(Jonathan Cape, £20)
At times one is agog in admiration, and at times one wants to fling the damned thing across the room. Or would, except it's too heavy for flinging. Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon's new novel, weighs in at almost 1,100 densely packed pages. Its cast of characters is enormous. It takes us from Illinois to Colorado, New York, Texas, New Mexico, old Mexico, London, Cambridge, various European cities and villages, the deserts of inner Asia, Los Angeles, and several dimensions not necessarily terrestrial.
A naive reader might ask, "What is it about?" My father, a writer, used to pose a more sophisticated version of that question when confronted by fiction he found perplexing. "What," he would demand, "could have been the initial idea that drove someone to write this?" Phrased either way, the question is unanswerable with regard to this novel. It's simple to provide a thematic answer: it's about, let's say, the vast impersonal forces that shape history and distort individual lives, the illusion of free will and the limits of human understanding. But novelists don't write themes, they tell stories. And the story this novel tells is too incoherent to be summarised, perhaps too incoherent to be called a story.
It begins, promisingly, as a pitch-perfect parody of early 20th-century American boys' fiction. A group of teenage "aeronauts" are flying off to the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago in their trusty dirigible, Inconvenience, for some adventure never properly explained. With their quaint diction, their obsolete but up-to-the-last-minute pseudo-science, their gee-whiz enthusiasm and the crude, cartoonish way their characters are differentiated, these early pages are a delight. But they also give the reader false hope: although the aeronauts reappear intermittently, they never again do so in the lovingly recreated style of the first 50 pages; nor do they perform any discernible plot function other than to provide the odd loose end and the occasional red herring in a novel already replete with both.
The cowboy saga is the surprise here. For several hundred largely uninterrupted pages, Pynchon—postmodernist games-player, elusive, ascetic, enigmatic eschewer of simple narrative pleasure—appears to have been possessed by the spirits of cowboy novelists Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, to have become a spinner of yarns. The reader—or this reader, anyway—unexpectedly found himself turning pages to find out what was going to happen next. This is not a normal response to a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Elsewhere, more characteristically, his strategy—insofar as it may be deemed a strategy—seems intended as an implicit rebuke to readers' childish desire to be told a story in the first place. Strands of plot often disappear, or are resolved anticlimactically. For example, much of the book seems to be building toward the vast catastrophe of the first world war, with the politics and history of central Europe expounded at great length, with much ominous foreshadowing and overheated warnings about the coming rent in time, the imminent age of barbarity; but when the war actually arrives, it is mentioned in passing, and is dropped within three or four pages. Also, a great deal is made of a mythical substance called Iceland Spar ("Iceland Spar" is even the name of one of the novel's sections), its optical properties permitting those who possess it to decipher a map to the ancient subterranean city of Shambhala, which many of the book's characters are hoping to locate and excavate. But no one ever gets there, the Iceland Spar isn't used for any other purpose, and the whole subject is simply dropped. And—take this as a metonymy for the entire perverse nature of Pynchonian plotting—although for several hundred pages much of the novel's impetus derives from the brothers' urge to avenge their father's murder, only one of the people responsible is finally killed by one of them. The fates of the others are a let-down, dramatically irrelevant. Pynchon's technique is so distancing, so determinedly alienating, that on those few occasions when he seems to ask for, and even honestly earn, an emotional response, we're too wary to grant it to him.
Are there compensations? Indeed there are. It would be small-minded to deny Pynchon a kind of genius. He writes gorgeously, for one thing; his virtuoso style, while never simple, has become far more supple and limpid in recent books, and achieves here a vigour and beauty unsurpassed, possibly unrivalled, in contemporary English-language prose. His ear for dialogue is phenomenally acute; whoever is talking—cowboys, Mexicans, twee Englishmen, German physicists, Serbian peasants—one can hear their accents coming right off the page.
There's also the humour: high, low, studied, offhand, and just plain silly. It's not for nothing that Groucho Marx, unidentified other than as a travelling vaudevillian named Julius, puts in a cameo appearance. Some of the jokes are thrown away so casually you'll miss them if you blink. Take this snatch of interior monologue, when the thoughts of a young woman are described as she tries to shrug off the departure of the man she loves: "No, as Merle used to say, apiarian by-product of hers." None of her beeswax. Pynchon can also be shameless in his puerile punning (the puerility essential to the humour). What other postmodern academic novelist would create a Viennese operetta entitled The Burgher King?
But the moments of brilliance are local effects. They do not serve a larger narrative. The various stories crisscross occasionally, but their interweaving seems pro forma. Characters experience moments of high passion, but these moments occur without dramatic consequence. It may seem churlish, with so many luminous gifts on display, to complain about what's missing. But when a novelist offers a book of this length and difficulty, he is offering his readers an implicit pact: it will be worth it. He will take us on a long eventful journey and, when we're done, we will have arrived somewhere. Pynchon certainly takes us on a very long journey indeed, densely packed with incident, but when it's over, I felt as if I'd been travelling in circles.
