Shadow Ticket - Thomas Pynchon

 I've read Pynchon over the years.   The Crying of Lot 49 is reviewed on this blog, but I also read Mason & Dixon when it first came out and really enjoyed it.   Shadow Ticket is more Lot 49 than Mason & Dixon, but we've got to remember Pynchon was in his late eighties when he wrote it, and it's a lot better than many late books by other authors who lived nowhere near so long.   It may have been, and probably was, worked on over a long period; I notice, for example, that it links to promotional material that Pynchon wrote for Against the Day twenty years earler, though little resemblance to Against the Day (we are talking Pynchon the prankster, after all).   Even so, Shadow Ticket seems remarkably fresh and bursting with ideas.

The plot is both simple and bizarre.   The year is 1932.   Private gumshoe and former strikebreaker Hicks McTaggart is on the trail of the daughter of the notorious Al Capone of Milwaukee Cheese (the Chicago Al Capone of Hooch being currently incarcerated).   The trail leads him to the Great Lakes and the new-fledged Balkan states which he finds to be in the early stages of Nazification.   Along the way he encounters masters of Swing, auto-gyros, spies and spymasters, and masters of apports and asports.

Most of the book is conducted in hip dialogue of the era, which manages to be cool and quaint at the same time.   As always with Pynchon, he is at his best when he gives his fancy free rein.   I especially enjoyed his account, late on, of the endless motorcycle race going on around Hungary.   The down side is that some manic interludes don't appeal so much.   It's a personal thing.   Pynchon provides the sideshows and we all drift towards our favourites.

Overall, a remarkable achievement some of which is likely to take up permanent lodging in my brainbank.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

A phantasmagorical medley of paranoia, conspiracy and latent psychodelia, Pynchon's second novel appeared in 1966. It is of its time in that it references the West Coast music scene, specifically of San Francisco, that was to erupt in 1967 and the widespread use of hallucinogens. At its core it has a much deeper timeline, dating all the way back to Thirteenth Century Europe where the German princelings of Thurn und Taxis built a staggering fortune on the back of the first transnational postal service. This went underground after the Thirty Years War and now services only syndicalists and anarchists. It's that peculiarly American obsession, postal fraud, and Oedipa, trying to observe her duties as executor of the will of her onetime lover Pierce Inverarity, sees its symbol of a muted post horn everywhere. Ingeniously the Tristero post boxes are marked W.A.S.T.E.

For such a short novel, only 142 pages in this edition, there's an awful lot of story and ideas. The ending is awkward. We find out what W.A.S.T.E. stands , what Lot 47 is and how come it is crying or cried, but really you get the impression that Pynchon has simply run out of steam. It's a lot of fun, though, and I'm really pleased I finally got round to reading it.

Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders

Well, what can I say? Where do I start? Lincoln in the Bardo is, quite simply, the most extraordinary book I have read in years. It is experimental, existential and yet profoundly moving. It is, on the face of it, bat-shit-crazy, and yet it never once loses its humanity.

I am kicking myself for not realising up front what the Bardo is. I thought it was perhaps a district in Washington. Obviously, it is Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan version of the Elysian Fields, where the dead go initially, before moving on to an even higher plane. As a writer on the Elysian conversations of Eric Linklater and a researcher into the early work of Ted Hughes, who was deeply immersed in Bardo-based projects which never saw the light of day, I consider myself duly abashed.


We enter the Bardo through many pages of quotations, which as far as I know are genuine, from accounts of the death of 11-year-old Willie Lincoln, son of the President and possibly the first presidential child to die in the White House. These then segue into snatches of speech from people who seem to have nothing whatever to do with Willy or Abe - Roger Bevins III, Hans Vollman and the Reverend Everly Thomas, who we come to realise are our guides to this entry level of the afterlife. They are spirits and make no physical concessions to their former corporeality. Mr Bevins has hundreds of hands and eyes, Mr Vollman a prodigious member. They have come across the new arrival and don't know how to help. Children normally pass through this stage quickly but something is keeping Willie back.


That something is his father, the President the psychopomps have never heard of, already weighed down by the horrors of a civil war they cannot imagine. He comes to Willie's tomb, takes out the body and cuddles it, unaware that everything he loved about his son is looking on. It is young Willie who in the end comforts his father and persuades the spirits of the Bardo (of whom we encounter dozens) to accept what they have thus far been unable to accept - their death. It's a beautiful touch - Saunders creates euphemisms for the Bardo like sick-box instead of coffin. The book ends in a blaze of multiple matterlightblooming phenomena as the Bardo depopulates.


It sounds ridiculous - it looks impossible on the page, with chapters as short as a single line and all the conversation laid out like quotations and no non-speech at all. And yet it works beautifully. Saunders is a well-respected essayist and short story writer but, amazingly, Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel. Turns out it was well worth waiting for. It's an instant classic of modern American fiction, comfortably up there with Pynchon and Salinger and Jonathan Safran Foer.