Against the Day

Warning: core dump of brain in progress.

"Now single up all lines!"

That first line sounds like a call to battle, or like the last instruction of a band leader before he kicks into the intro of his newest composition. What it actually is is the command to launch the dirigible airship Inconvenience, manned by the boys' adventure book heroes The Chums Of Chance, forever young and Biggles-ishly intent on making the late-19th century world a better place from their vantage point on high.

The problem for them is that the band leader in question is Thomas Pynchon, who is to literature what a free jazz player with ADD (Anarchist Deconstruction Disorder) is to music. Just as we've gotten to know the Chums and their playful, Star Trek-like view of the world, the plot moves to someone else, the lines fray and the music starts getting chaotic. The boys' adventure book turns into a Steinbeck-on-acid-like novel about poor miners. The Steinbeck turns into a Wild West revenge tale. The Wild West revenge tale veers briefly into Lovecraft before turning into an HG Wells-ian time travel story and then a European spy thriller. The spy thriller becomes a love story, the love story becomes bisexual porn, the porn becomes a code cracker mystery, the code cracker mystery becomes a math textbook, the math textbook turns into vicious satire on the current state of the world which at the same time is a story of the search for a shangri la... etc etc. And obviously, all of these stories aren't so much sequential as they are simultaneous; they all interweave.

Pynchon is the ultimate post-modern madman; more enamoured with chance than Auster, more encyclopedic than Eco, more absurd than Vonnegut and with more bizarre guest spots (from Bela Lugosi to Elmer Fudd) and song numbers than a whole season of The Simpsons. (Yes, of course he drops a Simpsons joke or two in there.) But where Auster uses chance as the exception to the rule, the thing that jolts his character out of their lives, in Pynchon chance and chaos IS the rule. Where Eco lectures, Pynchon often seems to take for granted that his readers know as much as he does about Balkan history, advanced maths, dimensional theory or famous anarchists; if we don't, hell, look it up; every single reference he drops seems to suggest a story that could take off in another direction - like Bob Dylan once said that every line in "Hard Rain" could be turned into a song unto itself.

Which isn't necessarily in a direction we know. Against The Day is a tesseract; just like the pages of a novel are a two-dimensional representation of (hopefully) three-dimensional characters (note the overlaying fonts on the jacket of ATD), the characters of ATD are three-dimensional characters living in a four-dimensional world. Things happen which they cannot understand, just like a stick figure on a piece of paper cannot understand the three-dimensional pencil drawing him. As mankind learns to fly and conquers the third dimension and its possibilities for good and evil (Russian airships dropping bricks remarkably similar to Tetris blocks on their enemies - come to think of it, reading Pynchon is a lot like playing Tetris, you better keep up or the screen will fill up and you lose) people start to wonder what discoveries and weapons may lie in the next dimension.

And in a four-dimensional world, time is negotiable in the same sense that height is in a 3D world. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Everything can exist at least twice; indeed, so much of the novel is about dualities, bilocations, doubles, mirror images that come to life, the way a good novel is a mirror of real life. Light refracts in a mirror, splits in two directions. Light as in progress. Light as in electricity. Light as in enlightenment. Light as in daylight. It can go either way. On the one side, we can build a better world. On the other, we're great at building machine guns, too. Prepare yourself against the day.

Five random thoughts:

1. Yes, of course Pynchon is still obsessed with secret societies, secret ways of communications, invisible train lines and stamps from post offices that never existed. You're telling me that's somehow not relevant in the Internet age? Why the hell is one of the main characters named Webb Traverse, d'ya think?

2. Ornette Coleman had a double quartet (!) when he recorded "Free Jazz".

3. There's something under Asia's deserts which is, apparently, worth going to war over. No one seems to know quite why we need it, but...

4. If everything exists in two versions, can there be a singularity? Can there be a third way?

5. "The sun would not have risen. A mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world." (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

Reading ATD is hard work. It needs to be. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of fun, it's exhilarating, and it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, but it's so goddamn busy that it demands your undivided attention for 1085 pages straight. There were days when I was hard-pressed to manage five pages. I'm not sure if this is Pynchon's best novel. It's kinda hard to tell; it's frequently all over the place and while I'm pretty sure there's a point to all of it, I don't always see that point. Yet. If it's his last novel, it's a worthy farewell; there's enough reading here to rediscover and reinterpret more times than most readers are able to, and the logical conclusion to an authorship that has alwasy wanted to do MORE with fiction. It's chaotic, but there's method in it. Just like the difference between pure noise and really wild jazz; the swing, the humour, the flow, the way the theme suddenly pops up somewhere for a few seconds before leading into something new, the way you can almost dance to it without breaking a leg. The way one player will occasionally break away into something completely different and the others either follow him into this new and exciting tune or do everything in their power to stop him and force him back in line. And all the while, the balloon boys on board Inconvenience pop in and out of reality and the storyline like a naive jingle-jangle guitar pop song.

Mash it up, burn it down, start all over again.

And that's the only way I know how to explain it. Thus far.