Here's the full text of the review I sent in to Daily Telegraph:
POPULAR MECHANIC
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
Cape1085pp
£20.00
Michael Moorcock
__________________________________________________ ________________
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
--Thomas Pynchon
FAMILIAR WITH THOMAS Pynchon’s work since the 1960s when we ran his ‘Entropy’ in New Worlds, I originally resisted his major novels. The New Worlds authors shared Pynchon’s interest in urban mythology, entropy as a metaphor, dreams, mathematics, theoretical physics, imperialism, racism. They celebrated his inverventions into earlier fictions via pastiche, but many argued that he lacked Burroughs’s laconic virtues.
Though he can fairly be considered sui generis like Firbank or Vian, Pynchon was co-opted by some critics into the steampunk movement and has much in common with a favourite of mine, Charles Harness, the Texan who was thrown out of his seminary, became a Washington patent attorney and wrote some of the strangest metaphysical sf of the 1950s. Against the Day‘s opening reminded me of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong graphic novels which drew on late 19th century ‘science hero’ dime novels to examine Edwardian mechanical optimism exemplified by the real Nikola Tesla. The first half of this romance certainly recaptures the prevalent mood of pre-1914 America, when ‘wizards’ such as Edison and Tesla were public legends, but, like Twain before him, Pynchon introduces a questioning, deeply elegaic note into his story of Yankee ‘can-do’ optimism, producing a tall tale entirely serious in intention, if only rarely in tone.
A massive engine, depending on its size for its aesthetic the way some rock bands depend on loudness, Against the Day takes a while to build momentum and requires a certain amount of patience while its inventor unrolls blueprints, explains the math, polishes a bit of brass here, makes a modest joke there, showing off his purposeful machine pretty much cog by cog, then introducing his passengers and their histories. Representing practically every major 20th century concern, most of his protagonists are connected to the aptly-named Traverse family and its murdered anarchist patriarch, as well as the skyshipmen ‘Chums of Chance’. They drift across the world, in and out of relationships, meeting some strange customers with Marx Bros names, resolving differences.
Through de-aboriginalised Western badlands and proto-Babbitsvilles we are involved in time, identity, mortality, our attempts to resist the logic of entropy, the extinction of identity, the loss of hope, discovery of the multiverse.
With eery echoes of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and similar pre-WW2 moral fables, Pynchon creates a visionary tapestry covering the years immediately following the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893. Embracing the narrative methods of popular fiction, his tales are designed to deceive as well as create expectations. As a parodist he can slip smoothly, almost imperceptibly from Nick Carter to Black Mask and then into 50s movies..
Having in Mason and Dixon examined the American Enlightenment, Pynchon, perhaps the greatest intellectual showman of our time, turns his attention to post-Civil War idealism and its apparently unstoppable warping into the Crash. There are more talking dogs, daft songs, and a whole slew of nutty professors real and imaginary, working on time machines, undersand (sic) suits, deathrays and beamable electromagnetic power, some opposing big business, others in its employ. Pinkertons, Wall Street grafters, Robber Barons, frontier whores, anarchist dynamiters, gun-fighters, angels, prospectors, gamblers, mad prophets, conventions of time-travellers, Theosophists, international spies, magicians, painters, beautiful adventuresses and secret societies (for a fuller list read the author’s own description at Amazon) are all involved in an increasingly metaphysical Great Game across the multiverse, from Kathmandu to Colorado to Cambridge, Contra-Earth to Contra-Earth. And marvel by marvel, pathetic fallacy becomes art beyond Ruskin’s wildest dreams so that sometimes you simply wonder if you aren’t just reading the smartest stoner in the universe.
By page 550, when he brings you to the novel’s melancholy heart, Pynchon has you firmly in the palm of his Barnum-like fist. It’s no accident that we are now in Belgium, narrowly missing being drowned in mayonnaise, or that a half-mad time-traveller warns a fellow ukelelist ‘Chum of Chance’ of future trench war. “This world you take to be ‘the’ world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.”
Soon string theory, of a sort, is used to rationalise time travel (of a sort) and we’re hurtling through a collection of slightly different realities, threatened by phantoms of past, present and future, power-mongers of every kind moving the worlds inevitably towards versions of those massively destructive events which have threatened the remains of our humanity since 1914.
Noting how our memories fade into folklore before our eyes, Pynchon finds, in quasi-Mandelbrotian optimism, self-similarity contradicting the logic of entropy. He travels not imaginary universes but universes of the imagination. One alternative shifts into another, one reality makes space for the next.
The best visionary fiction refllects shared realities. Once his barker-persona has lured us in, Pynchon holds before us a whole hall full of mirrors. Some of those reflected images are comic, a few are almost flattering. We’re laughing and crying. Yet what’s the point ? Be assured. The great Ludlow strike looms. Resolutions are offered through Pynchon’s clever use of triplets and his brief finale in future tense. We stagger out of this one man World’s Fair with our hearts and our sides splitting.
Against the Day is a fine example of successful marriage between the popular and the intellectual, between fiction and science. Many modern writers are rediscovering or taking over sf tropes, as P.D.James did in Children of Men, its subject already treated rather more subtly in Aldiss’s Greybeard (1965). Aldiss, Burroughs, Ballard and Vonnegut predicted, long ago in the 60s, that the arts and sciences would be reunited in speculative fiction, that the novel would not die if it could rediscover vulgarity.
Gloriously, demandingly, daringly Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to prove that the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world. Give this book your time. I think you’ll agree it’s worth it.
http://www.bigredhair.com/
POPULAR MECHANIC
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
Cape1085pp
£20.00
Michael Moorcock
__________________________________________________ ________________
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
--Thomas Pynchon
FAMILIAR WITH THOMAS Pynchon’s work since the 1960s when we ran his ‘Entropy’ in New Worlds, I originally resisted his major novels. The New Worlds authors shared Pynchon’s interest in urban mythology, entropy as a metaphor, dreams, mathematics, theoretical physics, imperialism, racism. They celebrated his inverventions into earlier fictions via pastiche, but many argued that he lacked Burroughs’s laconic virtues.
Though he can fairly be considered sui generis like Firbank or Vian, Pynchon was co-opted by some critics into the steampunk movement and has much in common with a favourite of mine, Charles Harness, the Texan who was thrown out of his seminary, became a Washington patent attorney and wrote some of the strangest metaphysical sf of the 1950s. Against the Day‘s opening reminded me of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong graphic novels which drew on late 19th century ‘science hero’ dime novels to examine Edwardian mechanical optimism exemplified by the real Nikola Tesla. The first half of this romance certainly recaptures the prevalent mood of pre-1914 America, when ‘wizards’ such as Edison and Tesla were public legends, but, like Twain before him, Pynchon introduces a questioning, deeply elegaic note into his story of Yankee ‘can-do’ optimism, producing a tall tale entirely serious in intention, if only rarely in tone.
A massive engine, depending on its size for its aesthetic the way some rock bands depend on loudness, Against the Day takes a while to build momentum and requires a certain amount of patience while its inventor unrolls blueprints, explains the math, polishes a bit of brass here, makes a modest joke there, showing off his purposeful machine pretty much cog by cog, then introducing his passengers and their histories. Representing practically every major 20th century concern, most of his protagonists are connected to the aptly-named Traverse family and its murdered anarchist patriarch, as well as the skyshipmen ‘Chums of Chance’. They drift across the world, in and out of relationships, meeting some strange customers with Marx Bros names, resolving differences.
Through de-aboriginalised Western badlands and proto-Babbitsvilles we are involved in time, identity, mortality, our attempts to resist the logic of entropy, the extinction of identity, the loss of hope, discovery of the multiverse.
With eery echoes of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and similar pre-WW2 moral fables, Pynchon creates a visionary tapestry covering the years immediately following the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893. Embracing the narrative methods of popular fiction, his tales are designed to deceive as well as create expectations. As a parodist he can slip smoothly, almost imperceptibly from Nick Carter to Black Mask and then into 50s movies..
Having in Mason and Dixon examined the American Enlightenment, Pynchon, perhaps the greatest intellectual showman of our time, turns his attention to post-Civil War idealism and its apparently unstoppable warping into the Crash. There are more talking dogs, daft songs, and a whole slew of nutty professors real and imaginary, working on time machines, undersand (sic) suits, deathrays and beamable electromagnetic power, some opposing big business, others in its employ. Pinkertons, Wall Street grafters, Robber Barons, frontier whores, anarchist dynamiters, gun-fighters, angels, prospectors, gamblers, mad prophets, conventions of time-travellers, Theosophists, international spies, magicians, painters, beautiful adventuresses and secret societies (for a fuller list read the author’s own description at Amazon) are all involved in an increasingly metaphysical Great Game across the multiverse, from Kathmandu to Colorado to Cambridge, Contra-Earth to Contra-Earth. And marvel by marvel, pathetic fallacy becomes art beyond Ruskin’s wildest dreams so that sometimes you simply wonder if you aren’t just reading the smartest stoner in the universe.
By page 550, when he brings you to the novel’s melancholy heart, Pynchon has you firmly in the palm of his Barnum-like fist. It’s no accident that we are now in Belgium, narrowly missing being drowned in mayonnaise, or that a half-mad time-traveller warns a fellow ukelelist ‘Chum of Chance’ of future trench war. “This world you take to be ‘the’ world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.”
Soon string theory, of a sort, is used to rationalise time travel (of a sort) and we’re hurtling through a collection of slightly different realities, threatened by phantoms of past, present and future, power-mongers of every kind moving the worlds inevitably towards versions of those massively destructive events which have threatened the remains of our humanity since 1914.
Noting how our memories fade into folklore before our eyes, Pynchon finds, in quasi-Mandelbrotian optimism, self-similarity contradicting the logic of entropy. He travels not imaginary universes but universes of the imagination. One alternative shifts into another, one reality makes space for the next.
The best visionary fiction refllects shared realities. Once his barker-persona has lured us in, Pynchon holds before us a whole hall full of mirrors. Some of those reflected images are comic, a few are almost flattering. We’re laughing and crying. Yet what’s the point ? Be assured. The great Ludlow strike looms. Resolutions are offered through Pynchon’s clever use of triplets and his brief finale in future tense. We stagger out of this one man World’s Fair with our hearts and our sides splitting.
Against the Day is a fine example of successful marriage between the popular and the intellectual, between fiction and science. Many modern writers are rediscovering or taking over sf tropes, as P.D.James did in Children of Men, its subject already treated rather more subtly in Aldiss’s Greybeard (1965). Aldiss, Burroughs, Ballard and Vonnegut predicted, long ago in the 60s, that the arts and sciences would be reunited in speculative fiction, that the novel would not die if it could rediscover vulgarity.
Gloriously, demandingly, daringly Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to prove that the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world. Give this book your time. I think you’ll agree it’s worth it.
http://www.bigredhair.com/
hi..
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