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Against the Day

And all that jass

Thomas Pynchon
Cape, 1104pp, £20,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 22nd November 2006

That future is, of course, being set up for a fall. As the ‘Chums’, at least initially, sail untouched above it all like a team of homoerotic Lost Boys, things on the surface are moving towards a climacteric the reader will anticipate.

. . . both remembered feeling the presence of a conscious and searching force which was not the storm, nor the winter, nor the promise of more of the same for who knew how long . . . but something else, something malevolent and much older than the terrain or any race that might have passed in unthinking pilgrimage across it, something which swallowed whole and shit into oblivion whatever came in range of its hunger.

As Pynchon’s huge, restless cast of characters sweeps across from the gold towns of the Rockies to London, Venice, Trieste, via Great Game espionage in the Balkans, Outer Asia, the Tungaska Event, and the search for the mythical city of Shambhala, we know they are also moving through history towards the devouring catastrophe of the Great War.

There are Frank, Kit and Reef Traverse, three brothers intermittently seeking revenge on their father’s killer. There’s the fatally beautiful and polymorphously perverse TWIT agent Yashmeen Halfcourt. There’s Kit’s old sweetheart Dahlia Rideout. There’s the evil, cigar-smoking plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. It is a story of multiple scatterings and partings and reunions and betrayals, of hunting and of flight, incessant as Brownian motion.