Guardian ATD Review finally online

[Carvill John]

In case they take it down again, here's the whole tiresome thing.Spoiler 
level is about medium, I'd say.  Don't recall the 'enjoys Against the Day' 
bit being in the print version.

The carnival goes on (and on)


James Lasdun enjoys Against the Day, and sniffs enlightenment in the 
enormous, addled world of Thomas Pynchon

Saturday November 25, 2006
The Guardian


Buy Against the Day at the Guardian bookshop

Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
1,104pp, Jonathan Cape, £20

The mind of Thomas Pynchon has never seemed quite plausibly human. Aside 
from the prodigious holding capacity, there's a sense, in his best work, of 
unnatural powers of connection: a sorcerous ability to link the most 
disparate, abstruse materials into endlessly suggestive patterns of meaning. 
All of history, most of science, and a great deal of every other discipline 
seem to have been mastered, cross-indexed, and then extended into equally 
rich realms of purely invented erudition: imaginary science, alternative 
history. The real Thurn and Taxis postal system, for instance, played off 
against its fantastical double, the "Tristero", in The Crying of Lot 49; or 
the V2 rocket science of Gravity's Rainbow, shadowed by the fictitious 
Imipolex G technology of Captain Blicero's 00000 Missile.


The characters, too, seem not quite of this world: highly developed in their 
sixth (and higher) senses, richly attuned to tremors in the fourth 
dimension, but pretty rudimentary as occupants of regular terrestrial space. 
Part angel, part cartoon, they mesmerise with their ravishingly articulated 
responsiveness to the invisible forces around them, and amuse with their 
vaudeville interactions, but they seldom engage at the emotional level. 
Perhaps for this reason the pleasure the books offer tends to be in inverse 
relation to their length. Gravity's Rainbow may be the official masterpiece, 
but The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the most enjoyable: a quest novel of 
incendiary beauty, and under 200 pages long. Against the Day, the author's 
latest, is over a thousand. It has its good points, but it certainly doesn't 
buck the trend.

It takes place mostly in the two decades leading up to the first world war, 
and its setting ranges from the silver mines of Colorado to the Siberian 
tundra, with interludes in London, Göttingen, Venice, Iceland, the Balkans 
and the deserts of Central Asia. Its immense bulk owes more to an open-ended 
accretion of character and backdrop than the working out of some intricately 
constructed drama, so it doesn't make much sense to summarise the "plot". 
But for what it's worth, there are two main storylines. One is a protracted 
revenge tale involving the gunslinging Traverse family, whose father, a 
politically radicalised Colorado miner, is murdered by the stooges of an 
evil plutocrat named Scarsdale Vibe. The other is a European intrigue 
featuring a vast array of ingenues, psychics and shady government 
operatives, caught up in the shenanigans (real and imaginary) of pre-war 
"Great Game" diplomacy, with the cataclysm of the war itself looming ever 
closer. Over it all floats a larky company of balloonists, whose madcap 
missions (which include a trip through a hole in the Earth) are the subject 
of a sort of Boy's Own adventure series, "The Chums of Chance", which in 
turn forms a framing device for the whole book.

Like its predecessor Mason & Dixon, Against the Day is built out of vast 
amounts of period detail, from ladies' hats to the arcane minutiae of the 
mathematical squabbles of the day. It has a similar, though less concerted, 
element of pastiche in its style, expertly spoofing Victorian pulp and 
western dime novels, as well as paying tribute to more contemporary genres, 
such as the retro sci-fi genre known as "steam punk" (a time machine with 
gutta-percha gasketry, et cetera). Its tumultuously varied topics which, in 
the course of a few pages, can turn from Quaternion mathematics to the 
history of mayonnaise and on to the Buddhist utopian myth of Shambhala, are 
patterned by a governing dichotomy between two visions of life: one all 
Edenic innocence and freedom, embodied by a wandering cast of outlaw miners, 
time-travel-obsessed scientists, sexual adventuresses and dynamite-tossing 
anarchists (proto-hippies, basically); the other all capitalist, 
authoritarian villainy, centring on the dastardly machinations of Vibe and 
his fellow "plutes". Parallels with our own time, especially the velvet 
totalitarianism of Bush's America, are fully intended. As one minor 
character named Virgil puts it (speaking perhaps for his own author): "I 
like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got 
hijacked by Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes ... "

As those words suggest, the tone is pitched at a generally jaunty angle to 
the apocalyptic subject matter, and whatever the drawbacks of this (ie a 
relentlessly sprightly mood), it certainly keeps the book moving at a good 
clip.

Even so, it's quite a challenge to hold its multitudinous threads together 
in your head sufficiently clearly to grasp what it is they're being woven 
together to form. Four or five hundred pages in there's a promising 
impression of grand thematic convergence. References to a translucent 
mineral, "Iceland Spar", with a mysterious property of double refraction 
whereby whatever object it is held up to seems to divide into two possible 
versions of itself, begin to tie in with hints of some light-harnessing 
power capable of both saving and destroying mankind, which in turn connects 
with the Balloonists' quest for the hidden city of Shambhala, using maps 
that appear to show one thing until you look at them in an ingenious 
distorting mirror (requiring, naturally, a major digression on the ancient 
secrets of Venetian glass-making), whereupon they show something quite 
different; all of this seeming, rather thrillingly, to be moving towards 
some immense, dramatic (rather than simply didactic) illumination of the 
abiding idea of history as a great duel between the actual and the possible.

But it doesn't quite happen. As if in obedience to the second law of thermo- 
dynamics, which states that the entropy of two combined systems is greater 
than the sum of the entropies of each individual system (a titbit I almost 
certainly picked up from earlier immersions in Pynchon), the stories drift 
apart, their energies dissipate and the book turns into a rambling 
transglobal picaresque, gathering volume without weight, full of train 
itineraries and descriptions of local dishes, and with an increasingly musty 
suspicion of having been adapted wholesale from a set of early Baedekers.

It's at this point that you notice the large problem posed by Pynchon's 
loftily postmodern way with character (postmodern in its implicit denial of 
the idea, once so useful to the novel, of a coherent psychology capable of 
interesting moral development). There isn't a single figure of compelling 
depth or presence in Against the Day. The cast keeps expanding right up to 
the last pages, but its members are almost all interchangeable: the women 
all sassy and sexy, the men coming in two basic models: gruff hetero 
American and winsome kinky European. They have their surface eccentricities, 
but none of them, not even the Zuleika Dobson-like femme fatale, Yashmeen 
Halfcourt - a polymorphous mathematical prodigy - has the stature to carry 
(let alone transcend) the book's gigantic armouries of fact and speculation, 
and most of them are little more than amiable ciphers.

This being Pynchon, there are lovely trippy rhapsodies throughout: Miltonic 
hymns to light; lyrical disquisitions on the mysteries of Riemannian 
geometry; some vintage wall-of-words sfumato on the impending global 
catastrophe. But you read on in a state of increasingly sullen admiration, 
as if at some lavishly produced but interminable carnival. Now and then one 
of the sideshows snaps you back to attention: a voyage beneath the desert in 
a wonderfully strange under-sand submarine, a raunchy three-way sex scene, 
whatever. But you soon start drifting again.

The balloonists' trip through the Earth is described by the author (in his 
winking guise as creator of "The Chums of Chance" series) as "my harmless 
little intraterrestrial scherzo", implying that it's intended as a foil to 
other sections with perhaps more traction on reality. But in fact the book 
is almost all scherzo; a monumental folly without much sign of a serviceable 
habitation. You only have to think of the other great novels about this 
pivotal era - Musil's The Man Without Qualities or Joseph Roth's The 
Radetsky March - to recognise its deep silliness. At best it functions as a 
phantasmagorical inventory of its moment. Its basic rhetorical unit is the 
list ("bowlers and deerstalkers, mantillas, lorgnettes, walking sticks, ear 
trumpets, spats, driving-coats, watch-chain ornaments ... "): a form that 
can sparkle but tends not to give much sense of progression, and seldom has 
any particular reason to end (the above goes on for several more lines). And 
the book itself has no particular reason to end where it does, other than 
perhaps the adhesive limits of book-binding glue.

· James Lasdun's latest novel is Seven Lies (Cape).


http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1956362,00.html

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