Against The Day

Regular readers of this enblogment will know that I am rather addicted to the works of Thomas Pynchon, that elusive, reclusive American novelist. He only releases a novel every ten years, so it was no surprise when his new effort, Against The Day, weighed in at 1085 pages when delivered to me from Amazon last December.

I've just finished it. From the Amazon reciept which i've been using as a bookmark I can see that it was delivered to me the week before Christmas. That's over nine months it took me to read, and there's a reason: it's virtually impenetrable.

The subject matter is right up my alley. It starts at the Chicago World Fair in 1893 and follows a horde of characters including some never-aging child zeppelineers (the Chums Of Chance); The Traverse family of dynamiting anarchists (initially from Colorado); Yashmeen Halfcourt and her father; the British secret service operatives from T.W.I.T.; detective Lew Basnight; photographer Merle Rideout, Nikolai Tesla, millionaire Scarsdale Vibe and others. It's been said that this novel has 400 characters. Pshaw! I wouldn't say it doesn't, mind, but I seriously doubt someone counted them all.

The novel simply sprawls. It moves along at it's own pace, which is sometimes maddening, but it gets there. Inasmuch as it has a plot it's about anarchism, and how the radicals of the left (unionists) were displaced by the radicals of the right (Marxists). But that's grasping at straws as far as finding a plot goes. It could also be said to be about the Great Powers' search for the mythical city of Shambala, or simply a family saga about the Traverses. As in all Pynchon though, the plot doesn't really matter. Its the narative that counts. Pynchon is, as always, encyclopaedic in scope. If anything can be thrown in, it is. In that way it reminded me most of Gravity's Rainbow, except that it seemed much more cohesive. GR was a psychedelic trip, ATD seems more like a ride on a ghost train: the randomness and sheer lunacy are still there, but they're weaved in as part of the experience, not thrown at the reader higgledy-piggledy.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes. Every time I picked it up I was captivated. The problem was, it was so dense and impenetrable that getting the interest level up enough to pick it up was difficult, so it tended to lay around a lot while I read other books instead. Hence it taking me nine months. Taking it with me on my recent trip to the Cook Islands helped a great deal: a week on a desert island with nothing else to read provided a lot of impetus.

Would I recommend this book to others? Not without a word of caution. I like Pynchon and I like the times it was set in, and I like the type of gentle fantasy it contains. If someone didn't like all three of these prerequisites, this book would be a monster.