Published by Jonathan Cape, 2006, hardcover, 1085 pages, 16.5 cms x 24 cms x 6.6 cms, condition: as new.
This is one of those Big Books where it is arguable that the true characters of the novel are the mechanics of the universe. Light and Darkness, Time, the Stars, Gravity, Earth, Mathematics, Death, Rebirth, New Life. But this would be disregarding that the novel is really, simply, a drama of two families at the end of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, living through its changes and disasters, its sociopolitical upheavals. And how perfect their names- Traverse and Rideout. Rideout and Traverse. One might also easily be persuaded that this is a pure fantasy novel, for it cares not for adhering to the rules of this universe, and the Chums of Chance, the aeronautic motivus of action in the book, transcend all rules of space, time, and physics. Ghosts and wanderers from the future dwell in its pages- psychics, seances, the Tarot, other-dimensional interventions are ubiquitous, impossible objects and geometry-defying buildings and landscapes abound. Within the world of ATD the fantastic lives directly astride the Real, parted only by a thin veil that is constantly leapt across. As well, one could be tempted to call ATD an historical novel (because it is pure historical fictioneering) for one of Pynchons great preoccupations here is the singling up of all lines of history into its inevitability- how the past, when it was present tense, shed all other possibilities to become the future it became. But he extends this and asks: What of the infinite possible pasts, and if their infinite futures were realized? What have become of and where are located the possible futures we have shed by narrowing down potentiality through choice and chance?- These other worlds, dimensions, or speculative universes are the true setting of Against The Day, and all the talk of Vectorists, Quaternions, Riemann surfaces, tesseracts, properties of the Aether, of Light, of Iceland spar and its double-refractive properties, are ways of asking a huge question, one we are caught in the very middle of in this experiment of becoming ever more conscious beings: Once, men sat and looked out on a flat plain and called that plain the world, and the world was thought flat and the center of the universe- then we built ships and set out, and found the world was round, and then we went further and found that the earth was not the center of the universe at all, but a speck in a cosmos unimaginably huge and complex- and so we built ships to attempt a crossing of that other ocean, the one not of water but of Space, and as we progress onward making discoveries and refining mathematics, it might follow that that first uncentering of the earth, the first rounding of the earth, might be the first of a long process of uncentering, of rounding the universe into its proper form and setting- maybe a thread, a membrane, or a spheroid amongst countless, uncountable other universes, maybe expanding forever into what we cant conceive, and what might this mean, and who is out there living beside us, invisibly, each and every fractured moment of our lives? And are there other Selves out there, doubled, trebled, even uncountable versions of us living out lives across this multi-dimensional sprawl? What are their destinies? And, considering the unbearable tragedies of History personal and universal, what might have been?
