Gravity’s Rainbow is Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, set in the final months, and immediate aftermath, of World War Two. It centres on Germany’s V-2 rocket programme, and a quest by a group of central characters to find a secret device, planned for a special version of the rocket.

The V-2 was a shockingly powerful innovation, the forerunner of all rockets we see today launching people and hardware into space. As one of the first man-made objects ever to break the sound barrier, the V-2 moved so fast that someone witnessing its impact saw an explosion first, followed by the sound of the rocket falling. Seemingly arriving ahead of itself, the V-2 blurred the difference between past and future, and so began to tear apart the foundations of what we complacently assumed was stable reality. The book’s initial confusion of past and future spreads out to include good and bad, madness and sanity, seriousness and levity, inside and outside. You name some form of organisation, it will fall apart in Gravity’s Rainbow. The psychologist Karl Jung – mentioned in the book – thought there was a shared unconscious which we enter in our dreams, where all the polite categories of waking life fall away. In the world of Gravity’s Rainbow this chaotic dream realm actually mimics real life, where Germany lies in ruins, its borders meaning nothing as troops of many nationalities mill about a wrecked wasteland. Berlin’s population live together in the open, amongst the rubble of former houses. A weird, sometimes beautiful, often profoundly distasteful, nearly always confusing, dream/nightmare is a good description of Gravity’s Rainbow.

In contrast to the fever dream feel, there is also a lot of hard science in the book, chemical bonds and engineering principles related to rockets and the industries that support them. The scientific method involves studying one variable while excluding all others. But in Gravity’s Rainbow it is impossible to separate one variable from another. The subject of astrology comes up quite frequently, a non-scientific subject in the sense that you can never separate one variable from another. You can’t keep Jupiter still while studying the effect of the movement of Mercury, for example. Gravity’s Rainbow is informed by science, but has an artistic sense that life’s variables can’t be isolated from one another.

So does all this make for a good book? I don’t know. Who am I to judge? My personal feeling was that Gravity’s Rainbow might be full of fascinating ideas, but the actual reading experience was patchy, at times entertaining, moving and interesting, but increasingly hard work and exhausting into the later sections. Thomas Pynchon certainly did not follow Hemingway’s writing advice that ‘the main thing is to know what to leave out’. Nothing is left out of this massive novel. Personally, I felt that some of Hemingway’s leaving out would have been beneficial to my reading pleasure. All the oppositions that get demolished in Gravity’s Rainbow include the idea of a good or bad book. This one is both.

Prophet Song is a novel by Irish author Paul Lynch, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.

This book imagines Ireland, taken over by a repressive regime, descending into civil war and anarchy. We witness events through the eyes of a woman whose husband is one of the first people to be ‘disappeared’ as the government ramps up oppressive measures.

The story, told in the present tense, has the feel of a movie filmed in one long take. Some parts of it rang true for me – a political party with repressive instincts wins an election, installs sympathisers in prominent official positions, and so becomes a dictatorship. To a certain extent this sort of thing has already happened. There was also a feeling of truth in the suggestion that once the totalitarian rot begins, going back is not easy. Without peaceful transfer of power, the only way to overthrow a government is through violent means, and one lot of violence isn’t much better than another. This gave rise to some fatalistic philosophising, suggesting that societies go through cycles of light and darkness, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Other aspects of Prophet Song were less believable. My reservations focused on the nature of Ireland’s imagined regime, where the state is a faceless, inhuman machine swallowing up individuals. This was like reading a dystopian novel from the 1950s. Against a background of Soviet Russia, and recent experience of Hitler’s Germany, the oppressive states described in books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451 were a reaction to their times. But the situation in western countries in the 2020s is different. Modern would-be dictators tend to be highly visible populists. They are hostile to state institutions, presenting them as enemies of personal freedom. The problem is not so much the state, more the wayward individual and their supporters who, seeking personal aggrandisement at all costs, finds the moderating influence of state institutions standing in their way. And in fact, even back in the day of famously dark twentieth century novels, the individual may have been a bigger problem than is generally allowed. Repression is often linked to a single, deranged person, whether that’s Hitler or Stalin, or a more recent wannabe. Tellingly, the oppressive regime in Nineteen Eighty-Four centres itself on the idea of an individual – Big Brother. In Prophet Song there is no such figure. There is just ‘the state’.

Perhaps it is our desire to see the world in personal terms that helps an inappropriate individual into a position of authority. People identify with a familiar face rather than a department of policy experts. Fame is the major determinant of political success, not competence. We need to rethink that. The struggle today is not with a faceless state, but with the well known faces of people who are unsuited to their position of public responsibility. The men and women who work for the state, unsung civil servants, scientific advisors, administrators of museum and arts funding, social security officials, teachers, health workers – are they really the problem? Nothing is perfect, but if anyone is fighting the good fight, it is usually them.

Prophet Song does not address such complications. In many ways it is engaged in a battle that does not apply anymore. The book reminded me of an idea attributed to Georges Clemenceau, French Prime Minister during World War One. Clemenceau is supposed to have said that generals are always prepared to fight the previous war, not the current one. Sometimes this applies to novels as well.

Science fiction often works by taking dangerous potentials lurking in current trends and then magnifying them out into a possible future. A lot of famous mid-twentieth century science fiction – Brave New World, Nineteen Eight-Four, Fahrenheit 451, imagined what would happen if government gained excessive power over people’s lives. Maybe by the 1990s some were taking this message rather too seriously. 1990s America saw a strengthening of sentiment hostile to government. Conservative groups, such as the ‘Citizens for Sound Economy’ stated an aim for smaller government and less regulation. Then came the Tea Party of the 2010s, and the Republican Party of the 2020s, parts of which appeared to want not just smaller government, but no state institutions at all. Interestingly, the world of 1992’s Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, imagines the consequences of these people getting their way. With organised crime stepping into the power vacuum, it’s not a pretty picture. The rich live in gated communities, the poor in ghettos. The police are a private enterprise protecting those best able to pay. And of course, the cruelly ironic effect of ‘freeing’ yourself from stabilising institutions, is an increased risk of some deranged individual coming along and imposing a personal dictatorship. And this is where Snow Crash’s magnified threat comes in. Maybe the threat we face isn’t where the old sci fi thought it would be. Snow Crash might be closer.

When he lost his job as an oil company executive, Raymond Chandler found himself unemployed during the years of the Great Depression. Thrown back on an early interest in writing, he decided that crime fiction might pay the bills. In a business-like way he taught himself the genre’s formula by reading pulp magazines and the work of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was Chandler’s first novel.

Looking back on his career, in his book Trouble is My Business, Chandler reminisced about trying to escape the limits of his chosen genre. While crime appeared to be his only option from a financial point of view – feeling ill-equipped to write romance for women’s magazines – he decided to join those who stretched the formula by writing stories where solving a mystery was not really the point. For Chandler, the perfect detective story ‘was one you would read if the end were missing’. Scene should outrank plot.

That was how I enjoyed The Big Sleep. The plot, involving a wealthy, grievously ill man, his wayward daughters and a blackmail attempt, is fairly confusing. I preferred to follow private detective Philip Marlowe, going about his work in long, lugubrious scenes, through rainy nights in 1930s Los Angeles. Marlowe’s character provides the interest. He is a detective living in a society of murky morals, where, for example, changing attitudes to Prohibition make the drinks business an illegal enterprise one day, a legitimate business the next. Certainties are hard to find. Marlowe responds by shrinking his personal world down to a small flat, and his work. And that’s it. From this little fortress he looks out at life, just as Raymond Chandler himself looks out from the tight confines of crime fiction. In a dark way, it’s almost cosy, in the sense that we have settled into our small corner, appreciating its limits even in resenting them.

For all the compulsive effort Marlowe puts into his work, even dreaming about it at night, he never gets a pay off, either financially or emotionally, at the end of it. In fact, there never really is an end. As he says to his client: ‘when you hire a boy in my line of work, it isn’t like hiring a window washer and showing him eight windows, and saying, “Wash those and you’re through”’.

There are, however, some dark consolations to be found in never reaching a satisfactory conclusion. When you are reading for scene rather than plot, the story’s point is not a few moments right at the end when the mystery is solved and justice apparently done. The point of the story is the whole thing, the long, atmospheric scenes which can be enjoyed in a leisurely way as Marlowe wanders through Hollywood fog. The journey becomes its own destination. I really enjoyed The Big Sleep in that respect. The term Big Sleep is a euphemism for death, the end of all our journeys. In that case it is definitely best to focus on scene rather than plot. Plot will provide a few moments of satisfaction: scene can last a lifetime.

In November 2023, The Beatles released their last song, Now and Then, with front cover art by American artist, Edward Rushcha.

Observant fans have drawn comparisons between the Red and Blue compilation album covers and the Now and Then cover, in the sense that they all feature diagonal lines. Is that just a coincidence? Or does this type of line have a role to play in producing an interesting and fitting image?

Let’s start with those Red and Blue album covers. The Beatles are pictured on the internal stairway at EMI House in 1963 and 1969. The stairwell balconies create a set of diagonals. These images could have been presented face on, but photographer Angus McBean tipped everything sideways. In photography or art, horizontal and vertical lines naturally suggest stability and structure. Diagonals, by contrast, bring a sense of dynamism, excitement, instability or insecurity. In the words of Cornell academic Charlotte Jirousek, an object on a diagonal line is always unstable in relation to gravity. The Red and Blue era Beatles appear happy enough, but the angled balconies imply something like a sinking ship. The exciting and terrifying experience of being world famous, while creating music of turbulent reinvention, certainly must have been ‘unstable in relation to gravity’.

Now and Then has been billed as the last Beatles song, but lyrically it’s really about continuing emotional uncertainty, and does not suggest an end. The cover reflects this. Apart from the diagonals, the image is ambivalent in how solid it appears to be. The background colouration could be seen either as a flat plain, on which the diagonals sit as folds, or as a gauzy, misty, watery surface with depths beyond. We have not reached firm ground. Everything is still slipping and sliding, and we cannot be sure of our footing. In fact Rushcha’s cover makes me think of words associated – accurately or otherwise – with John Lennon: ‘It’ll be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.”

(Images courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Post script

Post script

I follow various art institutions on Facebook. Here are pictures posted to my feed in the few weeks after writing this article. It is an arbitrary selection, but just look at all the diagonals…

Skippy Dies is Irish author Paul Murray’s second novel, published in 2010, and long listed for the 2010 Booker Prize.

The story starts with the death of Daniel Juster – or Skippy to his friends – in a doughnut shop. We then go back to events leading up to Skippy’s demise, before moving on to a dramatic aftermath.

In some ways this is an old fashioned book, set in a posh boarding school, describing the humorous antics of pupils and teachers – reminding me of Kipling’s Stalky and Co., and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both of which I’ve read recently. On the other hand, Skippy Dies is very modern. The boarding part of the school is old and decrepit, earmarked for rebuilding. The involvement of the Catholic Church in running the school is winding down, an unpleasant, management-speak acting-principal manoeuvring to take over from an ailing incumbent. The pupils have modern concerns, whether that means video games, fast food, drugs, or in the case of one scientifically-inclined boy called Ruprecht, string theory. The story also has a harsh edge of realism, which makes Stalky and Co. at its most unpleasant, seem traditionally well-mannered by comparison.

Thinking about what I made of it, I kept recalling one particular scene where a group of boys discuss Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Less Travelled. Dennis, the class cynic, thinks it’s about less than orthodox sexual practices, which seems a crazy idea, but which actually makes perfect sense of the poem. I thought of Skippy Dies in this way – a book presenting life as a confusing mess, where any interpretation of its ‘meaning’ is going to make you sound like a schoolboy with mad ideas about the poems of Robert Frost. And yet… the mad meaning actually seems to make sense of what you’re reading. String theory boy, Ruprecht, is continually trying to come up with a scientific concept that explains the universe. If there is any theory explaining the Skippy Dies universe, it is a contradictory scheme that is complete nonsense but still, in an odd way, hangs together. Maybe if scientists do ever come up with a theory that explains the universe, it might be nice if it’s something similar, an explanation that leaves much to explain.

This is a big, sprawling, funny, tough book with lots of scientific and historical ideas colliding with doughnut eating and cynicism. It’s certainly fun to read, though some sections are distinctly discomforting. Overall, a traditional-feeling book with a modern message.

Published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, charting the development of Stephen Daedalus, an able and artistic boy living in early twentieth century Ireland.

Change in the boy’s life mirrors change in the wider world. First we see Stephen as a young child at home with his well-to-do parents, confused at the Christmas dinner table, as family and friends argue about religion and Irish nationalism. Stephen then has a Catholic schooling, where graphic descriptions of hell leave him terrified that his adolescent sexual adventures will consign him to an eternity of fiery punishment. He decides to follow Church rules to the letter, only to grow out of his religious phase, and begin studying science in Dublin. Growing out of science, he has lots of intellectual conversations with other students about definitions of beauty, and decides at the end of the book to leave Ireland and become a poet.

This individual path reflects the world generally, as society moves from faith in religious certainties, to confidence in science, to a modern situation where people are just not so sure of anything anymore.

Does all this make for a good book? Some people think it does. Others disagree, which is quite fitting really.

Personally, I found the book more interesting than enjoyable. During Stephen’s religious period, descriptions of hell’s trials went on for so long, I skimmed a few torments. Sometimes I found Stephen’s intellectual conversations tiresome – a youngster showing off. The portrayal of a student who likes the sound of their own voice was clearly intended – more down to earth fellow students puncturing Steven’s pomposities – but that didn’t make these sections any less wearying to read.

That all said, there were things I enjoyed and admired about the book. Some of the poetic prose was lovely – like memorable lines describing swallows forever working in the eaves of houses to make temporary nests. I was also fascinated by reflections on nationalism. People were busy seeking out clear national identities during Stephen’s young lifetime, maybe as a reaction to a growing loss of religious identity, which had given succour and a sense of belonging for millennia. As an Irish boy, Stephen remarks on expressing himself in English – a language not his own. But like his student mates, he often throws in bits of Latin to conversations, the language of the Roman Catholic Church. This quietly tells us that English people don’t speak a language of their own either. English, like nearly every European language, has a great debt to the ancient language of Italy. For all the sound and fury they generate, national certainties are as shaky as any other. And maybe that’s no bad thing, since rampant nationalism was a major factor in the world war raging as Portrait was published. Loss of dogmatism can make us safer rather than more vulnerable. As the Irish poet Yeats says in one of his most famous poems, ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

So, I can see why some readers gave this book five stars. I also sympathise with those who gave one. On a purely personal level I’m somewhere in the middle. I think James Joyce would think this a perfectly acceptable place to be

The House of Doors is a novel by Tan Twan Eng, published in 2023 and long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.

Lesley Hamlyn, a widow living alone in South Africa, takes delivery of an old book of Somerset Maugham short stories, called The Casuarina Tree. This sends Lesley back in her memories to 1921, when Maugham, a friend of her husband, stayed with the Hamlyns in Penang, Malaya. Travel for Maugham served as an escape from an unhappy marriage, a chance to conduct an affair with his secretary Gerald Haxton in relative safety, and an opportunity to gather material for his work. Lesley told the visiting writer lots of stories, from her own, and other people’s lives, some of which appeared in The Casuarina Tree.

A novel about a famous writer does naturally invite comparisons. Before reading The House of Doors, I read The Casuarina Tree. One of the most striking differences between the two was the ‘voice’ of the books. In The House of Doors, a character says something along the lines of ‘I remember as if it were yesterday’. And then we’re supposed to believe that the ensuing prose, with dialogue and fancy descriptive passages, is their spoken account. When people in The Casuarina Tree tell stories, they do so in their own voice, rather than that of a novelist. In comparison with Maugham’s straight forward style, The House of Doors felt a little forced.

Nevertheless there’s much in The House for Doors that I did enjoy. Let’s start with the setting of Penang, a fascinating, tolerant, easy-going city, where all kinds of people from Asia and Europe rub along together. Ironically, Penang, for a while at least, also provides safe harbour to Chinese revolutionaries who are uncomfortable with different people rubbing along together. They disapprove of the ‘Straits Chinese’ – Chinese migrants who have intermarried with people in the Malay Peninsula. Tolerant places can find themselves in the hazardous position of tolerating people who are temperamentally intolerant. One of the many stories Lesley tells Maugham involves a man who collects decorated local doors, which hang, disembodied from walls, in his personal door museum. If Penang has a door between itself and the outside world, then it’s this kind of suspended door, lovely to look at, but maybe not offering the sort of five lever mortice deadlock that an insurance company might require. Interestingly the owner of the door museum, a Maugham fan, decorates the actual front door of his eccentric door repository with Maugham’s personal symbol, placed at the beginning of his books. This is a hamsa, found on travels in Morocco by his father, a Moorish symbol to bring good luck and ward off the evil eye. The hamsa seeks security, and seeing it on the museum door had me thinking about the contradictions of security. A sanctuary is not necessarily found by slamming the door and bolting it shut. And yet, there are also risks in leaving the door open, giving entry to intolerant people who might endanger a tolerant place.

In the end, however, I think The House of Doors comes down on the side of doors which are appreciated for their beauty rather than for their reinforced hinges, spy holes and strike plates. I think if Maugham had been able to read The House of Doors, he would have enjoyed the fact that now his secrets could finally be fictionalised by another author, without risk of career-ending scandal and imprisonment.

Money, by Martin Amis, published in 1984, tells the story of John Self, a London advertising man, brought up partly in America, partly in a London pub called the Shakespeare. He’s a monstrous consumer of junk food, cigarettes, alcohol and pornography. His ad campaigns sell the virtues of products like the Rumpburger. John Self is a tough, nasty bloke who throws his weight and his money around. John, however, has one weakness. There is something in him that wants a finer, better life. This leaves him vulnerable to those who would exploit people who think there is a finer, better life to be had.

John has a fancy that his experience of growing up in the Shakespeare would make a good film. A New York film producer apparently believes in this dream. John Self is now as vulnerable as a young writer seeing an ad for a vanity publisher promising bestsellerdom for a fee.

John’s tough and diffident search for a better life is extremely funny. I tried to suppress the laughter because, firstly, I was laughing so often, I thought this might be unsettling for anyone close by. Secondly, a lot of the stuff making me laugh wasn’t actually a laughing matter. So I spent most of my time reading Money in a state of painful suppression, which risked triggering an asthma attack, or maybe causing damage to sinuses, or the inner ear.

When I wasn’t trying to stifle laughter, I was also enjoying the book on a thoughtful level, For all its downmarket strut and swagger, Money is an interesting reflection on the nature of culture. There’s energy in the low brow culture that John goes in for. This is lacking in the high arts to which his posh New York girlfriend, Martina, tries to introduce him. But even as John makes his effort at self improvement, we begin to feel that maybe the gulf he is trying to cross isn’t so wide. John grew up in the Shakespeare. If any cultural icon serves to remind us that high brow often starts out low brow, it is Shakespeare.

Martina has a German shepherd dog called Shadow, who she rescued from the streets. Shadow loves his cosy apartment, soft dog bed and kindly lady owner. But taking him for a walk is a risk, because this conflicted animal still wants to run back to his old haunts. John, during his time with Martina, is in exactly the same position. Even though he enjoys his comfortable life, visiting art galleries and opera houses, a crazy hankering for his former existence remains. This opposition makes the book. It is a cultural artefact that combines low and high, leaving me exhausted, a bit wheezy and morally perturbed in the ambivalent, in-between place where the best art has a chance of being made

The Casaurina Tree is a collection of Somerset Maugham short stories, published in 1926. They are all set in the 1920s, amongst the British community of what was then the Federated Malay States.

These stories are from a different time, when, particularly in British terms, the world was bigger. I wasn’t very well when I read them, not getting around much. This made it all the more pleasurable to find myself taking long sea voyages, to places where London newspapers are always six weeks out of date. And yet, ironically, the personalities inhabiting these stories have a characteristically small outlook, which strives to never leave England.

I think my favourite story was The Outstation. This little gem was about Mr Warburton, a peripheral member of an old English family, who in his youth frittered away an inheritance, keeping up appearances in card games, and making loans to hard up noblemen, knowing it was bad form to expect the money back. Accepting his losses like a good sport, and not having ever had a proper job, he decides to disappear into colonial administration. By the 1920s Warburton is sitting in his remote outstation in Malaya, fondly recalling a lost aristocratic England, and having to deal with Mr Cooper, who arrives to assist in the station’s duties. Cooper is a man who lacks refinement, but does his job well, a representative of brash, modern meritocracy.

And then we get the really interesting part. Cooper is harsh with his Malay staff. Warburton advises more respect. Things do not go well when Cooper ignores him. In this section of the story we see that Warburton has come to love Malaya and its people because Malay society is old, with long established family lines and traditions. It is actually similar to old, aristocratic, pre-First World War Britain in that respect. Warburton has gone to Malaya, and in doing so, he unexpectedly comes home. The story was a moving combination of leaving and homecoming, loss and recovery.

All the stories revolve around this sort of contradiction, with perhaps The Outstation, for me anyway, as the definitive expression of the theme. The stories are about a specific community, wider changes in British society and identity in the 1920s, and finally, meditations on the contradictory human desire to seek both change and familiarity.