show itself in what and how we write? Why, then, have we at the moment no writers in English who can show us the shuddering trace of the Lord in what he has made with such vigor and precision that we cannot bear to look? With such saturated prose that the words become iconic of the Lord’s presence? Am I ignorant of such Catholic writers? Banville is, no doubt, a quondam Catholic (Irish, Christian-Brothers-educated) — and for all I know observant to some degree or another (though I doubt it). But his sensibilities are beginning-to-end pagan — and perhaps that permits him to see something I, we Catholics, ravished though we are by the triune Lord, cannot ……