Inside the Time Mcahine

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007

Inside the Time Machine
By Luc Sante
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon

Penguin, 1,085 pp., $35.00


CONT'D ...

Then there is the matter of Iceland spar, a clear
crystalline form of the mineral calcite that allows
for perfect double refraction, which here can be put
to a variety of uses, such as seeing through and
outside of time, maybe into alternate realities. It
can, for example, be used to read the
fourteenth-century Sfinciuno Itinerary, whose author
"imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional
sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the
optical arrangements for whose eventual projection
onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer
indeed," and which provides the only recorded set of
directions to the lost city of Shambhala. (Eventually
an expedition will be mounted to go there, via the
"subdesertine frigate Saksaul," which literally dives
through the underground sands.)

Time has apparently become frangible. The expedition
sent to gather Iceland spar in the Arctic brings home
a nunatak, a living mountain, under the impression
that it is a meteorite, and this unleashes disaster in
New York City when the ship docks. While "fire and
blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent
multitudes," "everyone in town seemed to know what the
creature was—to have known all along." At the
Explorers' Club a member declares, "Time itself was
disrupted, a thoroughgoing and merciless forswearing
of Time as we had known it." The cataclysmic event
itself seems to drop through the text, as if a hole
had been cut in the scant seven pages allotted to
it—but then a character calls it "the bad dream I
still try to wake from, the great city brought to
sorrow and ruin," and you begin to get the drift
without further prompting. One member of the Arctic
expedition, a painter named Hunter Penhallow, is
afforded an unexpected escape, aboard "a curious mass
conveyance.... The longer they traveled, the more
'futuristic' would the scenery grow." Is he headed for
the future, then, or for the past? When he reappears
in Venice, more than four hundred pages later, he
meets Dally:

    "There was a war? Where?"

    "Europe. Everywhere. But no one seems to know of
it...here..." he hesitated, with a wary look—"yet."

    "Why not? It's so far away the news hasn't reached
here 'yet'?" She let a breath go by, then—"Or it
hasn't happened 'yet'?"

    He gazed back, not in distress so much as a queer
forgiveness, as if reluctant to blame her for not
knowing. How could any of them know?

He's not the only time-traveler. During a sojourn at
Candlebrow University, somewhere in the Midwest, the
Chums of Chance meet a disturbing figure—maybe a
revenant, maybe not entirely human or at least not
entirely present —named Mr. Ace, who declares:

    We are here among you as seekers of refuge from
our present—your future—a time of worldwide famine,
exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of
the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to
understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth's
resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the
whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces. Those of us
who spoke this truth aloud were denounced as heretics,
as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like
religious Dissenters of an earlier day, we were forced
to migrate, with little choice but to set forth upon
that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic known as Time.

The Chums don't quite believe him, or at least not the
part about Mr. Ace and his people seeking refuge—the
time-travel bit they can accept, but they are certain
that these are raiders out to harvest some commodity
or other. And it does seem that Mr. Ace and his
Trespassers—as they are soon known—are running some
sort of confidence game, ensnaring the Chums in
something unsavory—but what?—in exchange for the
promise of eternal youth. Later one of the Chums meets
one of the Trespassers in Belgium, on the road between
Ypres and Menin. The Trespasser says,

 

    "Damn you all. You have no idea what you're
heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world
will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after
that will belong properly to the history of Hell."

    "Here," says Miles, looking up and down the
tranquil Menin road.

    "Flanders will be the mass grave of History."

    "Well."

 

A few pages later, an arms dealer comes into
possession of a "weapon based on Time," a small,
discreet thing with half-silvered calcite mirrors. Two
hundred–odd pages after that, the gun goes off,
putatively at least, in the form of the Tunguska Event
in central Siberia. (On June 30, 1908, an explosion
occurred there, some five to ten kilometers above the
earth's surface, with the force of ten to twenty
megatons of TNT—equivalent to the most powerful
nuclear weapon the United States has ever detonated—
felling 60 million trees over an area of 830 square
miles in a butterfly-shaped pattern. It has never been
successfully explained; an asteroid, a comet, a black
hole have all been proposed, but there are strong
arguments against all of them.)

Kit Traverse, who happens to be traveling through
Siberia on assignment from an agency that sounds like
a cross between British Intelligence and the
Theosophical Society (don't ask), believes the
explosion to have been caused by the Quaternion
weapon. One of the Russian counterparts of the Chums
of Chance says, "Time-travel isn't free, it takes
energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from
the future." Meanwhile, "Crazed Raskol'niki ran around
in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional
onlookers who got too close, raving about Tchernobyl,
the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of
Revelation."

There are so many roads through Against the Day that
to isolate one or five or ten of them in a brief
account is inevitably to distort its meaning. It is
possible, for example, to make it sound like an
allegory of the present day. The flap copy (written,
as such things usually are, by the book's author)
could make you think so:

    With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years
ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed,
false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil
intent in high places.

Which is presumably why, in the press release that
accompanied the galleys, he added a caution: "No
reference to the present day is intended or should be
inferred."

But while nothing as crude as simple transposition is
going on, the caution is both understandable and
mildly disingenuous. Historical fiction of any stripe
is always primarily about the time in which it was
written, and this one is no exception. Insofar as it
concerns the two decades before World War I, it homes
in on those aspects of the time that produce the
longest echoes in the present. The Chums of Chance,
eternal lost boys, are at least based on stock figures
of the period, but some of the other major characters
(Kit, Dally, the Russian mathematician Yashmeen, and
Cyprian in particular) sound very much like citizens
of our own time, with recognizable attitudes and
expectations, who happen to be living back then. While
that sort of thing might be a flaw in a more
conventional book, with Pynchon it cannot be anything
but deliberate. It is much more true, however partial
and unsatisfactory, to say that the book concerns a
hybrid experience of time: the past in the present and
the present in the past.

It is equally possible to isolate the book's
preoccupation with duality. The theme certainly runs
obsessively through its pages. Iceland spar, as noted,
produces a double refraction, but often one image
differs pointedly from its twin. The Chums of Chance
at one point stumble upon the counter-Earth proposed
by Plato, which remains invisible to us because it
performs the exact same rotation on the other side of
the sun. A British scientist named Renfrew is locked
in bitter struggle with his German opposite number,
Werfner, although they may be the same person (which
somehow reminds me of one of my grandmother's more
enigmatic aphorisms: "Cut an Englishman in half and
you get two Germans").

Other characters have doubles; the Chums of Chance
have both Russian and female counterparts. A luxury
liner, the Stupendica, is also the Austro-Hungarian
battleship SMS Emperor Maximilian—the two identities
somehow manage to separate, as the battleship appears
to start fighting World War I several years early. A
map of the Belgian Congo is used as a coded map of the
Balkans ("Remember, everything on this map stands for
something else.... 'Katanga,' here, could be Greece.
'Germans' could as well be the Austrians"). Some of
our heroes visit a convent in the Balkans with a
pronounced Manichaean tendency ("Part of the
discipline for a postulant was to remain acutely
conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly
unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between
darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the
presented world"). Within a few pages they learn of a
weapon based on light that is planned for use in the
Balkans during the coming war:

    From military experience with searchlights, it was
widely known how effectively light at that
candle-power could produce helplessness and fear. The
next step was to find a way to project it as a stream
of destructive energy.

This conjunction, too, gives the book's title an
additional spin.

TO BE CONT'D ...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19771

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