I'm going to go and keep this one very short. I did not like reading this book at all and I want to talk about it even less. But as I am pretty compulsive, I need to write down something on it, even if it's just a little bit. and so, naturally, as these things go, the page blooms words.
Over the past few weeks I wrote down a whole hell of a lot on Gravity's Rainbow, most of it very negative, and I've deleted most all of it already, as I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not someone who can talk about it for a few reasons:
I don't have anywhere near enough background on the facts in the book, how much of them are true and how much of them are not. Regardless, there are a staggering amount of anachronisms in the book, or so it seems to me, most of them involving drugs and drug-use during the second World War, a product of the time, and apparently also the drug trance, in which it was written.
I am not a native English speaker, so when I'm uncertain about something I tend to give whatever I'm reading the benefit of the doubt, and despite that I think that to do so for this book would be likewise wrong. I also think it's more than likely that some of the book's much lauded humor went over my head or just came across as crass to me, precisely because of this lacking background of native English. It's also obviously dated and will be more so in time.
I tend to read books for themes and though there were certainly some of those that were interesting to me, the esoteric, the mysticism and the metaphysics especially were fascinating, pretty much all of the rest of them were very much not. There's a huge focus on male genitalia and though it's easy to see why this is, the iconic shape of the rocket is very much a phallic one, it can be overwhelming. There is a crazy amount of sex in this book, most of it very explicit, some of it flat-out obscene, and there were a few that just made me upset with the book as a whole, to such an extent that my stance of giving every book I care to dedicate my time to a fair review, or even just to give my take on it, became impossible.
Simply put, I don't want to talk about it. And yet, here we are.
The central plot points hinge on the creation of secret rockets by the Germans, a secret British agency trying to find them, and one man's strange ability to seemingly predict where a rocket will strike through means of sexual climax.
There are four parts to the book, and the above premise seems to go out the window by the third. But then, the premise is mine, my attempt to describe the entire plot in as little lines and time as possible, and though these things are there, to dilute the novel so would be wrong.
Above was also the first time I termed the book a 'novel', and I've avoided doing so because it is also wrong. This is not a novel, and is instead a setting, a set of themes interweaving in and around characters interacting, conflicting and generally, living forwards (most of them). None of it is straight, not the progression, not the truths, not the ending, not anything. Characters inhabit multiple names, seemingly. Characters see angels, ghosts and signs, and all kinds of supernatural trappings are spread throughout the story. Technology rears its head and every reviewer and essayist will espouse the writer's virtues in getting it down so truthfully, and so correct, but, really, it doesn't matter in my opinion, the truth is not something to be sought after in a book like this, and that is despite my worry at the blatant misrepresentation of a drug culture 80 years gone. The first seems pointless, but it's the latter that sticks in my throat, as bizarrely as it distorts landscape, characters and events into something really quite unlikely. The world is a different place under chemicals.
My main problem is that for all the praise the book deserves, there is just so much more stick that it also deserves, which it just doesn't seem to get.
My main impression is that Gravity's Rainbow is quite a vulgar reading experience. My second is that it fully deserves a second read.
