Thomas Pynchon · 1973 · thriller

Thomas Pynchon's dense, dazzling 1973 novel of the last months of the Second World War and the first months of the peace, built around the German V-2 rocket. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, whose childhood conditioning has left his body strangely attuned to the falling rockets, is drawn from bombarded London to a casino on the Riviera, then AWOL through Switzerland and into the Zone, the shattered ruin of occupied Germany, chasing the secret of a rocket numbered 00000. The second half of his search is Baltic: down the Oder aboard the yacht Anubis, ashore at Swinemunde, over to the abandoned test stands at Peenemunde and back, then west along the coast on foot while he thins and scatters - Mondaugen's Law, personal density directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. Paranoid, obscene, encyclopaedic and very funny, it follows him across the map until he simply comes apart, scattered into the noise of history.

1. 1
   London

   Part One, and the rockets falling on a city that cannot hear them coming - the V-2 arrives before its own noise. Slothrop keeps a map of his conquests across London; PISCES, at the White Visitation, notices that every star on it precedes a rocket strike at the same spot by a few days. Nobody can say which way the causality runs, and the whole novel unfolds out of that question.

2. 2
   The Riviera

   The Casino Hermann Goering, still carrying the Reichsmarschall's name because the liberators have not got round to changing the sign. Pynchon puts it on the French Riviera and never names the town; readers usually place it at Monaco, a few miles east of this pin. Slothrop thinks he is on furlough. He is being watched, an octopus called Grigori is set on Katje so that he can rescue her, and every object in his hotel room is being used for something. Different.

3. 3
   Zurich

   AWOL and running. In neutral Switzerland Slothrop works the espionage cafes for a line on Imipolex G, the mystery polymer of his own conditioning, and buys his way toward the Zone. Behind him his file is being closed and his handlers are losing interest - which is its own kind of freedom, and its own kind of erasure.

4. 4
   Nordhausen

   The Mittelwerk, driven into the Kohnstein - the underground factory where the V-2s were assembled by slave labour from Dora, and where the rocket stops being a dream of space and becomes a thing built by dying men. Slothrop goes in as Ian Scuffling, English journalist, and comes out with the shape of the Schwarzgerat and Major Marvy on his tail.

5. 5
   Berlin

   The ruined capital under four flags, with Potsdam going on across the water and Slothrop crossing the rubble as Rocketman, in a cape and a helmet made from a rocket nose cone, to dig up a stash of hashish from beneath the Chicago Bar. Here he takes up with Margherita Erdmann and boards the Anubis on the Spree-Oder canal - east along the Spree through Koepenick, through the cut to Fuerstenwalde and Muellrose, onto the Oder at Eisenhuettenstadt, and then the long haul downriver north.

6. 6
   Swinemunde / Swinoujscie

   The port at the mouth of the Swine, and the hinge of the novel's whole Baltic section. The Anubis comes down the Oder into the Oder Haff in a storm; Slothrop, who has lost Bianca and understood at last that his quest was handed to him rather than chosen, goes over the side into the water. Frau Gnahb and her boy Otto fish him out and land him here, where he meets Gerhardt von Goll - der Springer - who offers to sell him the S-Gerat for ten thousand pounds. He comes back through this port twice more.

7. 7
   Peenemunde

   From the mouth of the Swine to the mouth of the Peene - the Army Research Centre at the northern tip of Usedom where the rocket was born, now fallen, occupied and picked over. Frau Gnahb takes the boat north out of the Swina, west along the seaward shore of Usedom and round the Peenemunde Haken, then south down the Peenestrom to come at the Peene mouth from the west - the only way in. Slothrop and Klaus Narrisch walk the ruined test stands on a sleepy summer evening; no two people have been so ill-equipped to approach a Holy Centre. The raid goes wrong, Narrisch stays behind to hold off the Russians, and Slothrop leaves in Tchitcherine's stolen uniform.

8. 8
   Stralsund

   Back to Swinemunde, then the Anubis is rammed and boarded at sea - and below decks, in the dark, Slothrop is beaten by someone he never sees and finds Bianca's body. Frau Gnahb puts him ashore at Stralsund and he walks off into the night alone. From here he is no longer chasing anything.

9. 9
   Rostock

   He wakes in Rostock still wearing the stolen Russian outfit, roughly eighty kilometres west of where the boat left him, dreaming of Tantivy and of his ancestor William Slothrop. The urgency is gone; what is left is the wish to start over. Mondaugen's Law is doing its work on him and he is beginning to thin.

10. 10
    Cuxhaven

    The last fixed point. West past a coastal town near Wismar and over the Elbe to the estuary where the British are firing captured V-2s in Operation Backfire, and where von Goll's forged discharge papers are supposed to be waiting. They are not what saves him, because nothing does: somewhere along this coast Slothrop stops being a character and becomes a scattering, last glimpsed as a crossroads, a harmonica in a stream, a face on an album cover.