Clever, very clever... (Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon)

Member Name: Pamsy

Product:	Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Date:	18/07/01 (126 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gripping yet humourous

Disadvantages: Takes a couple of hundred pages to get into

The book's first line is "A screaming comes across the sky." This refers to the arc of a V-2 missile inbound for London, and the V-2 (in many different ways) is the book's central metaphor. The book is so unique and complex that it really defies summary but I'll try to give you a basic idea:

The protagonist is one Tyrone Slothrop, an American officer who has a gift of precognition in that every time he gets laid, a V-2 falls right on that exact spot at a later time, and the book is the 700+ page story of his adventures, first in England before the Invasion, then in Occupied Germany. He also has a German semi-doppelganger who is involved with the V-2 program (and who appeared in Pynchon's earlier, easier novel V which I also recommend to those daunted by GR); other characters include a foxy German babe, a US military policeman, various British, French, German and displaced maniacs of every description, and a supporting cast of hundreds if not thousands.

This book, like War and Peace, is one of those works in which you have to take the first 100 pages or so on trust, as it doesn't seem to make any sense whatsoever.

The first time I read it I kept wondering what the hell it was about, it all seemed crazy, but after a few more pages it began to make sense.

It starts out (more or less) at a place called The White Visitation, which is an English country house modelled more or less on Bletchley Park, where the code-breakers worked. In this nut-house are gathered all sorts of people with odd "talents" like Slothrop - mediums, supposed telepaths, etc. - each of whom is stranger than the next. Slothrop becomes obsessed with the V-2 and eventually heads off into Occupied Europe to follow up on his fascination, searching for the underground factories where the missiles are built (by German East African blacks, of all things). He is pursued all over the place by an equally obsessed MP who's deter
mined to catch him (I forget exactly why now) and before the story's over he has gotten involved in the postwar Berlin black market and all sorts of other things.

Okay, that sounds marginally sane, but ... the whole book alternates between very serious subtext and a surface that is slapstick and utterly outrageous. At one point, for instance, there is a chase in which the MP in a Piper Cub is after Slothrop, who's in a hot-air balloon with a German baker who is taking a consignment of pies to market - what follows is a mid-air custard-pie fight. In another laugh-out-loud scene set in postwar Berlin, a sleazy petty officer has organized an illicit prize-fight (the weapons are runcible spoons) and as this is happening, the MPs chase Slothrop through the crowd - by now he is dressed in a pig suit with cocaine strapped all over his body, destined for the black market. There are countless other scenes of equal bizarreness and hilarity, but the book's purpose is a serious one and it succeeds on both levels.

I recommend it here not only because I really love this book but also because when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of the V-2 program, Pynchon is absolutely on the money -- he describes the innards of the thing entirely accurately insofar as I was able to judge, and except for the obviously invented stuff he stays within the framework of historical fact (essential for the serious part).

This won huge acclaim when it was published in the early 70's and deserves every bit of it. It's a lot to bite off, but anyone with the faith and fortitude to read, say, the first 200 pages will be hooked, I guarantee. It's one of those rare books that you really really wish it was longer.

A very clever book, and one which may take several reads to understand, but definitely worth it.

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