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Saturday 19 July 2008

And all that jass

The book is shot through with doubling, or surrogacy. There are the palindromic rival scientists Renfrew and Werfner. One of the main villains is called Deuce Kindred, and exists in a peculiar relationship with another hoodlum, each believing the other to be his own sidekick. A ship is at once cruise liner and dreadnought. Events on one side of the world have an occult influence on those on the other. ‘Double refraction’ through a particular sort of crystal allows you to turn silver into gold. Mirrors are to be regarded with, at least, suspicion. It gets more complicated, and sillier. We’re introduced to the notion of ‘bilocation’ — where characters appear in two places at once — and, later, to that of ‘co-consciousness’, where someone’s own mind somehow bifurcates. ‘He wondered if he could be his own ghost,’ Pynchon writes of one character.

Light, meanwhile, is the metaphor — well, not quite a metaphor so much as a preoccupation — to which everything, finally, returns. Does Against the Day itself, then, shed light? Or is Pynchon, in the words of one of his characters, ‘mistaking confusion for depth. Like a canvas that gives the illusion of an extra dimension, yet each layer taken by itself is almost transparently shallow’?

I think it holds up. And it does so because there is an underlying seriousness to it — to misappropriate, again, Pynchon’s own phrase, ‘The incorporation of death into what would otherwise be only a carnival ride.’ It drags, it forces you to struggle, but it does so for its cumulative effect. There’s a wonderful, gathering tenderness — and Pynchon writes some of the most beautiful sentences you are ever likely to come across.

Here are Dally and Kit, parting in Venice:

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