Ben Osborne“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
So writes the greatest reclusive writer in American fiction since J.D. Salinger in his epic novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Thomas Pynchon is a without a doubt the strangest of the big American writers of the twentieth century. A product of the paranoid tail-spin that was the inevitable out come of the ‘”Turn on, tune in, drop out” 1960s counter culture, Pynchon charted the strange recesses of the burnt out mind like no one else.
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
Author of seven novels it is inevitably for Gravity’s Rainbow that Pynchon will be remembered for. The novel is many agree, flawed, but it is difficult to deny it’s reputation as a post-modern masterpiece. Henry James once commented on Dickens that his novels where “great baggy monsters”, and you can only wonder what James would have made of Pynchon.
“In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing?”
With a plot that soon loses itself amidst the hallucinatory strangeness of World War II, Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflex, the V-2 bombs buzzing the skies of London (the letter ‘V’ playing a strangely prominent role in Pynchon’s fiction) , witch craft and the occult, bawdy drunken sailor humour, the Herero tribe of Southern Africa, various conspiracies involving the military-industrial complex, and enough symbolism to give James Joyce a run for his money, this is not a book for the faint at heart, or the easily defeated.
“Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says ‘try to tickle me’.”
It took me several attempts to get through it, but the struggle is worth it. Who cares if the second half of this monster descends into insanity? If you get that far you are already caught, just like the ‘hero’ of the story Slothrop, in the madness. And just like Slothrop, once you are consumed in the world of paranoia, there isn’t any escape.
“She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there.”
To describe the plot would be foolish here. It suffices to say that the plot is largely irrelevant and that this book is definitely (defiantly?) not for everyone. What makes me love it is the weirdness, the obscenity and strange eroticism, the structural playfulness, and the endless pop culture references.
“Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.”
It is a Moby Dick for the drugged, screwed up, plotless generations the befoul the earth in this post-sixities, plot-less planet hurtling to destruction in our own postwar, postcolonial, corporate outhouse. But all is not lost… somewhere deep inside this novel of war, death, scepticism and filth there is love. Love is at the heart of this book and although the V-2 bomb may seem to triumph, ultimately it is love that will win…
“They Were In Love. F**k The War.”
Below are some illustrations by artist Zak Smith who took it upon himself to illustrate every single page of the 760 page novel. His website provides a great accompaniment to the novel and is well worth a look. All the illustrations can be found by clicking here.
“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice — guessed and refused to believe — that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. “
