Less than epic

FictionEverything, including several kitchen sinks, contribute to the immense, if less than epic cartoon that amounts to Thomas Pynchon's latest meandering free-for-all, his first in a decade.

History and geography have provided what passes for structure in a zany picaresque that may well be a metaphor for the sick and deadly times in which we live. Not that this is all that new a theme for the famously elusive Pynchon, whose preoccupation has tended to be the sick and deadly times in which we live.

As camp marathon jaunts go, it is handled with gusto and the always saving grace of maverick humour. He wears his profundity lightly - just as well.

Pynchon may or may not regard himself as a seer, but his sense of humour has tended to come to his rescue, and that of his readers. And at no time has he ever needed his comic vision and lightness of touch - his prose, as ever, tap-dances along - as much as he does here in an indulgently crazed plot as loosely constructed as a house made of plastic straws. Early in the action - which opens with life as it is lived on the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, the crew, members of an elite club, the Chums of Chance, bicker. They are excited as they are heading for Chicago. It is 1893, and the World's Fair is taking place in the Windy City. On cue, the camera pans across deck and a dog stares intently at a volume of Henry James.

Remember this dog, he is but one of the dangerously large cast of characters. Pynchon literarily spills them like so many dice across the vaudevillian pages. They run all over the US and into a Mexico ripe for civil war and on to a world waiting for conflict. These characters, armed with crazy names - Toadflax, Chick Counterfly, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin etc - and weird habits, arrive in deserts, in jungles, in London, Paris, Vienna, Ostend, Russia, all over the Balkans, Venice, Germany. They shout, sing, argue, engage in group sex, abandon each other, forget each other, remember each other, travel by train, horseback, ocean liner - and of course skyship. Cowboys yawn, revolutionaries plot, sex fiends leer and aristocrats shriek.

While chaos rampages on the ground and the story is tossed about among the various protagonists, the Chums of Chance maintain some level of look out, acting as a unifying presence - the novel begins and ends with them. This is a book about terror and terrorism and about living on the run. It is also concerned with some vague notion of multiple quest. Most of all though, the one abiding sensation that ricochets through the pages is that Pynchon is having fun. He clearly enjoyed writing what is the definitive shaggy dog story - never has the defining logic of Sterne's majestic Tristram Shandy, an influence so evident in Pynchon's entertaining historical romp Mason & Dixon (1997), appeared so lucid as when experiencing the undisciplined insanity of Against the Day.

Pynchon has characteristically littered the text with in-jokes and cross references. In fact, those in-jokes and the cross references, as well as the historical asides and goofball digressions, serve as life rafts for the reader grimly paddling along through a novel that is more than twice the length of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, which says so much more. All the while the superior shadow of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's demented post-modernist classic, published in 1973, hovers. It is this earlier novel, never mind what appears to be the serious absence of inspired editing, that presents the main difficulty facing Against the Day.

Its comic impact, however, has been virtually obliterated by Pynchon already having used the gags and the tricks and the funny voices. Nor does it approach the satiric bite of The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), a surreal comic fable that satirises Californian life and achieves what is for Pynchon a rare emotional engagement.

SHORT, SHARP AND timeless, The Crying of Lot 49 proves that Pynchon can write effective short fiction. In 1985, Slow Learner, a volume of five stories written between 1958 and 1964 was published - and was accompanied by a witty and insightful introduction by Pynchon. In it, he discusses many topics, including the young writer's habit of attempting to be world-weary and of writing about things, life mainly, of which the young know little.

Then out of the blue, he writes: "Fascinating topic, literary theft. As in the penal code, there are degrees. These range from plagiarism down to only being derivative." These remarks, written more than a quarter of a century ago, have acquired an eerie resonance in the aftermath of recent accusations of plagiarism directed at British novelist Ian McEwan, whom Pynchon, among other writers, defended.

A mere 200 pages into the narrative, one of the characters, Reef, finds himself in Utah. "Not that he wasn't warned, but that didn't keep it from being the worst town Reef ever rode into. What was wrong with these people? For miles along the trail, coming and going, every telegraph pole had a corpse hanging from it, each body in a different stage of pickover and decay . . . By local custom and usage, as the town clerk would presently explain, these strung-up wrong doers had been denied any sort of decent burial, it being cheaper anyway just to leave them for the turkey vultures."

Elsewhere, another character wonders "if innocence were some kind of humorous disease, transmitted, as in a stage farce, from one character to another . . . and if so who he'd caught it from."

No one appears to know what is going on. The communal bewilderment may be summed up in an observation. "Some believed Ellmore Disco was Mexican, some said he'd come from even farther away, Finland or someplace like that." Pynchon has a magpie's mind and an impressive range of interests. He has travelled as widely as this novel does, he has seen a great deal of the world. Not even Ireland escapes: Oscar Wilde crops up a couple of times and then there is Wolfe Tone O'Rooney "a travelling insurrectionist - though not, he was quick to add, a Fenian." The "Ich bin ein Berliner" gaffe gets an airing.

ON AND ON races an admittedly good-natured narrative devoid of either coherence or cohesion, giving the impression that Pynchon - who was born in 1937, served in the US forces, and decided to become invisible, thus securing mythic status - allowed his imagination to simply fly. For all the energy and obvious overview, it is a disappointing performance.

When Mason & Dixon appeared in 1997, some seven years after the flop that was Vineland, it showed that, for all his surrealism, Pynchon's vision has always been shaped by his grasp of history. In basing that book on the 18th-century survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that was carried out by two Britons, Pynchon wrote, what was, for all its wayward pastiche and slang, a historical novel.

Approaching 800 pages, it is a comic turn, albeit one with a dark heart - the reality of slavery and its relevance as the enduring cultural division of North and South as well as between the old world and the new. Mason & Dixon could have been a good novel instead of a dense, entertaining romp.

Against the Day inhabits a different category. It does little for the reputation of Thomas Pynchon, who since exploding on to the literary scene in 1963 with the allegorical V., has been hailed as one of the two Americans who inherited the Joycean novel from Europe.

The other American is none other than the great William Gaddis, in my opinion always the master. It was Gaddis, not Pynchon, who possessed the narrative and linguistic skills to sustain dense, dialogue-based layered works. While Pynchon favours the zany, Gaddis drew on perfectly timed, comic exasperation. Read Against the Day as a likeable if completely daft post-modernist text.

Consider it as a study of invisibility in an age of terror, one of the characters calls for a "cloak of invisibility" - Harry Potter already has one - by a writer whose cult status has been consolidated by invisibility.

Ultimately this post-hippy salute to all things offbeat is about the random.

" . . . due to feelings of mental ambivalence which were just beginning at that time to be understood, it had one day occurred to Ewball, after an absence measurable in years, to drop in on his family in Denver . . . " Such is the slap-happy, devil-may-care improvisational energy Pynchon brings to a hurrah guaranteed to leave the reader wondering "now what exactly was that all about?"

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Against the Day By Thomas Pynchon Cape, 1086pp. £25