I'd attempted it a couple of times before, previously getting a whole 8% of the way through (in fairness, the best part of 100 pages) before throwing in the towel. But now I came at it with more focus, more time and a willingness to put off any other books that might tempt me. So was it worth it? Hmmm...
Gravity's Rainbow is a book that, on paper at least, has a lot in common with two of my all-time favourites: Catch-22 and Infinite Jest. It shares the WWII setting and politically satirical ambitions of the former and the post-modernist style, huge cast of characters (over 400 of those) and disparate subject matter of the latter. Length-wise, it sits roughly between the two. So it's not a work to be taken on casually, and it was probably unfair of me to hold it up against them - but either way I found it very hard going from start to finish.
The plot and writing style are not so much twisting as labrynthine; it's effectively designed to get the reader lost, launching haphazardly into tangents and diversions that morph into fully-fledged chapters with no attempt to ever return to the original thread. Characters are firmly established only to disappear without trace for hundreds of pages, plot lines interweave and drift apart without apparent logic or rhythm, and the prose style, lurching from borderline academic literature to stream of consciousness to vernacular ramblings, can be enough to make you want to throw the book out of the window in despair at times. It must be said that things do get better - make it through the first part of four and you get into the groove both in terms of the story (character arcs and motives do start to slide into place) and the language, which is dialled back just enough as to be readable.
And the story, such as it is, is quite a fun one. The book opens at the house of Lt. Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice in London in 1944, as he catches sight of a German V-2 rocket bomb on its way over the channel. We soon learn that Pirate is a member of a secretive group known as PISCES, employed by the controlling forces behind the war effort due to his ability to read the minds of others - or specifically to inhabit their dreams and fantasies and mould them to his own will. It's an intriguing premise, and one that I would happily have read a whole book on, but I never got the chance because Pynchon abandons Pirate early on, only bringing him back a couple of times much later to move the plot along. Instead, the narrative begins to focus more on Pirate's friend Teddy Bloat, assigned to track the movements of his American colleage Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual encounters with women seem to be predicting V-2 strikes across London by a couple of weeks. It's from here that the plot really gets going, as Bloat and Slothrop are transported to the South of France, setting into motion a vast chain of events whereby Slothrop starts to get an idea of his real purpose in the war. Is it just paranoia, or has his whole life been under the control of higher powers, carefully calculating his every move for their own benefit? He decides to try to escape, embarking on a meander around immediately post-war Europe that involves plenty of escapades and colourful characters. The plot starts to come together into something of a detective story, as Slothrop decides his goal is to find the mysterious S-Gerät, a device housed in the V-2 rocket with the serial number 00000. There's all sorts of corporate espionage (the real war all along), meetings with the Illuminati and frankly uncomfortably realisitic depictions of the state of Europe around that time.
Again, I would probably have enjoyed a whole book on this plot alone, as Tyrone dashes around getting involved in drug heists, daring escapes from underground bunkers, hot air balloon chases, orgies for the continent's elite and a submarine full of Argentine rebels. Or indeed any of the mid-level sub-plots, like that of Tchitcherine, a depressed and drug-addicted Soviet career soldier trying to decide between the rest of his life in the Soviet zone of Germany or the wastes of Central Asia; or Dutch double-agent Katje Borgesius, a femme fatale for hire going around seducing information out of men; I even enjoyed the story of a lightbulb named Byron doomed never to go out and who tried to lead a global revolution through the world's electricity networks.
But Pynchon just keeps on derailing everything, setting off on endless attempts to break the reader through treatises on patents in the fields of electrical engineering and polymer chemistry (nice try, I understood a depressing amount of that), film studies (ditto), linguistics (three from three and I actually did really like that bit), and yes, a whole lot of things I couldn't get into, from theology and classical philosophy to art history and traditional American folk songs. So while the action sounds like a lot of fun, and is, it always seems to take a back seat to Pynchon's philosophical ramblings on what these long-range missles actually mean for humanity - like how we were always destined to create them, how they're an analogy for the Buddhist mandala and how, as the reader of the book, we're destined to follow the same path with it as the rocket does over the Earth. Yeah... stylistically it all feels a lot older than 1973, but looking at it from that perspective, the date of publication sits about right.
And it's a shame because there are some really brilliant moments. It's a bad choice of book to read on public transport - full of graphic sex and racial slurs and generally unsavoury subject matter - but also prone to genuine laugh-out-loud humour. There are songs and limericks and one-liners all over the places. The best scene: two stoned German drug lords sit blathering on about different strains of weed, when a troop of American soldiers come bursting in demanding to see their papers. The Germans' response completes one of the all-time great 1-2-3 punchlines. Oh, and credit where it's due for more or less tying up all of the plots properly by the end.
But that's not enough to elevate the work as a whole. It seems to be the consensus that the second read is a lot better, but I don't exactly feel compelled to go there - there's just too much slog for the reward, too much thinking involved. I know this is the kind of book I need to keep reading to further my love and appreciation of literature, but that doesn't necessarily mean this book in particular.
Or it can just be summed up by the following five-star review from goodreads.com:
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN WW2 HE GETS ERECTIONS.
I think Pynchon would have approved of that one.
3/5, although I reserve the right to change that if I ever read it again.
And today I learned that this song is directly inspired by this book. Not sure what to do with that information.
