23-10-2013, 09:14 PM
'Bleeding Edge' has been dismissed by many reviewers either for Pynchon being Pynchon (flat characters, wisecracking, silly songs, wacky jokes etc.) or for being 'Pynchon lite.' Me, I love it. Nobody writes like that. As usual, there is a healthy dose of references to deep politics. As the novel is set in Spring to Fall 2001, 9/11 theories and references to upcoming business opportunities in the Middle East come into play after a while (to be precise: references to upcoming business opportunities in the Middle East come into play well before the towers fall). As I do not have the time to analyse and put into narrative context, I will just give you a few observations and quotes in order to hopefully whet your appetite (I'll leave 9/11 out, because there is just too much here, fictional, unsupported and plausible): The Brock Vond-like villain Nicholas Windust is not FBI. "Something worse, if possible. (...) Windust has been inthere from the jump, a field operative whose first recorded job, as an entry-level gofer, was in Santiago, Chile, on 11 September 1973, spotting for the planes that bombed the presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende." (BE, 108) Interestingly, unlike Brock Vond, Windust turns out not to be beyond redemption after all. The old lefty March, as usual with Pynchon a sympathetic character, offers with regard to the Montauk Project: "I see my share of conspiracy theories, some are patently bullshit, some I want to believe so much I have to be careful, others are inescapable even if I wanted to escape." (BE, 117) I'm thinking about using that quote for my signature around these parts... Later on, our heroine Maxine with the help of a young hacker (and foot fetishist, this being a Pynchon novel) surfs the Deep Web. There she enters an old situation room from the Cold War, probably situated at Montauk Airforce Station. The bird avatar of the colonel on duty explains some things to the visitors: "There is a terrible prison, most informants believe it's located here in the U.S., though we also have Russian input comparing it unfavourably to the worst parts of the gulag. With classic Russian reluctance they will not name it. Wherever it is, brutal is too kind a description. They kill you but keep you alive. Mercy is unknown. It's supposed to be a kind of boot camp for military time travelers. (...) Given the lengthy schooling, the program prefers to recruit children by kidnapping them. Boys, typically. They are taken without consent and systematically rewired. Assigned to secret cadres to be sent on government missions back and forth in Time, under orders to create alternative histories which will benefit the higher levels of command who have sent them out. They need to be prepared for the extreme vigours of the job. They ares starved, beaten, sodomized, operated on without anesthetic. They will never see their family or friends again. If by accident this should ever happen, during an assignment or simply as a contingency of the day, thir standing orders are immediately to kill anyone who recognizes them. Standard strategies for deflecting public attention are considered to be in effect. Rapture by UFOs, disappearance into the correctional system, MKUltra-type programs have all been proven useful as diversionary narratives..." Wow. Preston Nichols/Peter Moon, no? Later on Maxine in some secret corridor leading to the Montauk facilities encounters a creature which just might be one of those time-travelling child assassins... The novel being occupied very much with the internet and surveillance, PROMIS turns up two times, as I seem to remember but cannot find right now. And a lot else: Guatemala 1982, TWA flight 800, DARPANET as part of CoG planning during the Cold War... Ralf P.S. I have to finish this right now. How do I put line breaks in my postings?