Against the Day, at more than 1000 pages, is Pynchon's longest novel. It is a tale of corporate greed, family vendetta, and the search for a lost city. The story's action begins in 1893 and ends sometime in the early 1920s, and is set in a number of locales, including Chicago, New York City, Mexico, Venice, Gottingen, Paris, London, Siberia and Inner Asia.

The story is complex, as is the telling, with flashbacks, embedded narrative, and plotting that sometimes seems digressive. Different chapters are focalized through different characters, and sometimes those focalizations shift within individual chapters. The narrative is dense with detail, not only with regard to fictional events, but to historical events and to scientific concepts as well. Because of the level of detail and the length of the novel, it is easy to forget a lot from earlier in the narrative, the further one gets into the text.

In a number of ways, Against the Day is like other Pynchon novels--too many characters to remember, people breaking into song as if they were in a musical, references to historical events both familiar and obscure. Pynchon works with a variety of genres, including detective fiction, horror, the western and boys' adventure novels. (There was not a lot on the theme of paranoia, however. Perhaps in this instance Pynchon felt it was a distraction from the themes of Anarchism and Capitalism?)

The characters include anarchists, spies, scientists (of whom Nikolai Tesla is one), balloonists, and at least one vampire.

I read this from May to July 2021. After I finished, I thought for a while about what to read next. At the end of two months, I had pretty much realized that I did not think I would enjoy anything as well as re-reading this again, so I started it again in October, finishing in December.

Not only do I like re-reading Pynchon better than I like reading some things for the first time, but another reading of this novel was probably a good idea given the complexity of the plot. It is kind of like The Sound and the Fury--your sense of what is going on improves with subsequent re-readings.

During the two months between reads, I watched a number of videos to familiarize myself with some of the technical and scientific concepts that came up. As a result, my most recent reading of the novel went a lot more smoothly. (Even with the information I gained from the videos, there are still things in the novel I do not completely understand. However, I do think I understand enough of it to get what Pynchon is doing, and so I suppose that as I do more research, the things with which I have difficulty will make more sense. Again, it's like The Sound and the Fury in that way).

Acquired Feb 2, 2007
Oxford Book Shop, London, Ontario

Review updated Jan 15, 2022

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APsR1...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6OQ...

The most epic, heart-warming, heart-breaking, majestic, hilarious, dreadful and inspiring piece of fiction I have ever read. If you took Once Upon a Time in the West, a couple of Final Fantasies (the good ones), the whole of HP Lovecraft's production, Verga and Hardy and Zola and such topnotch realists, and at least three or four more secret ingredients - and then gave it all to the world's greatest fiction writer to turn into one single uniform narrative, Against the Day is what you would get.

Truly up there with the Divine Comedy, Middlemarch and such.

what?

When judging the work of one of your favorite novelists, it is important to keep in mind that there is a difference between that author's best work and your personal favorite work of an author. An author's best work has to be decided differently. What does this author do well? What separates him from the rest of the world's novelists?

With that said, Gravity's Rainbow is probably Pynchon's best work (or, arguably, V). But Against The Day is definitely my favorite. This is the kind of book that messes with your head, but in a good way. This is the kind of novel that forces you to reconsider all the five stars you've ever given. You're going to want to go back and give all the five stars four stars instead because none of those books are as good as this one.

I was forced to read this book in small chunks. I read the first four hndred pages straight through and then took a break, reading a good fifty pages or so between other novels. I need a break every now and again from Pynchon's dense prose. However, dense though it may be, it's a breathtaking work. Very funny, plenty more accessible than previous works, and chock full of remarkable characters (the Chums of Chance are a particular favorite of mine).

It had been some time since the Chums of Chance had last visited Candlewood University, and as soon as they were on terra firma they made their way directly to Professor Vanderjuice's office. The Professor, who was in the process of calibrating what looked like a complex optical instrument, welcomed them effusively. "Randolph! Miles! Lindsay! Darby! Chick! How wonderful to see you!" He gave Pugnax's head a pat, receiving a friendly growl of recognition from the canine savant, and exchanged manly handshakes with the others.

"So what have you been up to, Doc?" asked Randolph, the greetings completed. "Your wireless telegraph message sounded most intriguing. Something about a... book?"

"Indeed, indeed," said the Professor, hardly able to contain his habitual enthusiasm. "And what a book! We have had our setbacks with the temporal displacement unit, I am the first to admit it, but this time it is 'the real deal'. Feast your eyes on this!" As he gestured towards the scientific device with which he had been occupied, apparently some kind of microscope, the Chums were surprised to notice that it was trained on an open volume. The Professor carefully unfastened the clamps and handed it to Randolph.

"Against the Day, a novel by Thomas Pynchon," exclaimed the intrepid aeronaut as he studied the flyleaf. "Published in... 2007?!"

"Quite so, quite so," murmured the Professor. "By far our most successful experiment to date. Nearly a whole century forward. Please, read on!"

The other Chums crowded around their leader and peered over his shoulder as he turned the pages. There certainly were a great many of them.

"I can't make head or tail of it," admitted Randolph after a few minutes of study. "All these... mathematical equations..."

"Long sentences," added Chick.

"And foreign words," concluded Darby.

"It is, indeed, something of a challenge," said the Professor. "But, as you will no doubt remember, literary theory has long been a passion of mine. I remain convinced that, with suitable mechanical aids, even the most recondite screed will happily yield up its--"

He broke off in mid-sentence; from the glances being exchanged between Randolph and Miles, it was all too clear that they had not yet forgotten their unfortunate encounter with the Pansensual Gerty MacDowell Experience (see The Chums of Chance and the Jujubes of Joyce). But after a moment of hesitation, he continued, ignoring his young friends' skeptical expressions.

"I have studied the text carefully," said the Professor. "It soon becomes clear that the theme of mirroring is of central importance. Reflections and twins abound. Professor Renfrew, and his 'conjugate', Professor Werfner. Vibe, and his shadow Foley. Venice and Venice im Wien. The Isola degli Specchi. The curious doubly refractive properties of Iceland spar. Do you begin to see?"

"No," said Miles truthfully.

"It will become clearer," said the Professor with unshakable confidence. "What we are being told to consider, we soon realize, is the essential duality of nature. Yin and yang. Waves and particles. Vectors and quaternions. Bras and--"

"Panties?" suggested Chick.

"I was in fact about to say kets," said the Professor, not in the least discomfited. "But that too. What, after all, is sex, viewed in formal terms, but a vain attempt to find a common eigenbasis for two generally non-commutative operators?"

Chick tried, with rather limited success, to find a rejoinder to this no doubt penetrating question. But before he could stammer more than a syllable or two, the Professor was off again.

"I tried to determine what it was the author was telling me," he continued. "Why all these mirrors? I thought of Alice through the Looking-Glass, since childhood one of my favorite tales. And then it hit me. Lolloping Laplacians! This was evidently not the real book at all, but merely its reflection. The first step must thus be to build a device capable of restoring the true text. Luckily, I happened to have a high-quality calcite crystal and a good understanding of quaternionic theory. The decoding instrument was easy to construct."

He strode back to the "microscope", replaced the thick volume in its original position, and adjusted the focus. "Here," he said. "Look at it again!"

Randolph peered through the eyepiece and whistled. "I thought it was bad before," he said. "But now! Mathematical symbols on each page, every third sentence in some outlandish language or other..."

"One cannot deny it!" said the Professor cheerfully. "But having proceeded so far, we must not let ourselves be deterred. This, we have determined, is the true book. But what is it saying?"

He paused, pretending to wait for an answer to his transparently rhetorical question, but received none.

"I realized," he said, his voice now almost a whisper, "that it was telling us how to understand the other world... the world on the other side of the Mirror."

"You mean the Looking-Glass World?" asked Randolph. But the Professor shook his head. "No," he breathed. "not the Looking-Glass World... for, I have now come to understand, we are the Looking-Glass World, the imaginary, quaternionic world. What this book is telling us is how to reach the real world."

The Chums gaped open-mouthed, stunned by the enormity of the revelation they had just received.

"But..." said Lindsay in the end, "if the book is incomprehensible..."

"No book is incomprehensible," replied the Professor briskly. "My work with Joyce convinced me of that. I now have in place a rigorous study program. Intensive courses in the development of the labor movement, the histories of Mexico and the Balkans, techniques of silver mining, the dynamics of Æther vortices, special and general relativity, vector calculus, Riemann's ζ-function, cricket, the exploits of the duc de Richelieu--"

"Is that the third duc de Richelieu," asked Linday, who was taking notes, "the one who was involved with Émilie du Châtelet?"

"The very same," said the Professor, without pausing for breath. "As for languages, obviously French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian. Latin and Greek go without saying. Then it is undoubtedly useful to possess at least a smattering of Dutch, Croatian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Turkish, Japanese, Swedish, Finnish--"

"But..." expostulated Miles, "even if one had a century of study time..."

"You underestimate recent advances in educational theory," retorted the Professor with a mischievous look. "Choose a language, any language!"

"You said Finnish?" suggested Darby. "We were there once (see The Chums of Chance and the Curse of Karelia) and I picked up a few words of the lingo. Here, yksi, kaksi--"

"An excellent start!" said the Professor. "Follow me!"

Snatching up the book again, he opened a door and led the Chums down a long corridor. After passing a dozen oak-paneled doors, they paused before one marked DEPARTMENT OF SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES. The Professor knocked; a moment later, an arctically blonde young woman emerged, dressed in an alluringly brief ensemble consisting of a few scraps of reindeer leather.

"Excuse us for troubling you, Liisa," the Professor said, giving her a courtly bow. "My young friend wishes to improve his grasp of Finnish." He turned to Darby. "Unless you have got 'cold feet'?"

"No siree," said Darby with undisguised enthusiasm. "Boy-oh-boy!"

"Excuse me," interrupted Lindsay in a prudishly horrified tone, "I would just like to assure myself that this is entirely 'legit'--"

His protestations came too late; Liisa pulled Darby into the room, which appeared to contain little except a blackboard and a large bed, and closed the door, after which there came the unmistakable sound of a key being turned in a 'Yale' lock.

"You need have no fear," said the Professor reassuringly to Lindsay. "We use the most modern techniques, intensive one-on-one tuition based on a version of the sexualpedagogiska metoden which Fröken Suomalainen has in fact been instrumental in developing..." He continued in similar vein for a few minutes, without notably increasing Lindsay's confidence, until the door opened again and Darby stumbled out, tie orthogonally askew and almost implausibly well-informed about the inessive case.

"Was the experiment a success?" asked the Professor.

"Who-whee!" said the young student by way of answer. "What's next?"

"I think perhaps some higher mathematics," mused the Professor, opening another door marked ADVANCED RIEMANNIAN STUDIES. A brunette with an Italian accent was explaining the concept of hyperbolic geometry, with frequent references to her dramatic décolletage; but before Darby could sit down, Lindsay, wise from his earlier mistake, marched him out into the corridor again.

"Now," he said firmly. "What I want to know is, do we really need all this?"

"It is barely enough to keep up," said Professor Vanderjuice in a wounded tone. Randolph and Miles, familiar with this concept from an earlier adventure (see The Chums of Chance and the Red Queen's Race), nodded, but Lindsay set his jaw defiantly.

"Let's see what Pugnax thinks," he muttered. "If I may?" He relieved the Professor of the book, which he was still holding, and bent down to show it to the hyperintelligent canine.

"Rrrf!" exclaimed Pugnax after a few moments of perusal. "Rrrff-rrf-RRF! Rrrf!" The Professor suddenly looked shamefaced.

"To be completely honest," he sighed, "your dog has a point. I have perhaps been a little too enthusiastic in promoting my new invention. In fact, it is sufficient to have a robust sense of humor."

"Rrrf, rrf-rrf!" added Pugnax. "Rrf!" Vanderjuice sighed again. "Yes, yes, yes," he said with just a hint of asperity. "And a dirty mind."

A couple years ago I was reading Tom Leclair's The Art of Excess (1989), in which Gravity's Rainbow earns a chapter, along with some postmodern bricks by Barth, DeLillo, Gaddis, and others. He supplies the notion of a 'systems novel', which I have enjoyed thinking about ever since. This is an appropriate term for describing GR, but really Thomas Pynchon wrote - ​and I think this is an astonishing achievement - three such novels : GR, Mason & Dixon (M&D), and Against the Day (AtD).

Insofar as GR has any main character at all, I think Tyrone Slothrop would claim that spot. He's too centrifugal to be a main character, really, but if he were part of a system that I was analyzing I'd call him a primary node. Or, to borrow a term from complex analysis, we might call him a pole, or maybe a zero, said analysis being by the way a topic which might figure slightly in GR (Poisson's equation? if memory serves) but goes on to play a significantly larger role in AtD.

What about M&D? Well in this system we have two poles. Or maybe they are dipoles, if you want to get all electromagnetical, clearly in the age of Ben Franklin this is a relevant theme to be thinking about. Opposites attract, as they do here, although sometimes they repel one another too. Both of the title's characters are more central parts of the system than Slothrop is in GR. Perhaps this is why the M&D system tends to be more stable than in GR, where Slothrop more or less disintegrates into the wastelands of the later chapters.

One pole, two poles, are we starting to see a pattern here? Is AtD a three-poled system? Of the three novels it strikes me as the most structurally complex, though on a sentence by sentence level both GR and M&D are the more ambitious. Singling out a main or major character is trickier here than it is for the other two, though with a surname like Traverse, and a patriarch named Webb, I think it's safe to say the brothers Kit, Frank, and Reef are good candidates. None of them are main characters in the traditional sense, but these aren't traditional novels, they are systems novels, and as they are among the most important post-WWII cultural achievements we have, it seems worthwhile to spend some time trying to figure out how they work. How much of the system is influenced by these three, though? Not that much? I don't think they are even aware of the existence of the Chums of Chance, but maybe that says something about the role Chance plays in a system.

So, what about four poles? Does Pynchon have another late-career systems novel up his sleeve? As it's been almost sixty years now since his debut novel V was published, that may be a little too much to ask for. However if a two-thousand page novel from a mysterious author comes out next year, and it is a family saga featuring the whys and wherefores of, say, the first four Marx Brothers, we will be among the first to know who really wrote it, won't we now?

Against the Day is a great carnival of delights: the glitter of uproarious humor and clever wordplay, the luxurious flow of a smooth, meticulous plot, the pleasure of meeting real characters (not bundles of assembled traits), the more intellectual pleasures of math, philosophy, and politics, and of course the writing, the mad, majestic explosions and twinkling filigree edge of Thomas Pynchon’s glowing sentences, his descriptions like fondant decorations, his delicious metaphors like creamy chocolates wrapped in gold foil, requiring a bit of unraveling, but rewarding you all the more for the effort you put in.

How can you describe this book? Do you focus on the exciting adventure, the low-brow jokes, the thrilling fantasy and science fiction? Do you focus on the philosophy, the political ideas, the math and the history?

All I can say is that this book, in its design and its characters, in the moments in which the text seems to dream, in the sudden intrusions of whimsy that catch you off guard, is a thing of beauty, reminding me often of Dvorak’s lovely, “New World” symphony, with its passages of lyricism and excitement, its optimism interrupted at intervals by acknowledgements of the darkness that underpins our tumultuous history…

n  

“We are light, you see, all of light – we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety match at the high city window, the stars and nebulae in full midnight glory, the rising moon through the train wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the costermonger’s barrow… When we lost our aethereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to” – grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and forth-“this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of the Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Aether, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction…” He paused at the door. “Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey. Do have something to eat, there’s a good chap.”

n

I don’t know how to express how much I loved this book, its intricacies and its themes, its beauty and its cruelty. It is less like a story than some weathered guide in a far away country, displaying talismans whose power is appreciated if not fully understood, leading you through great blue caves, up icy mountains beneath sparkling stars, through landscapes anticipating the shock of some great violence yet to come, past ruined watchtowers hazy in a greenish mist, among labyrinths of a complexity beyond the human imagination, beyond our world and below it, at times moving too close to comfort alongside monsters perhaps less malevolent than misunderstood…

Read “Against the Day”. Read it and swim through its staggering dreamscape of beauty and power. It is moving, heartbreaking, and exciting, incorporating every genre imaginable and a few others of its own invention. Thomas Pynchon, you marvelous magician you, to live a moment in your imagination…

Huge, sprawling, encyclopedic story that defies succinct description (as I found the numerous times anyone asked me what I was reading). It follows a cast of wild and wacky characters across real and imaginary parts of the globe in the years approaching the First World War as they look for revenge, love, a secret city, a mysterious weapon, etc etc etc.

A couple thoughts:
- I travelled MANY miles on Wikipedia looking up obscure historical references - Pynchon wove a staggering amount of history into this, all splashed with a dose of the supernatural
- SO many characters, an unnecessary number, I don’t know why we needed three new characters on page 1077 / 1085....
- There are like 35 ideas or subplots in this book interesting enough to make an entire novel out of and Pynchon just toys with each them for 30 pages and moves on, which was frustrating but you have to respect the imagination
- Obviously the writing is super meticulous, so so so clever, and at times beautiful and hilarious

For anyone looking at the page-count and thinking 'F--- that!' please reconsider. While jam-packed with ideas and attractively-deployed disquisitions upon most imaginable subjects, this is as entertaining a great book as you may ever discover. It's a total blast and may well be the best way into Pynchon other than Lot 49.

This is a very difficult book to assail and digest but worth it for me to see how the pomo master keeps up with the scene of post-postmodern he has spawned. The wonderful new weird I can’t get enough of (such as the three M’s of Mitchell, Murakami, Mieville), and others I keep trying (like DeLillo and Lethem). I bring these others up to convey that if you like them, this may be worth the ascent.. There is something in it for most readers (mystery, espionage, fantasy, historical fiction, family saga, campy humor, philosophy, mathematics), and in that sense there is too much in it for most readers. Too rich. Like reading 3-4 of those other authors in a row. The same was true for “Gravity’s Rainbow”, a masterpiece of comparable scope which took me a few years to complete. Jeeze, can it be back some 40 years ago? It’s hard to believe that Pynchon, one of the key fathers of postmodernism, has still got the juices. Here we get the same MO of personifying entropy and forces of physics into history. And plenty of mind-bending forays and obsessive quests by a troupe of comic and tragic characters performing the kaleidoscopic dance for our delight and wonder. Only this time around we don’t take mescaline any more.

What is he doing here to mess with our minds? This time he more after the relations of reality to math than to physics per se, and instead of World War 2 as the mental crucible, he is concerned with the fateful collision of burgeoning modernity at the end of the 19th century with the vortex of forces at play after the turn of the 20th century that leads to World War 1. Though it didn’t take me years to finish, I did take took a refreshing month-long break in the middle. There are some truly loveable characters here worth staying the course for, more so I think than in Gravity’s Rainbow. Others in my reading group should take heart that long pauses can make for a feasible strategy.

Jules Verne gave us 80 days to travel around the world, but with this book as a travel itinerary Pynchon does it in 25 plus years span (and 10 years to write). From the book jacket:
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

I love it how Pynchon kicks off the book by bringing a lot of his key characters together in Chicago at the beginning and then disperses them about the globe. At the World Exposition in 1893, all the great wonders of modern science and industry are on display. There we experience the arrival of a crew in the dirigible The Inconvenience, the cartoonish “Chums of Chance”, who we learn fly around the world on secret missions handed down by a mysterious Upper Hierarchy. They are the epitome of youthful and plucky gung-ho for technology in the service of progress and adventure. Their assignment has something to do with Tesla, who is working on wireless communication and hopes to create a source of free electricity for the world. We meet a key enemy of the story, the slimy magnate Scarsdale Vibe, who desires only economic exploitation of such wonders. He funds a Professor Vanderjuice to beat Tesla at the game and a young Tesla assistant, Kit Traverse, to study at Yale the type of math most relevant to his lucrative schemes. There you have the historical thrust of the innocent and the corrupt of this tale in a nutshell.

Aside from Kit, other loveable characters we meet on scene in Chicago are a traveling photographer and electrical appliance handyman, Merle Rideout, and his brilliant adventuresome daughter Dahlia (Dally). Then there is the righteous detective Lewis Basnight, working to outsmart possible anarchist bombers. I don’t count the five members of the Chums of Chance as “loveable” as they remain caricatures of their titles (Captain, Communications Officer/Historian, Scientific Officer, Handyman Apprentice, Mascot, plus the literary dog Pugnax as a protector and oracle). Finally, we run across some important minor characters, a pair of Austrian government agents who are guarding and keeping out of trouble the young Archduke. Yes, the very one whose assassination by a Serbian agent triggered the Austrian response and cascade of treaty obligations as the onset of World War 1. Much of the book is a form of foreshadowing of this coming conflagration.

Soon the Chums of Chance fly away to tune into an Arctic exploratory mission that has a lot to do with finding a form of calcite known as Iceland Spar. It has the property of double refraction that holds out the prospect of a window into an alternate reality.



Before we get to the house of cards in Europe, we take a diversion to Colorado, where Merle and Dally soon end up and Lew somewhat later. Merle’s chemistry skills from photography and his handyman talents lands him work in the mining industry through a new friendship with the miner Webb Traverse, father of the math whiz Kitt whom we met in Chicago. We expand our key characters with Kitt’s older siblings, including the happy-go-lucky gambler, Reef, the pragmatic mining school student, Frank, and their wild, boy crazy teenager sister, Lake. Lew comes to town on the trail of anarchist threats to the railroads owned by his corporate masters and makes a modest transition to countering the subversive forces aligned with the mining unions. From the conditions of the workers, the dirty tricks and violent tactics of thugs enforcing the greedy corporations, and his growing friendship with pro-union Merle, Lew begins to question whether he is on the right side.

Colorado makes a great stage to wind-up and solidify the characters and to display a nexus of historical forces. Manifest Destiny has closed the wilderness, the Indians are all out of the way on reservations, and capitalism has a free hand to apply new technologies to exploit the environment big time and the muscle of legal and extra-legal means to ride herd over the workers, which includes a lot of foreign immigrants with socialist fervor. The balance is upset by the entropic monkey wrench of the anarchists, who get pretty bold with their dynamite craze. Soon a lot of folks take up dynamite as a personal means of self expression and empowerment. Tall tales emerge of a mysterious Kieselguhr Kid, named after clay that stabilizes nitro in dynamite, as evident in this gossip:

“Don’t carry pistols, don’t even own a shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trade-mark, what you’ll find him packing in those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite …
Couple dozen in big bandoliers across his chest.”
…”But say, couldn’t even a slow hand just gun him down before he could get a fuse lit?”
“Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of strike rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s he has to do’s draw, and the sucker’s all lit and ready to throw…
Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.”

A critical event happens that ends up indirectly sending all the key characters off in different pathways through the rest of the novel. Without saying who or why, I share the modest spoiler that Webb gets murdered. All of the brothers are forever after motivated toward avenging his death while at times actively dodging this duty. Lake runs off with a flashy scumbag, unaware of his connections with the corporate bad guys. Lew gets on the dangerous bad side of the dark forces and takes the opportunity of a quick escape to London. The travels and quests of our characters will continually intersect the shadowy forces that drive the missions of the Chums of Chance and that of various nations’ spy networks concerned with harnessing advances in math and science for the development of powerful new weapons.

The Traverse family saga is loads of fun, full of naughty bits, and replete with feats of derring-do that knits their fate with that of the world. Frank and Reef wander around the west looking for a target for their revenge, and in the long course of events Frank ends up in Mexico in the middle of their revolution while Reef gets in the middle of the Balkan conflicts that preceded World War 1. Meanwhile, Kit pursues math studies in Gottingen, where he bonds with fellow math whiz, Yashneen, the daughter of an important English spy and Russian mother. They soon are led into significant forays in Austria and Belgium, and then he assumes a quest that takes him through Central Asia to Siberia as she joins Reef on the Balkan escapades. As for Dahlia, she converges with Lew in London, where he is adapting his detective skills to espionage, and then she ends up in Venice, where she gets involved with the ferment of the arts and part of the draw that makes this city a home base of sorts for Kitt.

Yes, this is all quite dizzying, but Pynchon weaves a very satisfying web, and it becomes clear why places like Bosnia, Venice, and Belgium are favored sites to portray the fateful transformations between the 19th and 20th centuries. Bosnia is obvious as its annexation by Austria in 1908 kicked off an uproar among world powers, particularly with the Ottoman Empire which had held it as a Muslim province on Western Europe’s doorstep for five centuries. Venice is an ancient link between Europe and Asia, home of Marco Polo, the capital of one of the first nation states, a leading center of the Renaissance, and for long periods in history a part of the Austrian Empire. With its traditions of carnival and masked balls and ancient tradition of mapping and mirror making, it makes a great site for romance and intrigue for Pynchon. Belgium, which figures in the book as a site of dual conventions of anarchists and radical mathematicians, is a lowland county whose sea walls are metaphorically depicted as barely hold back the suffering from King Leopold’s colonialism in the Congo. It is foreshadowed as the future pathway for German invasion of France and site of the long slaughter at Yypres. The spying Belgian security police captain looks for significant connections between the two sets of conventioneers:

“They could turn out to be only innocent mathematicians, I suppose,” muttered Woevre’s section officer, de Decker.
“Only.” Woevre was amused. “Someday you’ll explain to me how that’s possible. Seeing that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.”

Again and again we circle around mathematical advances and the competition between the Quaternionists and the Vectorists. The average reader can be sorely mystified and perplexed as to how much of this is a parody of academics and how much a real contributor to the forces of history. The progress of math to make use of dimensions beyond the three of conventional reality and of imaginary numbers whose terms incorporate the square root of -1 did pave the way for use as tools for progress of physics in Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. For example, the treatment of time as the fourth dimension in a geometry known as Minkowski Space was an ideal way for Einstein to portray the effects of gravity on space. However, in most ways mathematical innovations are just a useful tool for description of reality and not translatable into altered perspectives on fundamental aspects of reality. In this sense, the search for invisible realities, sources of energy, doorways through time in the extra dimensions and imaginary numbers of mathematical systems is just an endearing lunacy. Even so, the prospect of new weapons coming out of these academic fields presages the obvious fulfillment later in the century on their predictions of the powerful energies that might be released from splitting the atom. In retrospect, the allure is plausible:

It is said that the inventor of this weapon has found a way to get inside the scalar part of a Quaternion, where invisible powers may be had for the taking.

And in this age of bizarre spiritualism at the end of the Romanticism (based on a recent historical reading of Chaos Imagined, there would likely thoughtful folks who would align the science with the mysticism of Tarot and the Hindu Atman and Shiva and come up with the potential for bifurcated lifelines, for co-consciousness, and for parallel universes, such as in this projection:
Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety. …Within the mirror, within the scalar term, within the daylight and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim’s guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist.

The Chums of Chance flying above all the madness below somehow maintain their innocence despite contracting with various governmental powers. Their adventures extend to a search for the invisible or underground Asian city of Shambhala and efforts to counter interventions of time travelers from the future, wavering between the flavors of Lovecraft and Steampunk (e.g. Pullman’s “Golden Compass” and Westerfield’s “Leviathan”). Sometimes these madcap elements wore thin, but usually it was a relief to come back to them from the intense drama and struggles of the “real” characters. I was uplifted how, when World War 1 finally came to pass, they largely flew above the fray, so to speak, and punched out to the other side with even more optimism and ambition than they started with. The same is true for many of the Traverse and Rideout clans, as we bid a fine farewell to them in sunny California. Don’t you love it when you go through hell and still reach a happy ending?

PYNCHON IS THE UTOPIUM OF THE MATH CLASSES:

A Rhapsody of Exquisitely Mindful Pleasures

n  "Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end."
[Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"]n

Most authors inadvertently encourage us to be lazy readers. They make it too easy to read their fiction. We expect authors to comply with conventions of story-telling, a manageable number of characters, a narrative arc, a sense of relevance and progress towards a conclusion, a climax, a goal, a realisation and/or an understanding.

Pynchon doesn't necessarily write this way. He takes us to a world that might look like ours, but it is potentially alien (or at least foreign), in that there are some things or a lot of things that we do not know or understand about it.

"I'll tell you a story someday. Maybe."
[Thomas Pynchon, "Against the Day"]

What we see and experience at first might look familiar, superficially, but ours is the experience of a tourist, a stranger in a strange land or a space traveler landing on a distant moon or planet.

We have to construct knowledge, meaning and understanding, bit by bit, like a spy, a sleuth or a detective.

"...a crime, often of the gravest sort, committed in a detective story, may often be only a pretext for the posing and solution of some narrative puzzle..."
[Thomas Pynchon, "Against the Day"]

Pynchon doesn't just present his fictional world to us in easily digested mouthfuls. Whether or not his novels are difficult, they require mastication, exertion. We have to work on them. We have to do our bit. Having bitten off, we must chew.

This is their challenge, but even more importantly this is our reward. Pynchon offers us not mindless pleasures (an early working title for "Gravity's Rainbow"), but exquisitely mindful pleasures.

"'Oh, you're overthinking it all,' Yashmeen said, 'as usual.'"
[Thomas Pynchon, "Against the Day"]

That said, what would a Pynchon novel be if you didn't endeavour to think (or overthink) it through?

Are we meant to settle for studied incomprehension?



"NOW SINGLE UP ALL LINES!"

The first line of the novel is a nautical term that relates to the preparation of a ship (or in this case, an airship) to leave its mooring and depart (or take off).

Several sets of double ropes would normally secure the ship in its place. This command reduces the mooring to one rope in each position. It’s a halfway step.

Just as it releases the ship, it releases the lines themselves: once freed of their burden, the lines can now float free. They might also represent the verbal lines of the book, which are then commanded to cast off “cheerly now... handsomely... very well,” a perfect description of what Pynchon proceeds to do throughout the novel. He writes comically, eloquently and effectively.

"It's Always Night, or We Wouldn't Need Light"

The epigraph is attributed to Thelonious Monk in a Time Magazine profile published in 1964. While it might have been an expression that Monk used frequently, it could be a misquotation of another expression attributed to Monk by the saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1960:

"It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn't need the lights."

The two expressions have slightly different connotations. The first implies that the darkness of the night requires the enlightenment of the day or lighting. However, the second, in the context of jazz musicians playing at night in clubs, implies that the dimly lit darkness is a precondition for their music, their creativity, spontaneity and improvisation.

The darkness is not a negative quality that needs to be alleviated by the light. It’s a positive that allows individuals to perform at their best.

"Against the Day"

This construction, if it’s credible, hints at the meaning of the title "against the day".

In the novel, which is set between the 1890’s and the early 1920’s (the era in which Modernism began), it’s the light of day that is the negative. It symbolises the work of the Devil, the obviousness and conformity of the crowd, and its scrutiny by the powers that be (whether governments or employers).

Pynchon’s sympathy is very much with non-conformists, anarchists and socialists who are battling against capitalism and imperialism (or different manifestations of civilisation promoted by Great Britain, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia and Turkey), often with the only tools available to them: strikes, protests, assassinations, bombings and terrorism.

The latter are the underground (the counterculture), the former the overground (the over the counter culture).

Above them all are the Chums of Chance, "a five-lad crew" (plus their dog, Pugnax, who enjoys reading Henry James’ “The Princess Casamassima”, also a novel about radical politics featuring a terrorist assassination plot) who float above the world in their airship (“the Inconvenience”), privileged to have a map-like perspective or birdseye view of the clashes of civilisations occurring on the surface.

By befriending chance, they too oppose (law and) order, and embrace the chaos of unrestrained freedom, free as birds (although as Bob Dylan would later ask in "Ballad In Plain D", "are birds free from the chains of the skyway?")

Servants of Greed and Force

Underlying the clash of civilisations is a (daylit) certainty that I (the sovereign Subject) am right and you (the Other object which is the subject of sovereignty) are wrong.

Pynchon questions certitude and power from both mathematical and metaphysical perspectives.

The maths might deter some readers who would otherwise thoroughly enjoy the novel. However, in truth, it's not necessary to study up on it, unless you're particularly inclined to do so. It's primarily contextual, and there is enough explanation in the novel itself to get Pynchon's drift.

The maths is largely dispensed with in the first third to half of the novel. I tried to keep up, but still found myself doing some online research to determine how much I was missing out on. However, once I felt that I had some basic layman's understanding of the issues, I was content to focus on the pleasures of the text.

This mightn't be much comfort to a sceptical or impatient reader, but I found that it was a lot easier to read, comprehend and enjoy the novel after the first 490 pages or so!

The Fork in the Silk Road

The maths helps to understand the concept of doubling or coupling that is fundamental to the book.

Neither concept is far removed from Nabokov's employment of doubles in "Lolita". It's a literary or cultural device, in this case, one built on a mathematical or scientific foundation.

If we start with a ray of light passing through a prism (such as Iceland spar), it's possible that the ray might be refracted into two sets of waves or particles. Thus, the thing that was once singular might now be separate or double. If there is a symmetry between the refracted light, one wave might be the opposite or inverse of the other.

Thus, we have the potential for both "bi-location" and "algebraic coupling".

However, what is separate or inverted can potentially be joined or reverted.

Pynchon jokes that the German word "und" when refracted and inverted might become the English word "pun". Thus, yet again (after "Mason & Dixon"), a conjunction is both significant and comical.

Metaphysically, what was once one, but is now two, might either engage in a life and death struggle, or seek to be re-united.

Thus, the double can either encounter itself in duplicity or oneness.

This is equally applicable to nations and people.

Dive-Bombing into the Day

From a national perspective, duplicity can result in war, unless resolved by treaty or entente.

There's much conflict between civilisations and nations in the novel. This aspect reminded me of Lawrence Durrell's works "White Eagles Over Serbia" and "The Alexandria Quartet", just as much as boys' own adventure stories from the days of the British Empire (subsequently reprised in the likes of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and steam-punk).

Pynchon captures how conflict followed from Imperialism, which followed from Capitalism, which was founded on the separation of labor and capital, as well as male and female.

The Interwovenness of Desires

From an individual perspective, opposites often attract, if only motivated by the desire to reunite what was once one ("the secular expressions of a rupture within a single damaged soul").

This is often the most fascinating aspect of Pynchon novels. His early works were ineffably romantic, "Against the Day", even more so (fewer characters being truly uneffable).

This novel is what I'd call "anarcho-romantic", opposing power and master/slave relationships with freedom and equality, both socially and sexually.

We shouldn't be wasting our time building wealth for capitalists and imperialists, but punning, playing games and having sex in some new Utopian commonwealth of nations and genders. (I'll give it a go...again!)

n  I Heart Yashmeen Halfcourtn

The Triumph of the Night

Sex is a major part of "Against the Day", as if it's the most obvious activity to engage in at night (when pitted against the day).

Pynchon's representation of sex is a product of liberation. It doesn't come attached to any particular configuration of genders, body parts or numerical permutations and combinations, as long as you're having at least one orgasm (each), some fun, a giggle or a look.

She is the World

For all the sex, this fictional world is just as much a woman's, as a man's, world.

Its 70 chapters are a quasi-biblical septuagint. Towards the end, it segued into a nativity story of Yashmeen's Christ-like daughter, Ljubica (literal meaning: love or kiss; violet [see also chaya or etheric double]). However, this is just one of many tales of family, love, romance, passion, flirtation and kissing in the novel.

Whereas the focus of "V." was the feminine and "Gravity's Rainbow" the masculine, "Against the Day" suggests that what is paramount, in the night of the liberated imagination and against the rationalism of the pseudo-illuminated day, is our relationships with each other, including and especially family.

Perhaps, at the end of the day, family is even more important than mathematics and science. All we need is love.

The Green Hour

Did I mention food, alcohol and drugs?

Meals are intimately described, as if on a menu. The alcohol is as bar-hoppingly diverse as the geographical canvas of the narrative. The drugs reflect the taste of an author born in the 30's writing about the time before his birth.

The alcohol and drugs, in particular, enable us to see what is not there, sometimes even what is there but invisible.



"Or, as we like to say, l’heure vertigineuse."

"The Absinthe Drinker" by Viktor Oliva

Oops, I just realised I hadn't mentioned philately or cricket, the latter of which is the greatest game, the game that witnessed an empire become a commonwealth of sorts. But for that, you'll have to peruse the sundries below...



REVERSE SWING & SPIN:

Against the Light (or An Ode to Leg and Tale Spinners)
(Thomas Pynchon Esq.'s English Ashes Tour 2005)
[For (and as Predicted by) Madame Eskimoff]

Tom Pynchon rocked up, one summer,
At some Brummish cricket joint,
Yearnin' t'learn the diff'rence 'tween:
A dry gully and a silly point,

What, then, of a pull shot and a hook,
A deep cover and a sweeper,
A leg slip and a sight screen,
A stumping and a keeper,

A donkey drop and a spinner,
A run out and a hat trick,
A sundry and a swinger,
A French cut and a snick,

A chinaman and a googly,
A pacer and a seamer,
A wrong 'un and a flipper,
A bosie and a beamer,

Deep third man and twelfth man,
A maiden and a no ball,
A leg bye and a wide,
Not out and umpire's call,

Next to last, a guffaw and a sledge,
Mostly vulgar, not polite,
An appeal for LBW
And an appeal against the light.

What Pynchon learned is in his book
About civilisation's clashes,
He loved how Poms and Aussies fought
Over a tiny urn, full of ashes.

Now the tale is told at Edgbaston,
How they were confounded by Shane Warne,
And how each time he took a wicket,
Some Yank blew on a muted post horn.

Shane Warne's magic ball to Andrew Strauss - Edgbaston, Birmingham 2005

Shane Warne vs England 2005

Shane Warne 2005 Ashes - 40 wickets

Footnote:

Cricket is a sport played by most members of the British Commonwealth, a collection of former colonies that gained their independence by non-revolutionary means. It was originally anticipated that Britain would lose its empire, but win the cricket.

Although the USA played the first ever international game of cricket (against Canada) in 1844, it only gained entry to cricket's FIFA, the Imperial Cricket Conference, in 1965, after the ICC changed its name to the International Cricket Conference (known as the International Cricket Council since 1989).

Condimental Reaction

My mind
Feels like
It's been
Peppered
By a
Pynchon
Assault.

Jameson's Ride
[For Alfred Austin]

He went across the veldt,
As hard as he could pelt,
To join his young wife svelte
At home where they both dwelt.

Nymph and Satyr

It rained.
The rain ran down
The statuary
In the garden.
Dripped off
The noses of
Satyrs and nymphs.



"Nymph and Satyr" by Dosso Dossi

Kim and Umeki

One fateful
Afternoon,
In her room,
With rain in
Autumnal descent
At the windows,
She appeared
In a doorway,
Naked, blood beneath
Skin fine as
Silver leaf
Sonorously,
All but singing
In its desire.

"A Demi of Lambic for That Bloke Over There"

I'd like to think
If I could drink
A cloudy cold
Belgian beer,
Something lambic,
Not too dear,
I could master
One iambic.

Our Bill Impeached

Once there was a randy POTUS
Who thought no one else would notice
If he pulled out his angular knockwurst
For ev'ry single female in turn.

Pharmaceutical Literature

When I crave novel pills,
I prefer to devour
Thomas Pynchon's uppers,
Than the downers of our
Two grim Teutonic Bills.

William Hamilton's Quaternion Multiplication (i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = −1)

"And here there dawned on me the notion that we must admit, in some sense, a fourth dimension of space for the purpose of calculating with triples ... An electric circuit seemed to close, and a spark flashed forth."



Algebraic Couples, and Algebra as the Science of Pure Time

"Algebraic Couples, and Algebra as the Science of Pure Time" By William R. Hamilton

Utility of Quaternions in Physics (Tasmanian Connection I)

Alexander McAulay

"Here, at last, we exclaim, is a man who has caught the full spirit of the quaternion system: the real aestus, the awen of the Welsh Bards, the divinus afflatus that transports the poet beyond the limits of sublunary things! Intuitively recognizing its power, he snatches up the magnificent weapon which Hamilton tenders us all, and at once dashes off to the jungle on the quest of big game."

David Walsh [MONA] (Inverse Tasmanian Connection II)

"Mathematics is unsullied and friendships are dirty."

AT HOME WITH DAVID WALSH, THE GAMBLER

Don De Lillo

"I think New York itself was an enormous influence. The paintings in the Museum of Modern Art, the music at the Jazz Gallery and the Village Vanguard, the movies of Fellini and Godard and Howard Hawks. And there was a comic anarchy in the writing of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and others. Although I didn't necessarily want to write like them, to someone who's 20 years old that kind of work suggests freedom and possibility. It can make you see not only writing but the world itself in a completely different way...

"Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn't a better writer because his contemporaries weren't better. I don't know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon's generation can make that statement. If we're not as good as we should be, it's not because there isn't a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He's raised the stakes."

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/1...


SOUNDTRACK:



"It's Always Night (or We Wouldn't Need Light)"
[Thelonious Monk quoted in Time Magazine Profile, 1964]

http://www.monkzone.com/Profiles_inte...

"It Must Be Always Night, Otherwise They Wouldn't Need the Lights"

The source of the original quote: Thelonius Monk’s advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy (1960)

http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/02/th...

Thelonious Monk - "Evidence", "Straight, No Chaser", "Rhythm-A-Ning" (Live in Philadelphia on March 3, 1960)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Opt-...

Steve Lacy (ss)
Charlie Rouse (ts)
Thelonious Monk (p)
John Ore (b)
Roy Haynes (d)

Michal Wierba Doppelganger Project - "It's Always Night (or We Wouldn't Need Light)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7vXv...

Sevil Sabah Quintet - "Round Midnight" (Live at Castlemaine Jazz Festival 2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud8Gn...

The Band -"Up On Cripple Creek" (from "The Last Waltz")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnlU...

James Gang - "Ashes, the Rain and I"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-s73...

Blue Oyster Cult - "Don't Fear the Reaper"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZmr8...

"40,000 men and women every day
(Like Romeo and Juliet)
40,000 men and women every day
(Redefine happiness)
Another 40,000 coming every day
(We can be like they are)."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM0im...

The Beatles - "All You Need Is Love"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKiqt...

I can't even begin to write a review of this massive, impressive work. I found it extremely difficult but hypnotic. Although there were times I thought I'd never finish it, I couldn't put it down. Hopefully, I'll write a review in the future.

Just a few words, on reflection. The theme of day/night, light/dark was never clear to me (no pun intended) although the references to these topics are profuse and obviously have meaning. It seems, writing as a first guess, that the light is dangerous and that life lived against the day has more integrity. However, moved as I was by the imagery, I was not able to reach a clear understanding of the theme.

There are an amazing number of characters and events in the novel. Clearly, anarchism is important as well as capitalism and greed. The story is played out over several continents and decades, from the Chicago's World Fair in 1893 through the first World War. The characters travel through Asia, Europe and America's "wild west."

The prose can be hauntingly lovely (as well as rambunctiously obscene) and although I was often baffled by the book, I was entranced by the writing and the feeling of meaning just out of my reach.