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Against the Day

And all that jass

Thomas Pynchon
Cape, 1104pp, £20,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 22nd November 2006

‘Quaternions?’ My friend perked up, and started talking about associative algebras, and complex numbers. Complex numbers are numbers expressed as the sum of a ‘real number’ and an ‘imaginary number’ (that is, a multiple of the square root of minus one). And, that explained, I realised how the maths related to the themes of the novel. I amended my note with a deep sigh: ‘Shit. No. Maths not made up.’ And, actually, it looks like the maths is not decorative but structural.

Pynchon’s preoccupations haven’t changed much. You could see this book — in its historical range, from the end of the 19th century to the second world war — as a sort of prequel or companion piece to Gravity’s Rainbow. He evinces the same old interest in paradox, paranoia, cryptography, complex equations, music-hall songs and explosive munitions (dynamite here; the V2 bomb in Rainbow).

He’s still doing those daft character names, too. I wrote down just a few: Miss Chevrolette McAdoo; Ewball Oust; the Rev Lube Carnal; Scarsdale Vibe; Stilton Gaspereaux; Oleander Prudge; Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin; Chick Counterfly; Q. Zane Toadflax; Alonzo Meatman; Dr Coombs De Bottle; Thrapston Cheesely III (the ‘East Coast nerve case’). Then there’s a dog called Pugnax whom we first encounter reading The Princess Casamassima.

That’s not to start on the silly acronyms, such as the capitalist conference LAHDIDA (Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation of the Industrial Defence Alliance), or the Alaska-based Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation (IGLOO), or a sect of English illuminati called TWIT (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tectratys).

There are shades in here of many other writers — Joseph Heller, H. P. Lovecraft, Nathanael West, Herman Melville and William Burroughs inter alia — but as the novel opens, oddly, it recalls nothing so much as Alan Moore’s parody of Silver Age comic books in Tom Strong.

We are aboard the Inconvenience, an airship crewed by a team of peppy young adventurers called the ‘Chums of Chance’. It is 1893, and they are en route to the Chicago World’s Fair, a crowning moment of scientific and moral optimism; a glimpse in innocence of a gee-whiz future.

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