Atdtda27: Horseshit, or counterfeit, 773-776

[Paul Nightingale]

Irkutsk, or the San Juans again? As previously, "like Saturday night in the
San Juans" frames 'new' in terms of 'old', and emphasises economic
relations. If a class divide separates "the lowlife element" from bourgeois
respectability, the kupechestvo are sensitive to their own gold-fuelled (?)
social mobility. Another 'new' and 'old', then, the nouveau riche and
whatever they used to be. And if the reference to the San Juans invokes
Kit's pov, one might also consider his own, somewhat fragile, social
mobility, eg Webb's "[y]ou're either my boy or theirs" on 105 and everything
thereafter. In this respect, cf. Kit's own lament on 674: "He must have
wanted all along to be the one son Webb could believe in."

And so to Swithin Poundstock, for whom the law is an "[i]nteresting concept"
(775). Like status, a construct. From gold miners at play to forgery, fake
sovereigns validated by the head of "young Vic", which is "what matters". On
770 the Kara Tagh reminds Kit of a modern American city; here, he is taken
back into the near-past of the pre-modern West. Again, the impulse is to
undo recent progress, wipe it from the record. Cf. his response when
Halfcourt first mentioned the journey on 764: it would take him beyond
Yashmeen. The "pseudo-sovereigns" (775) provide another way of juxtaposing
'new' to 'old', just as Irkutsk might be seen as a replication of the San
Juans. If the Kara Tagh (770) and the Flaming Mountains (771) are natural
phenomena, transformed by Kit's perception of them, the "pseudo sovereigns"
are part of a manufactured similitude that includes, of course, the human
behaviour he recognises, ie: "... Saturday night in the San Juans" etc
(773). At the start of the chapter, on 768, "bold fourteeners and desert
snows" are set against "trailside saloons".

By the end of the section, the sovereigns have also invoked a suspension of
history. On 775, Poundstock can say: "It really is Young Vic here ..."
because "the dies we use are perfectly genuine". The image itself is
"genuine" because the manufacturing process "perfectly" replicates that in
London, not necessarily because it 'looks like' the Queen. Over the page on
776, "[s]he has conquered time" etc. Whatever the Germans say, she is never
dead, the whole point of monarchy and succession.