Pynchon's flying circus

[Dave Monroe]

THE SCOTSMAN
Sat 25 Nov 2006
Pynchon's flying circus
Review by TOM ADAIR

AGAINST THE DAY
by Thomas Pynchon

Jonathan Cape, 1085pp, £20

I AM STARING AT A PHOTOGRAPH OF the 18-year-old Thomas
Pynchon, taken in 1955. A jug-eared insolence
smoulders back. It's a recalcitrant mugshot and the
subject's resented captivity in that high-velocity
stare is obvious. Not many years later, in the wake of
the publication of his debut novel V, Pynchon vanished
from the public gaze. His sense of privacy seems, in
retrospect, as acute as his sense of posterity.

Pynchon's career since then has been characterised by
vast silences in between novels, great gulfs of
gestation - 17 years between National Book
Award-winner Gravity's Rainbow and the ambitious,
nostalgic, less than fruitful Vineland (a pop at the
politics of the Reaganite 1980s viewed through the
lens of the 1960s California generation). Pynchon's
follow-up, Mason & Dixon, which charted the fortunes
of two iconic 19th-century surveyors as they
tortuously arbitrated and fixed the disputed
borderline between Pennsylvania and Maryland, was a
large-scale but generally lacklustre stab at pinning
America's territorial psyche.

Pynchon's earlier books were more focused - more a
true echo of the authentic epic voice of American
visionary storytelling - the uncompromising legacy of
Melville, Faulkner and Gaddis, all of whose writing,
at its best, dares you to struggle with it. Neither
the scabrous The Crying of Lot 49 (a satirical comedy,
somewhat surreal, depicting Californian life) nor V, a
philosophical allegory featuring life below streets in
the New York sewers - was user-friendly, but both were
irresistibly commanding. Arguably, along with
Gravity's Rainbow, those early books are among
America's least-read, most awe-inspiring masterpieces,
written with dazzling brio, arrogant density, and a
ferocious imagination.

Against the Day takes on some of their savour, as well
as their characteristic girth (at almost 1100 pages).
Its plot is typically tough to summarise, its
timescale and settings easier to capture, but
nevertheless dauntingly wide. The Chicago World's Fair
of 1893 (a celebration of the 400th anniversary of
Columbus's arrival on mainland America) marks the
starting point - an almost literal lift-off as
balloonists the Chums of Chance, aboard the
hydrogen-inflated Inconvenience, plot their course to
the Windy City. "Going up is like going north,"
confides Randolph St Cosmo, their commander, as they
rise. Broad hints are dropped that ascending far
enough might lead them to the magical realm of other
planets. The boys however, at least for now, are
headed due south to terra firma. Momentarily, Pynchon
keeps the novel grounded.

But hundreds of pages, and several continents, down
the track, the book arrives at the First World War,
along with pre-war bargaining over Bosnia and its
sorry aftermath. Light is beamed on the great powers'
carve-up of the spoils. An old cynicism reigns. Nation
states conform to the jigsaw carved by the victors.
The Balkan tragedy of a decade ago is determined,
foreordained - "this bad daydream [the European
Question], toward which all had been converging,
murderous as a locomotive running without lights or
signals..." There is portent at every turn.

"No reference to the present day is intended or should
be inferred," states Pynchon, tongue in cheek, of the
novel. This is, of course, baloney. Pynchon mocks our
contemporary state of global dithering and distress,
not least in the case of the world's grave
incompetence in its muddle over energy. The energy
struggle here is between those who see the future
offering free electricity worldwide, and those whose
money empires depend on tight control of supply and
development. Business entrepreneurs Foley Walker and
Scarsdale Vibe attempt to finance the invention of the
"counter-transformer", to protect "the very nature of
exchange". They are talking about capitalism, and
industrial espionage and any number of deaths seem a
cheap price to pay.

SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES LATER, THE same two characters,
now filthy rich, are taking refuge from "the murderous
fields of capitalist endeavour" while dining al fresco
in the foothills of the Dolomites. Their obnoxious
self-delusion is comically palpable. Some of the
comedy is less subtle, such as Pynchon's passing
mention of the township of Thick Bush, a place full of
meatheads and mobsters. The book is an anthropological
zoo, with every species of human type, including
walk-ons by the famous - Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi,
Groucho Marx and Reilly, Ace of Spies.

The book's field of action, some of it fantasy, some
even fact, encompasses Mexico, Central Asia and
Siberia, mixed with dalliances in London and Vienna,
carnival capers and conspiracies in Venice, time out
in Hollywood and Paris, and the Chums of Chance
hovering cheerily over everything and everywhere. At
one point the novel's hidden narrator breaks from
cover to claim his authorship of the Chums as featured
characters in a series of adventures: "letters having
come in from as far away as Tunbridge Wells, England,
expressing displeasure, often quite intense, with my
harmless little intraterrestrial scherzo". This is a
terse, if amusing, reminder that Pynchon's stock in
trade lies in twisting observed reality into a hall of
mirrors tableau, then leaving the reader to spot the
distortions.

The three-decade period from 1893 was one of America's
most crucial, a time of expansion and self-discovery,
poised on the brink of industrial might. Pynchon
dispatches his characters westward as well as outward:
the miners' strikes in Colorado, with their
counter-insurgents, and incoming English travellers
chasing the handkerchief-slipstream of Wilde among the
mineshafts; the gamblers, the anarchists, the crazed
pursuit of women, the lust for wealth, the personal
jealousies and the infidelities that arise. The
disappearance of the so-called "wild frontier" is as
much psychological here as physical. Colonisation
spreads like a stain and is one of the global themes
of this book.

Sometimes Pynchon could be accused of surrendering
characters to action, which means he is never at risk
of over-drawing them. Oddly, this grants them
authenticity as modus operandi joining the novel's
zillion compass points, but the points are all on the
map, and all predictable. Pynchon, in this respect,
never takes you unawares. His finest moments - despite
a tendency to overwrite some of his sentences - come
in quiet, lyrical, often entrancing insights. Take
this on Venice: "In Venice we have a couple of
thousand words for fog - nebbia, nebietta, foschia,
caligo, sfumato - and the speed of sound being a
function of the density is different in each. In
Venice space and time, being more dependent on hearing
than on sight, are actually modulated by fog." The
dream of Venice, Pynchon suggests, is possibly greater
than its fulfilment. As is the American dream, and the
striving towards the great American novel, which this
is not. But it is a serious book, and the finest thing
Pynchon has done since Gravity's Rainbow.

It should be acknowledged, nonetheless, that Against
the Day is immensely, if intermittently, funny, an
intricate, wheezing shaggy dog joke which
characteristically lacks a punchline, yet plays along
with our expectation of a punchline - in a sense, it's
the perfect postmodernist, mocking jest. Yes,
Pynchon's comedy stares straight back at you,
demanding that you recognise your complicity in the
joke. It's a stare not unlike the challenging gaze he
brought to the photograph of his youth. An interesting
face - a gaze that holds you in its grip for a
thousand pages. Quite a feat.


http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1746102006


 
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