Home > The Magazine > Cartoons

Wednesday 9 July 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Liz Anderson

Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

And all that jass

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.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Next page

More articles from: Sam Leith | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our liberties

I was starstuck by David Cameron

Steven Berkoff

In the week of the Spectator Summer Party, Steven Berkoff recalls another of our celebrations at which he sought out the Tory leader and forgave his confusion of Brando and Dean

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House

Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

David Davis

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties pointlessly