ATD/Against the Day – the culmination of the inevitable

On it goes – my account (spoiler!) of what, mostly, on the surface of things actually takes place in this, the fourth massive chapter of Pynchon's “Against The Day”, the respective summaries of which you can revisit here (pt.1), here (pt.2) and here (pt.3).

Cyprian Latewood is being recruited as an agent for Whitehall (the British) by Derrick Theign. When sent to Vienna on some assignment, he encounters his old Cambridge co-alumni Yashmeen, who, as always, is under some carefully under-defined threat from multiple powers having her under surveillance and hoping to either learn from her about her father's whereabouts, or to make some use of her rumored psychic gifts. Cyprian then returns to Venice to meet up with Theign and ask him to help in an effort to rescue Yash.

Next, Scarsdale Vibe and Foley, Kit and Reef in the company of Ruperta Chirpington-Groin, as well as Dally and Hunter Panhallow, all come flocking into Venice. Kit and Reef with the help and local knowledge of Dally, prepare for an assassination attempt on Vibe - but have to helplessly stand by as they are being outdone and deprived of that very opportunity, when Anarchist-Futurist painter Tancredi takes the shot first, fails his target and is gunned down mercilessly instead. Consequentially, the two Traverse brothers have to flee and part ways, with Kit off to Trieste and on to Inner Asia as originally intended, thus leaving one life's love, Dahlia, behind.

Kit finally arrives in Kashgar just south of the Taklamakan, where he meets Colonel Auberon Halfcourt, Yashmeen's British foster-father, who in this time of conspicuous scheming and looming disaster, and not knowing anything about Shambala to begin with, is only bent on getting out of there to re-establish some sort of ties with his desired step-daughter Yashmeen. Accordingly, Kit is sent on to journey farther East and to probe into the matter of some mysterious “Coming of the Other”, which rumor has it holds some promise of deliverance from whatever collapse appears to be upon the Western Powers engaged in this region.

In order to do so, Kit sets out on his mission by passing through the Prophet's Gate and on to some spiritual journey quite un-American. Out there in the soul-forsaken wilderness and monotony of taiga, he and his party witness the Tunguska Event of 1908, that giant meteorite explosion in Siberia, whose overwhelming destructive force shatters and obliterates all thinkable logic and interest that sent him here in the first place, so that struck by riddance, he finally sees himself somehow, with no more goal to pursue, no plan to follow, set free at last.

The respective crews of Inconvenience and Bolschai'a Igra meet at the site of the Tunguska Event, Ground Zero of these pivotal times, to discuss the strange occurrence from which point onwards all history appears to be fractionally, decisively stained forever: an announcement of what is to befall mankind, reverberating through the lives of each we've come to know and the many unnamed.

Uproar on all fronts as Cyprian is ordered to go to Bosnia in the midst of the Balkan crisis gathering momentum, and to leave Yashmeen behind in Trieste, frighteningly prone to the doubtful protection his allegiance with Whitehall may provide, while the Anglo-Russian entente and Habsburgian opposition thereto cast an equivocal light at best (not just) on Theign's loyalties. As we see Cyps journeying to Sarajevo, Yash is having an affair with Vlado, the contact he left her with.

Cyprian on his mission to Bosnia, allegedly to rescue some spy from revolving and backfiring powers, learns that it is in fact his instead he better tried his hand at rescuing; in doing which, and barely surviving a life-threateningly harsh winter hiding in the mountains, he unexpectedly comes to grasp, if not fully understand, the marvel of simply being alive.

Reef encounters Yashmeen in Venice and saves her; though he is not able to do the same for Vlado, who gets captured by Theign and whoever his party are at that time. Setting the balance straight for once, Vlado's people take their revenge on Theign by eliminating, by torturing him to death.

Carnisalve in Venice: Reef, Yashmeen and Cyprian in living out the real, the “secret life of masks”, opt for carnal deliverance, even forgiveness imaginable at least, if not attainable – and there is comfort enough. Their threesome of mutual bliss however proves, as it must, to be temporary in nature as it cannot persist where (real) love comes into play, attaching Cyprian to Reef and getting Yashmeen pregnant.

Dahlia Rideout accompanies Hunter Panhallow to London, where she takes up her former modeling and stand-in routine, before being signed on by Lew Basnight to spy on her mentor, Clive Crouchmas, the prolific arms dealer involved with many Powers, notably the Germans. As he leaves for Constantinople to arrange for transactions pertaining to the delicate task of some obscure Q-weapon's acquisition from Japanese sources, Dally goes along in pursuit of her assigned mission. En route to the Bosphorus however she finds herself fatefully reunited with Kit again at Szeged, where they instantly decide to go into hiding together and lavishly spend their days with each other, thus the better staying out of the way of Crouchmas, who by then, having found out that he had been spied on by her all this time, seeks her mischief.

We see Frank recovering in Casas Grandes from a bullet wound incurred in some anti-revolutionist skirmish in Mexico, and encountering brief episodes of bliss while in the assembled company of Stray, Ewball Oust, El Espinero and a girl named Wren, soul-searching, as it turns out, soul-saving for his own sake and uncertain good.

In Yz-les-Bains the party of Reef, Cyprian and Yashmeen join a camp of international Anarchists and learn about their intention to prevent the Renfrew/Werfner-born idea of a poison-gas pipeline across the Balkans from materalizing, to prevent in effect an all-out European war from happening and servicing nothing but Capitalist interest. Setting out for the Balkan Peninsula on such mission, where but in the most pastoral of villages, the so-called “Village of Roses”, should they find the heinous installation, Riemann's Interdikt, in this twilight of European history? Find it alright, but it turns out the weapon is quite different in nature than previously assumed, more to do with some massive, lethally toxic emission of light, a literal “phosgene” barrier directed, aimed against nobody could tell whom exactly. In all this, Yashmeen gives birth to a baby girl, names her Ljubica.

Inevitably, with Europe's suicidal hour approaching, the four of them find themselves deeply immersed in its many shadows, as the first consequence of which Cyprian recognizes his last chance of transfiguration and decides to stay behind in the Balkan Range as a novice in an Orphic monastery, while secondly, the remaining family-to-be tries to thread their own path of rescue through the raging melee of that war just begun. Eventually they reach safety from the world that is in Corfu, stay the winter and on into spring, where presently, and with the “Compassionate”, the Chums as well looking on, they meet up with Auberon Halfcourt and his fiancée Umeki Tsurigane.

Stray, making her way back up north again into Colorado together with Ewball Oust, finds Reef's and Frank's and Kit's mother Mayva on housekeeping duty in the Oust mansion, the good caretaker spirit of that orderly, civilized family haven.

In Mexico, Frank gets entangled in the ongoing ebb and flow of re-revolutionist battlefield fortunes, engineering railroad bomb raids and counter-attacks, before leaving it all behind to head down south instead and join Günther von Quassel as chief engineer at his coffee plantation. But with political scales eventually tipping the wrong side, Frank gets out of Mexico and up back to Colorado, where he meets up with Ewb and Stray and her son Jesse in the coal miners' city of Walsenburg at last, still in it for the little man's cause.

After sitting through winter in a strikers' tent camp, besieged by militia and all brands of gunmen, they are finally forced to take the last possible exit, virtually, during the terminal raid on the camp, and they separate, performing the by now customary routine of putting on civilian life's hardship on the one hand, while Frank on the other, probably equally desperate side of history unfolding, takes to the path of resistance once more.

Back with the Chums of Chance, the crew of Inconvenience, we join their ascend-descend to Antichthon's surface, the Other World that has become – and a battlefield it is, scarred by the Great War's deadly trenches. Counterfly's escape (and that of all the other boys as well, of course) is to catch up with the Bolshai'a Igra now flying under a new name and on a different mission, and to assign themselves to do cargo and personnel airlifts when and where they are needed to bring some temporary relief.

Next, after some opposing winds fatefully gave rise to the opportunity for all of the crew to team up with a bunch of girl Aetheronauts, imparting them with a state of balance if not completeness, they arrive in the US. There, in L.A., Hollywood alright, Chick runs into his father “Dick”, and is introduced by him to no other than old Merle Rideout and his comrade-in-applied-science, Roswell, thus getting to know their quite extraordinary optical device or projector, which allows them to redeem the photographic still of any given picture to as much of the potential full of its life as the frame can hold: engineering a nexus of light and time!

Staying in the business, this time in L.A., Lew Basnight gets hired to look into some unresolved murder case, to which he applies Merle's and Roswell's peculiar time-picturing machine so he can meet with one of the presumed victims – only to learn that by settling in into the kind of second generation Anarchist refuge Hollywood has become, she has also taken the liberty of letting the system be as it is, no re-negotiating proper fate as far as she is concerned, but a crashing exit instead.
While on the opposite end of reality's spectrum, the homicidal perpetrator, Deuce Kindred, who has been living alongside his wife Lake in a state of subdued, of hushed panic, but on parallel tracks, is finally brought to justice by the police.

And now I shall leave it it there for you to digest or comment on as you wish, as this has turned out rather lengthy, I admit; and no more meta-fabulation for the time being. I will come back to this later as I get ready for the final stage in this reading journey that so far has been worth every minute of it! Hope you come back here, too.

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