Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Sometime before dawn, Adam Godley lies in a coma inside his ramshackle rural pile, Arden.

This will be no ordinary midsummer day.

The god Hermes is holding back daybreak so that Zeus can have his wicked way with Adam’s daughter-in-law, Helen. For an hour, her cuckolded husband, young Adam, paces the corridors in a semiconscious state that renders everything “unreally real.”

So opens John Banville’s new novel, “The Infinities,” a lofty, often wry look at the lowly business of being a mortal. The omniscient narrator is Hermes; the plot spans a single day.

The mischievously named Godleys have vexations enough without the intervention of deific pranks and caprices. Old Adam has suffered a stroke, and his wife Ursula is awaiting the worst, along with their son Adam, their troubled daughter Petra, and Helen, an actress with honey hair and an icy heart.

No matter. Zeus, that randy old romantic, visits Helen’s bed disguised as her husband. Then Hermes releases the dawn and proceeds to dip into the mind of each mortal in the house, eavesdropping on their desires and fears. Even Rex, the old family Labrador, isn’t exempt. Nor are Duffy, the gruff cowman, and Ivy Blount, the cook, whose ancestors once owned Arden.

Young Adam, a big, bumbling man, worries that Helen will leave him in the wake of a miscarriage. Petra, a haunted 19- year-old with scars on her wrists, is looking forward to the arrival of her boyfriend, a vain fellow named Roddy Wagstaff. And Ursula’s tippling is getting out of control.

‘Celestial Dentist’

Old Adam, for his part, is “trapped in the celestial dentist’s chair,” aware of what’s happening around him yet unable to communicate. He takes stock of his life, from his fatherless childhood to his lingering guilt over his first wife’s suicide. He also ponders his life as a celebrated mathematician and the role that an enigmatic character called Benny Grace played in his career.

Banville’s literary novels are more admired for their cerebral style than for their plots, and this latest yarn is no exception: an illicit kiss is planted, an attraction is confessed, and a beloved hen gets roasted and served up for lunch. That’s pretty much it. The long hinted-at denouement, though pleasing, comes as no surprise.

Among these scant events, Banville weaves a meditation on mortality, love and free will, offsetting the weighty motifs with playful prose. Old Adam, for one, is “sleeplessly sleeping,” his “memoryless memory” recalling a long-forgotten visit to Venice. The author also conjures up indelible images and unexpected similes: The sunny day, glimpsed through an open door, is as “mute and calm as money.”

Aloof as Hermes

All this lustrous detail, unfortunately, held me outside the scene, aloof as Hermes from the messy ado of the Godleys’ lives. Instead of drawing near to Banville’s characters, I found myself marveling at his technique and yet laboring to pin down mundane specifics.

The story appears to be set in present-day Ireland, though old Adam recalls that Sweden, of all countries, was on the warpath a few decades ago. In a sense, the novel takes place in literature land, its pages saturated with references, implicit and explicit, to Shakespeare and Chekhov, Nabokov and Woolf.

When it comes to the precise nature of old Adam’s mathematical achievements, this vagueness becomes vexing. He had his heyday, we’re told, after the Great Instauration, a fancy phrase for a restoration and an allusion, perhaps, to Sir Francis Bacon’s grand philosophical project of that name.

‘The Brahma Hypothesis’

During this period, “the relativity hoax” was exposed and Planck’s constant debunked. In their place, Adam proposed his “Brahma hypothesis,” a theory of creation that Banville only sketchily outlines.

“In our new beginning was an old end,” the elder Adam reflects, before hinting that his work had helped restore the classical gods to their thrones.

As for the gods themselves, their influence on the Godleys proves surprisingly benign. Enchanted by these humans, they shape their destinies with unexpected kindness, leaving Arden a tidy world whose loves and losses are all the more vivid for being so fleeting and infinitesimally small.

“The Infinities” is published by Picador in the U.K. and will be released by Knopf in the U.S. this February (300 pages, 14.99 pounds, $25.95).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Hephzibah Anderson in London at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.

Last Updated: September 13, 2009 19:00 EDT