When "A screaming comes across the sky" on the first page of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the V-2 rocket bombing of World War II London sets forth as much novelistic intrigue and ambiguity as it does interwoven, encyclopedic narratives and a heady mix of all things apocalyptic, paranoiac and pop-cultural. Will the deadly barrage "come in darkness, or will it bring its own light?"
The open-ended and enigmatic conclusion of the novel hints that the "angel of death" and utter annihilation may actually signal some kind of divine salvation, bearing out motifs of regeneration, cyclical time and metamorphic accord with a "Soul in ev'ry stone." Indeed, noted in the epigraph to part one of the novel is Werner Von Braun's belief in the continuity of spiritual existence after death: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation."
The rainbow connection in Europe Central,the epic, fever-dream fusion of fiction and fact by the prolific and Pynchon-esque William T. Vollmann, takes on near-monochromatic hues and arcs closer to earth with its own multi-layered history-based complexity in plot and themes. Also centering around events of World War II, this 2005 National Book Award winner focuses on some figures, — famous, infamous, unknown and mythic — surrounding the authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. But because "color had yet to enter the world," we'll "tell our tale in gray," and this time it's personal: One character "dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming."
There's no transformative pot of gold at the end of this ear-piercing, vapor-trail rainbow, though, and no souls in any stone as two lovers amid the Armageddon (in a dream about a film that seems to parallel Gravity's concluding movie-house setting) come together for the last time as "their mouths both opened and then those two pale, open-mouthed Russian corpses formed their own exclusive society on a street corner which shone brilliant silver with rain."
The tenaciously ambitious and prodigious Vollmann has never been one to appease and pacify in his more than a dozen novels, essays and on-the-spot journalistic forays, all culled from whirlwind detours of duty and variegated labors of love and deviance. From his standing as an under-the-radar cult figure and gadfly on the wall, to more widely recognized critical acclaim, Vollmann has demonstrated steadfast dedication to professional craft and personal quirks: smoking crack for research; consorting with junkies, terrorists and prostitutes; roughing it in Afghanistan in 1982 to fight the Soviets; and in his off-hours at his San Francisco computer programming job, surviving on candy bars and sleeping under his desk while writing his 1987 debut novel, a phantasmagoric millenarian allegory.
Among his most audacious works are the Seven Dreams series of novels, comprising a "symbolic history" of North America, and The Royal Family (2000), a harrowing gumshoe tale of sordid sorts set amid the denizens and dregs of San Francisco, the who-done-it inspired by a who's-who of such disparate influences as Ovid, Dante and Melville. The nonfiction Rising Up and Rising Down is Vollmann's doorstop magnum opus, an elaborate and exhaustive seven-volume analysis and history of human violence.
Bringing similar historical insight in the endeavor to "invade the meaning of Europe," Vollmann, calls to mind Pynchon's view of history (from Mason and Dixon) as a "great disorderly tangle of lines." He attempts and largely succeeds in Europe Central in synthesizing and reconciling varied factual, cultural and imaginative strands. Against the backdrop of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 German advance into Russia, and the eventual German defeat at Stalingrad, Vollmann presents 36 intertwined paired narratives reflecting the impulses and actions of an assortment of German and Russian military, diplomatic, and artistic characters.
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