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Like a cross between The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Stoner, set in reunited Germany. And that's the sort of soundbite that Inge Lohmark herself would most likely have had nothing but contempt for.

Frau Lohmark (she's very adamant about being on last-name terms with everyone, and cannot fathom how the younger teachers can let their students adress them by their first name) is a biology teacher in a dying town in the former GDR. Each year, she gets a new class (smaller each year, as more people move away and the ones who remain lose all motivation to study) of bored high schoolers whom she's expected to teach the basics of what should be a hard science; she's been doing this since the good old communist days, and while other teachers have had to change their entire syllabus to adapt to a new society, biology hasn't changed, has it? Well, apart from people like Lysenko falling out of favour, the idea that improvement can be passed on from generation to generation, and so she clings even harder to the basics: genetics, evolution, survival of the fittest. She loathes her weak students, her daughter's moved to California and her husband has taken up ostrich farming... what else is she supposed to do but carry on, convince herself that nothing really changes but the buzzwords in the principal's motivational speeches?

Like with Atlas of Remote Islands, Schalansky plays a lot with the narration here, almost to Oulipoan levels. The book is only three chapters long, each covering one day in Frau Lohmark's life, but with each spread having a different heading - Infanticide, >Niches, Central Nervous System, Embryogenesis, etc etc - as she forces everything that she feels and remembers into a purely biological context, trying to explain everything with a Darwinian deus vult to keep from screaming. Not that she would. That sort of self-serving sentimentality is for those who still think words like "freedom" and "happiness" actually mean something. We fuck up because we're born that way, we foist responsibility onto the next generation, and then we blame them for not accepting it.

And yet, within all this, amid the closed-down factories and empty apartment buildings, the averted eyes, flashes of pure beauty and a longing that she almost allows herself to feel, itself perverted by the setting. Until she forces it down again.

It's funny. In retrospect I feel like I should have rated Ancillary Justice higher; in terms of world-building, in terms of ideas, it's often brilliant even when the plot meanders a bit, and ends up leaving a lot of threads hanging for this sequel.

So maybe upon reading Ancillary Mercy I'll have to go back and redo the whole trilogy and see how it all fits together. Because what I liked about the first one - the narration, the language/power/gender fuckery, the central character struggling to actually be a character, all the little nooks and crannies of what we call humanity that she gets into - is still very good here, and Leckie writes with both heart and guts. At the same time, the plot itself feels like... well, I think back to when I'd waited for a while to read the fourth book of Stephen King's Dark Tower, only to get a novel that for the most part digresses away into a long plot that had little to do with what the books had been about up until then. And it wasn't a bad plot, it just felt like someone had hit "pause" on the main storyline. After the way Justice built up, I'd expected more follow-up rather than something that at times feels like Woody Guthrie's "Deportees" in space. Not that it's a bad song, or a bad plot, it's just that it feels like she could do more with this. But there's at least one more novel to go, and I want to see where all this ambition will take her.

Vafan? …tänker jag ett par kapitel in i Järnskallen, efter att vi etablerat att vi befinner oss i Stockholm anno 1917, med världskrig, revolutioner och inbördeskrig som rasar alldeles inpå knuten, året då allt kunde gått åt helvete, året då både konservativa och arbetare gick beväpnade på gatorna och väntade på startskottet för revolutionen, året då man rev upp parkerna för att odla kålrötter. Det är inte det som får mig att dubbelkolla att jag faktiskt precis läste det jag läste, utan att mitt i den här realismen presenterar han en mystisk man som bär en mask med unionsflaggemotiv, som någon jävla Marvelskurk? Jaja, det får väl sin förklaring. Men nudå, här har vi en tänkbar hjältinna, en ung förläst fritänkare som inte vill gifta sig utan vill… dra på sig en maskeradkostym, svinga sig från Gamla Stans tak i ett rep och spöa upp tjuvligor.

Återigen: Vafan?

Den där känslan av fullständig vantro håller i sig en bit till – tills vi presenteras för rånarligor utklädda i dalkullekläder, ett danskt tekniskt geni som kan bygga om vad som helst till ett vapen och en estnisk superspion – och sen ger jag upp och bara vänder blad med ett flin som blir allt bredare. Håkanson har vågat sig på något här som jag önskar att fler vågade göra, och framför allt lyckas med: en genremashup som skiter blankt i hur man ska skriva historiska skildringar och bara går loss. Som en blandning av Stephensons Snow Crash, The Avengers och ”Varför är det ingen is till punschen?”

Det låter galet, men det finns metod däri. En bra historisk roman bör ju kunna göra något mer än att bara använda den historiska miljön som rent staffage, den bör kunna komma åt något som ligger bakom också. Håkanson är påläst både i hur det såg ut i Sverige för 98 år sedan; han kan stan, han kan språket, han kan politiken. Han är bara mindre intresserad av att ge en historiskt korrekt Fogelströmsk redogörelse av hur vardagen såg ut i olika samhällsskick, och mer av att använda lite roliga knep för att visa idéernas Sverige 1917; den gamla goda tiden, bara en välfärdsstatsskött mansålder sedan, då nymodigheter som demokrati, rösträtt, likhet inför lagen, kvinnors självbestämmande, etc fortfarande var radikala idéer som lika gärna kunde förkastats. Alltså: Beskriv staden och politiken realistiskt, fånga talande detaljer av denna så bekanta men så främmande stad och dess invånare, men stoppa i detta in en mystisk man i mask som får spela Professor Xavier åt ett löst sammansatt gäng udda existenser med antingen medfödda eller förvärvade specialförmågor. Det börjar med att de nystar i ett mord på en officer på en krog på Söder, och innan de vet ordet av har det expanderat till en konspiration som innefattar domedagsvapen, Lenin, protonazistiska frikårer, utländska spioner, samiska ninjor, avdankade stumfilmsaktriser och – naturligtvis – jetpacks.

Det är, enstaka genrebundna klichéer undantagna, rent förbannat kul. Håkanson håller masken hela vägen, vägrar låtsas som om det är något ovanligt med hans idé, dompterar språket så att jag nästan kunde tro att att boken är 98 år gammal. Samtidigt smyger han in sina långtifrån felfria antihjältar i en handling där de egentligen inte har något att göra men tar plats så självklart att man knappt vet ordet av förrän han grävt sig ner i gamla bortglömda konflikter som vi idag gärna vill tro aldrig existerade i vårt perfekta jämlika demokratiska drömsamhälle.

För en gångs skull ser jag rentav fram emot nästa bok i serien. För det är ju, som alla jävla böcker måste vara anno 2015, del 1 i en serie.

Vafan?

I think this may be the fourth time I read Moby-Dick since I was 12 or so. Re-reading is always tricky, especially books that you've carried with you this long: I've developed as a reader every time, but it seems designed to develop with its readers.

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.

At its heart it's such a simple story. Naïve sailor - call him Ishmael - signs on for a 3-year whaling voyage, and once they've left port he and the rest of the crew discover that the captain, Ahab, is obsessed with taking revenge on one specific whale, the great white whale Moby Dick who bit Ahab's leg off on an earlier trip. And so, Ishmael tells us, everything went more and more to pieces... but in order to understand that we also have to understand something about whales, and whaling, and how and why and where and whence and...

”Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, ”that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

The first time, I read it as a straight adventure novel with nerdy whale facts mixed in. Rereading, I picked up on the metaphors, and boy, can you find those here, especially since the novel doesn't really work as a straight-up adventure. There are too many digressions, too much lecturing, not to mention that the characters that start off as protagonists are soon eclipsed by Ahab and his mates. So yeah, the image of Ahab fleeing the safety of home to chase... well, God or Existence or Meaning or one of those things, the great whale who can never be caught, remains unknown even if you devote your life to it, all that. Take one more step and it's a Kafka-style comedy - a genuinely funny novel, with both slapstick comedy and a narrator who occasionally lets his own story run away with him, ranting like he's halfway through a bottle of rum and telling the greatest fishing story ever. Which of course he is. But the punchline, we're never quite allowed to forget, is death and our own insignificance on a huge sea.

God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

All of that is still in there when I read the book today. But I'll be damned if the thing that strikes me this time is that it's an anatomy. Or a bible, which may be the same thing. Not literally, though it's an interesting question what Melville might have done if he'd had a chance to read The Origin Of Species and plunder it for narratives. But what Moby-Dick seems to want to do, in all those wild thrashings from action scenes to moonlit walks on the deck, Bible and Shakespeare allusions mixed with sea shanties, dumb jokes leading into profound philosophical questions on free will which give way to what are basically 19th-century blog posts on the role of the whale in art history... It's nothing less than an attempt to draw a complete picture of what it means to be a man. Or an animal. In as much as there's any difference. Moby-Dick switches genre, tone, format with every chapter because they're all different body parts of a Frankensteinian monster of ideas.

And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.

Of course it's flawed; a perfect novel must by definition contain imperfections. But how about this: It came out in 1851, when owning and selling people like cattle was still perfectly legal, and takes place on a ship crewed by sailors of all nationalities and ethnicities. Sure, by today's standards Melville('s narrator) comes across as more than a little racist, however much he may insist that "savages" are some sort of people too, but he doesn't take concepts like race and class for granted. He examines them with all the tools he's borrowed allow, questions and teases. He follows a chapter where one of the mates chews out a black crewmember and gives him a pointless job with a chapter on cetology where he sneers that any attempt to divide whales in different classes is futile, it's all subjective anyway. He compares the working-class lads on the Pequod to war heroes, princes, saints, demigods. He anthropomorphises the whales to the point he ascribes religion and long-term planning to them, only to dismiss them as swimming blobs of fat in the next chapter. He makes the narrator and his prejudices part of the story. Layer after layer of alleged civilisation are hauled up from the deep, peeled off, inspected, boiled down to their essence and stowed away for future illumination needs, until the only thing remaining is a fight for territory between two old males, the man and the whale, man and mystery.

Ahab is one of the great literary characters for a reason, as complex as his novel. A powerful cripple, a madman who sees his own madness clearly, obsessed and prepared to sacrifice everything, yet with a humanity and a charisma that means he'd rather convince his men to follow him of their own free will than force them. They say the novel flopped in the 1850s because nobody could imagine anyone following a madman like that; after the trenches of WW1, it suddenly became a classic.

A bible, I said. Not the kind that wants to explain an existing religion to faithful followers, one that wants to pick apart. Melville himself called it blasphemous, and it is, in the best way. Our narrator fails to see any distinction between his own Christianity and Queequeg's idolatry, Ahab denies all authority but himself, the most religious person on board is only paralysed by his faith. A whale represents Satan, or God, or the question if there's any difference; everything's a process, all categories man-made. But there's more to heresy than simply cursing the pope or drawing a doodle of Mohammed. It's about understanding and then appropriating a narrative. Moby-Dick keeps digressing because that's what a bible does, throws out tendrils of burning cities and sinking ships, history and ethics, until it contains everyting.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

What Moby-Dick doesn't offer is salvation, even at the point of rebirth. At best a lifesaver for the randomly chosen survivors. A small creature clinging to a floating coffin, in the middle of an ocean where titans just fought to the death. And brings back a story full of contradictions and flaws, death and destruction, but so beautiful that he can't shut up about it and only dreams of going back out again.


Well, technically I didn't read it this time, I listened to it through the podcast The Moby-Dick Big Read, where 136 different people from Sir David Attenborough, Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch to perfectly ordinary readers each get to read a chapter of the book as they see it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to a first-time reader - while most of it's good, it inevitably becomes a rather disjointed affair with every conceivable pronounciation of the characters and settings, shifting sound quality etc - but somehow it fits perfectly for a novel that seems to what to say everything.

Out of the mouths of babes... Good Morning Comrades is set in Angola in the early 90s, among civil war and supposed post-colonialism spearheaded by the liberating comrades from Cuba and the Soviet Union, with roving gangs of bandits and political unrest. And all witnessed through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who's never known anything else and is just as cheerfully proud of it all as you'd expect of a good citizen.

I'm always a bit worried when I stumble upon a novel written by a poet; there's always the risk of trying to write like a poet, weighing the novel down with language. But like a good poet, Ondjaki knows the value of language, how to tell a story simply, without the narrator realising just how many different layers there are to his story, how much of history echoes in his language.

I picked this up with the express purpose of waving it about 35 years from now and yelling in my old man's voice "Where's my [this book's equivalent of a] jetpack?" While it's interesting, I don't think I'll bother.

That the book is over 10 years old and obviously a bit dated (yes, e-books did become a thing; no, AFAIK we still haven't proven that breast cancer is caused by infection) isn't its major problem. Rather, it is that the editor seems to have first decided which authors he wanted to include and only after getting their contributions realising that a lot of them ended up writing about the same issues. So we get a bunch of articles that skirt the same issues (biochemistry, genetics, and Moore's Law in every single chapter) while others that might have been at least as interesting (say, the environment, or energy) are all but completely absent. Plus, of course, if you want to be pessimistic you could argue that all these things we might achieve over the next half- (or third-) century depends on us not spending that time killing each other and handing political power to people who still think the world is 6,000 years old, and there's nobody here who's not a "pure" scientist willing to look beyond their own field to society at large.

That said, sure, there are some very interesting essays here, promising a few decades of increaing awarness of complexity, leavin us with some very intriguing ethical issues to face (or ignore, if you want Dawkins' opinion).

The Daylight Gate has the makings of a very good historical horror novel. Set during a witch trial in the early 17th century, it gives Winterson a chance to delve into a lot of things - how "witch", in times of political, social and scientific upheaval, becomes a very deliberate synonym for "heretic", "terrorist", "deviant", anything that threatens the Order Of Things. "Witch" is a powerful word to use against someone, impossible to defend yourself against since its definition also includes "uppity woman". If you're poor, you're obviously a witch because why wouldn't you do anything to be rich. If you're rich, you're obviously a witch because how else would someone as powerless as you become rich. But then again, by using that word you give power to the ones you use it on...

But sadly, 'twas not quite to be. While there are passages where Winterson shines and it feels like we're walking through a slightly more conscious Hammer movie, the novel as a whole feels rushed, clunky. She drops exposition clumsily into the middle of dialogue, goes on long flashbacks, skims over dramatic scenes and overwrites and repeats ones that are less so, throws in a cameo by Shakespeare himself for no apparent reason... It's not enough to ruin what should have been a better novel, and the worst of it is early on, but it's enough to turn it into a rather halfbaked affair. Pity.

Ladydi García Martínez lives in the sort of backwater jungle town where nobody has daughters. Not because of some weird Marquezian curse, but simply because it's no place for girls. The boys can learn to be drug mules or sneak into the US to work as gardeners; girls, from the moment they stop being children, are prey. The ground around her village is riddled with holes where girls run to hide any time SUVs with armed men roll into town. Beauty tips involve ruining your skin, hiding your figure, fucking up your teeth to bring down the market value to the point where you're not worth kidnapping. The herbicides regularly dropped over the town - rather than the well-guarded poppy fields a few miles outside - by the military help somewhat. But never completely. Her best friend fails to hide in time and is taken away, returns years later, her eyes empty and her body full of cigarette burns. Her father disappears into the US, leaving Ladydi with her increasingly alcoholic mother and a few other surprises. It's all basically the rapey bits of Bolaño's 2666 without the narrative distance. Where to go from here?

All in all, it's a way to grow up.

I'm not being facetious. Ladydi gets to narrate all this from childhood to... whatever is the result. She knows this isn't the way people are supposed to live; after all this is the 21st century, there's a satellite dish on every house, and her mother spends her days getting drunk in front of Oprah, US TV series and the History Channel. (She named Ladydi for Diana, not out of admiration for England's Rose, but to prepare her for the fact that men will use her.) It's an ugly, unflinching, desperately sad story, no less so for being largely based on real life. And yet Clement has Ladydi narrate all this in the only way she can, with all the detail and wonder that even a tragic life deserves. The beauty of Prayers For The Stolen - and it is a beautiful book - isn't the kind that excuses atrocities or uses them for some cheap feelgood epiphany about triumph in the face of yada yada, but simply to enhance and cling to whatever there is. Stories like this tend to always be about endings; either a tacked-on happy one, or a grim martyr one. We focus too much on beginnings and endings. This novel isn't about either of those. It just is, as horriffic as it is.

It starts with a death; the mysterious stranger who came to the little Guadeloupan town years earlier is found dead, the entire town comes to his wake - his enemies, his mistresses, his friends - and all have their own image of him. It's not miles from Mahfouz's Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth in that way; the truth about a man nobody really knew is different for everyone. The question who killed him soon becomes so irrelevant that I find myself realising after I've put the book down that I forgot about looking for clues to his death, instead looking for clues to his life.

Of course, it's not about him, it's about the society he winds up in. Condé's sketch of Guadeloupe here won't win her any points with the tourist board, but it's beautifully complex, mixing the lingering effects of centuries of colonialism - both physical and mental, geographical and internal; the need to not be the one who gets dominated, whether on account of your skin or your gender, even if it means letting yourself be dominated in a manner of your own choosing. Etc. Condé switches POV and narration with every chapter, from the poetic to the harsh, and every time we see a new side of the supposed protagonist it seems to contradict the last one. She gives a multitude of voices to people who are (by others) supposed to be uniform, either in their négritude or their own disdain for it. One of those novels I find myself admiring more than I love it - it probably deserves a higher rating, but something about it frustrates me; I want to know more, I want to see more, I want those half-spoken things explored rather than swirled into a mystery that doesn't unpack itself. Maybe I should pick up Segu.

A Story Of What's Most Important (1923) is the sort of short story that sets your head spinning. Over 45 pages, Zamyatin tells the supposedly simple tale of a skirmish between Soviet soldiers and rebelling farmers, where both sides soon discover that their leaders are old friends. Except - presumably inspired by the new idea of cinema, an art that can catch time in a bottle - the narrator comes equipped with a remote control that can pause, rewind, slow time down or speed it up, capture a moment and make it last forever or cut it off once and for all.

As if that wasn't enough, he intercuts it with a sci-fi story of a dead planet hurtling down to collide with Earth, the last four inhabitants fighting over the last bottle of oxygen amidst crumbling columns and temples.

And underneath that, somewhere, traces of an even older story about gods, men, sacrifice and rebirth.

All of it in a prose that never says outright what's most important, and skips from closeups to panoramas to things that can never be captured in images in the turn of a phrase.

Seriously, no wonder Stalin didn't want him to write anymore.

A curious book, in a good way. A post-global-warming-and-Chinese-takeover story that at first seems to present itself as yet another Collins-style teenage dystopia, but then shrugs at launching the Big Heroic Plot and instead chooses to act local, mixing buddhist philosophy and stubborn Scandinavian existentialism into something that seems to want to fuse PK Dick and Tove Jansson (OK, enough with the namedropping already).

It's long after the polar icecaps melted, in what used to be central Finland and is now a border province of New Qian. The old coastlines are long gone, the world has dried up and freshwater is increasingly rare. Our narrator is a young woman apprenticing for her father to become the new Tea Master of her village - a position that, like most traditions, has been important for so long nobody remembers when it wasn't or why, but which of course relies on the very resource that's becoming ever more scarce, ever more controlled, ever more the privilege of those with guns. They have access to a secret well, but the rest of the village don't, and her best friend (or more) has none... From there, Itäranta spins a tale that for the most part isn't interested in any big rebellions or revelations, but instead the personal angle, with Water as the central (perhaps at times too central) metaphor of constance and change, along with the wordless power of silence (I did mention it's a Finnish novel, right?) to both oppress and release, destroy and preserve.

It's not the strongest 4 I've ever doled out, it gets a bit preachy at times and I'm not entirely sure it's quite as profound as it tries to be. But it's a quick, engrossing read that still has a serene but serious dignity to it, and one that seems to want to seep into other things. We'll see how it holds up, but for now I really like it.

Thoughts upon third read:

Was Pynchon always a cyberpunk author? In 1966, he compared the layout of Californian coast towns to circuit boards. There's a straight line (in as much as anything Pynchon can be a straight line) between the underground mail services of CoL49 and the darknet of Bleeding Edge, between the unfathomable rat's nest of inforrmation in Pierce Inverarity's papers and the post-Internet information overload of Against The Day.

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless.



Damn, Pynchon writes like Monk plays; never the expected note, never the obvious shortcut, so many beats that would simply be wrong if he didn't know exactly what he was doing and how they related to each other.

Paranoia and entropy pop up everywhere. No system works without them, precisely because they break apart any system. N Katherine Hayles knew what she was doing when she used an English teacher assigning Pynchon as an example of entropy in How We Became Post-Human. The example, quoted from memory: If the teacher says "We'll be reading Crying of Lot 49", there can be no miscommunication, no entropy; no possible evolution of the message. If she says we'll be reading a Pynchon novel and lets the students guess which one, there are all sorts of possible outcomes - information theorists will tell you that if the sender and the receiver don't get the same message, communication has been ineffective; a biologist will tell you that's called "inbreeding". (The lead character is called "Oidipa".) A world without entroy would be dead. No growth without mutation.

change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick.

Obviously, there's always the option of insanity. Of paranoia being, well, paranoia, of all the connections being confirmation bias and a wish to have it all make sense rather than accept blunt reality.

San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her; became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle. Pierce Inverarity was really dead.

None of what we read prove anything but that it's been written down at some point before we read it. And the interpretations, boy, they're the biggest noise of all. Is every reader just the executor of a dead author's estate? Does "just" belong in that sentence? And they're using corpses to make ink anyway.

One of two great works of American 1966 art to mention the Black Angel.

The object of the conspiracy/faith/agenda is long lost, if it ever existed; what remains is what we've built around it, which keeps it alive.

What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inveracity’s testament, whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.

She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, the Word.

The beauty of that. The lie of it. The LSD-induced insanity of trying to isolate any one voice in this chaotic harmony.

-----

A couple of thoughts upon re-reading The Crying Of Lot 49.

Being by far the shortest and condensed of Pynchon's novels, it's both easier and harder to make sense of than his longer works. On the one hand, the plot - a woman is asked to be executor of her ex's estate, and in the process uncovers a conspiracy involving a shadow post office going back hundreds of years (or does she?) is much easier to follow than the vast, intermingling storylines of his other works. On the other hand, the world in Crying is just as mad and chaotically ordered as in any of his other books; but since we only see one person's view of it, we can't even trust that fully. Which of course is part of the point. It's not for nothing that he drops several references to Lolita; Oedipa Maas' story may be told in the third person, but her experiences are just as unreliably told as Humbert's. There are bunches of references to things being deliberately fake; the Hollywood world, American rock bands posing as Brits (this being 1963), newly made Nazi uniforms for sale to collectors...

Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They.

All of Pynchon's novels play around with the idea of disestablishmentarianism, of underground (or overground, or inground, as in Against The Day) organisations refusing to follow the official line of how the world is. The world isn't simple, the ones in control are only in control of what we acknowledge them to be in control of. It's essentially a pre-Internet cyberthriller, all about the control (or lack thereof) of information. But if the ones in control are actually behind the anti-establishment - what then? Or what if all that gets sent through this alternative information system is meaningless "hi, hope you are well" messages - what's so subversive about that?

As conspiracy thrillers go, it's really more Foucault's Pendulum than The Da Vinci Code. Oedipa Maas is stuck in the midst of what might be a huge conspiracy, might be all in her head, or might actually even be exactly what it looks like: that we prefer the idea of there being a conspiracy to simply realising that we're being openly screwed.

For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

Or not. The Crying Of Lot 49 came out in the early 60s, at the beginning of something of a paradigm shift; it's no less relevant in today's world. It doesn't offer any answers, Pynchon's novels never do, it just spins you around until you're not sure what side is up and if you're on either of them. It ridicules the ideas of conformity and efficiency - for instance, in the anecdote of the man who's replaced by a machine, eventually decides (after consulting the underground mail service) to commit suicide by self-immolation, and is surprised in the act by his wife and her lover, the very efficiency expert who had him replaced:

"Nearly three weeks it takes him," marvelled the efficiency expert, "to decide. You know how long it would've taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced."

And it stops right before the supposed revelation, leaves you hanging, wanting both more and less of this glorious, bewildering, hilarious madness.