castle of illusion

I hesitated between this novel, V, and The Crying of Lot 49 when allotting space to Pynchon. A reading of Paul Fussell’s fine book The Great War and Modern Memory convinced me that, while the others are brilliant higher games, this work, not as yet widely understood, has a gravity more compelling than the rainbow technique (high colour, symbolism, prose tricks) would seem to imply. The subject of the novel is clearly the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) of the Second World War, housed, as I remember, at 62-64 Baker Street, but here transferred to a former mental hospital on the south-east coast called The White Visitation. To this parodic SOE an American lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, is assigned in 1944, his task being to learn to predict the dispersal pattern of the V-2 missiles aimed by the Germans at London. The work brings him into contact with Brigadier Ernest Pudding, the commander of the unit (his name echoes that of the head of SOE — Brigadier Colin Gubbins, MC) and a senile veteran of the Great War. He still lives that war, reminiscing about “the coal boxes in the sky coming straight down on you with a roar… the drumfire so milky and luminous on his birthday night… what Haig, in the richness of his wit, once said at mess about Lieutenant Sassoon’s refusal to fight… the mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-crumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenches and shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions…”. Pudding engages in fortnightly secret rituals with a Dutch girl attached to the unit, Katje Borgesius, who also plays the allegorical role of “Mistress of the Night”. These rituals are humiliating and involve coprophagy; classic pornography provides the only possible metaphors for the obscenity of war. This is what the novel is about. Fiction allows at last what was forbidden to the original suffering poets and novelists of 1914-18 — the utmost in obscene description, the limit of masochistic pornography. If Gravity’s Rainbow is often nauseating it is in a good cause. This is the war book to end them all. (from Anthony Burgess’ 99 Novels)