I first started reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece, while living temporarily in Frankfurt airport. I was 21; I’d been working in Germany for the summer, then taken a week’s holiday in Prague, returning from which I’d managed to miss my plane home. A kindly travel agent found a seat for free on a flight the following week, so I spent the intervening time eating at the airport McDonald’s, washing in the airport bathroom, and sleeping as best I could on the uncomfortable plastic seats, while bombarded every 30 seconds with booming announcements auf Deutsch from the airport PA.  

This, of course, was a not appropriate place to begin reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which opens in London in the last days of World War Two as the city is being hammered by German V-2 rockets. ‘A screaming comes across the sky’ is the famous opening sentence. ‘It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.’ The intelligence services (the book is thronged with spies and agents of various kinds) have discovered a mysterious link between the rocket strikes and the sexual misadventures of an American GI, the hapless Tyrone Slothrop, who soon finds himself sent to the chaotic ‘Zone’ that is postwar Europe on the trail of a V-2 that’s been mysteriously altered. Who’s sent him, and why, also remain mysterious – you may be discerning a pattern here. Discerning patterns is, in part, what the novel is about: Slothrop and others’ increasingly desperate, and in the end doomed, attempts to make sense of a reality that has been smashed to pieces by the horrors of the war.  

With a cast of hundreds, including a giant octopus and a troupe of escaped chimpanzees, and written as a kind of prose-poem that shifts in register from pastoral to pulp, the book is impossible to summarise. Reading it for the first time I found myself unable to understand more than a third of it, and re-reading it now, aged 48, I’m not sure I understand much more. Pynchon’s knowledge and deployment of everything from Pavlovian psychology to German expressionist cinema to genocide in Africa is astonishing, but hard to keep up with. Still, I can see why the book had such a huge impact on me. Sentence to sentence, the writing is almost impossibly gorgeous. While he’s best known for his analysis of technology, Pynchon’s descriptions of the natural world – almost annihilated in the war – are heartbreaking. Also, he’s funny – really funny. Also, and this was what really got me, he’s angry. His depiction of the war can be read as an allegory of American atrocities in Vietnam, and his vision of a future where technology is used to control, subdue or monetise every element of human experience feels more prescient every day.  

There is no love in this book – that’s what struck me this time around. I found myself wondering if the many depictions of cruelty, violence, misogyny were really necessary, if Pynchon’s vision was bleaker than it needed to be. But then you look at the news, you know? Climate change, the capture of the state by corporate interests, tech billionaires turning whole populations into lab rats? And you start to think that the real difficulty of this famously difficult novel may, after all, be that Pynchon saw it coming. 

This article was first published in the Irish Independent