V. to C

The latest novel by the British writer and conceptual artist Tom McCarthy, short-listed for the Booker Man Prize, is out today in the U.S. (I like the U.K. cover design, above, much more than the groovier-looking Knopf design). I'm looking forward to finding out if it's something more than the most skillful pastiche of Pynchon ever committed to paper, which is what Jenny Turner’s review in the LRB made it sound like:

Through Serge’s eyes, the Royal Flying Corps is basically a death cult and all the more glorious for it, with the height, the explosions, the machinery, the proximity of death: ‘I liked it a lot,’ he says, after his first trip airborne. ‘It was just right … just how things should be.’ From the air, he can see the world as ideally flat, map-like,

a mandala of small roads and pathways, at least half of them unusable, criss-crossing and looping over open ground; then rows of empty trenches – last month’s, or last year’s, the year before’s; more open ground; more tracks … a mesh of interlocking trenches … The pockmarked village, road and woods.

It’s in the war, in short, that Serge finds himself, his vocation, as a necronaut, surfing death, reading Hölderlin, popping heroin, wearing a pair of women’s silk stockings over his face: a Modernist who is also ancient, a beautiful being who is also absurd, a creature of technology who also worships at the oldest shrines. ‘Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things.’ Euphoric, exalted, off his face, he doesn’t think he’s killing people but ‘quickening … bringing to life’; he dreams of ‘the idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts’, ‘like the Eiffel Tower, a pylon animating the whole world’.

Pynchon's reputation has undergone a palpable deflation in recent years, but to borrow from Flannery O’Connor, nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Long Island Limited is roaring down.