Times Stuffy thought he wasn't here anymore — that they really did get him when they blew up the truck. Kept saying things like 'Maybe I'm a ghost now and I'm haunting you.'

Dodging fate and paying for it, if not in this world then in the next one, if not you then your shadow, your shade. Putting one in mind of the dead-alive Thanatoids in Vineland, and generally the state of insubstantiality, of dissolving into history, as many a Pynchonian hero has been known to do (anyone seen Slothrop lately?) Pynch even spells it out for those of us too slow to have uptaken it from his previous eight novels when he has Federal Agent T.P. (geddit?) O'Grizbee describe U-13, patrolling 1932 Lake Michigan and bothering many a hooch-swigging ice-fisher:

...a rogue Austro-Hungarian U-boat that refused to surrender, making it more than just a submarine but also an outward and visible expression of paths not taken, personal and historical...

Pynchon's a mystery novelist and also a historical one. Mystorical and hysterical. Historic and mystic. Whatever. History for him is a steady winnowing of possibilities, a reaper swathing through a hayfield of might-have-beens, new buds meanwhile visible on all sides. He's interested in how and why each stalk was cut, how each might have grown, and what might sprout from the stubble. Isn't this how you think about the past too, in terms of what didn't happen, what could have transpired — make-believe? Reading Pynchon isn't like reading Dickens or Eliot because their fictions are about closing off, shutting down timelines, arriving at an inevitable terminus; their novels are like pinball machines, only one ultimate destination. Pynchon's are like upside-down, anti-gravity pinball machines. But just like regular pinball, it's a game of no return:

Hicks: "Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything's back to normal."

"Oh, dear," Pips making with an eyebrow, "do you really not know? 'Normal'? Things will never go back to the way they were, it'll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, 'interesting.'"

Hicks there conversing with a lady spy on a transoceanic liner. The ocean, especially the Atlantic, is an engulfing spongy sea of Pynchonian uncertainty. It's a zone between old and new worlds, a place where anything goes and the cocktails are a midatlantic melange (Jack Roses with calvados), not the pour you're used to in Bristol or Boston. TP sailed the seas of course — I think of him up in the rigging, shaping his mouth to make weird sounds as the wind laps his lips — and the sea, and the ships that ply it, are prime Pynchonian plot places. U-13 isn't the only ghost-ship in this book; the liner Hicks is shanghaied onto also has supernatural qualities, steadily gaining passengers mid-crossing, generally behaving like a drifting, floating asylum:

"This wasn't always a passenger liner," Alf doesn't exactly explain, "converted during the War to a hospital ship ... Still populated by casualties physical and psychical and those in whose care they were conveyed ... unquiet stowaways with broken odds and ends of unfinished business from the War, common to all being a hope no longer quite sure and certain that injustices would be addressed and all come right in the end."

Pynchon like Conrad sees ships as embodied history, as stories cutting a wake through a murky, treacherous reality.

I'll break here to say TP's dad joke/bad pun game is stronger than ever. "Oat cuisine", a "20,000 leagues under the sea" aquatic bowling joke, a Russian double agent with the Anglophilic name Vassily Midoff... combine that with the 30's argot where everyone's a "tomato" and you get lovely dumbness or dumb loveliness like Terike instructing Hicks in Hungarian a couple pages before the end:

"Here, a tomato. Say 'paradicsom.'"
"Which one, you or it?"

I dug this, too, in the same vein as the invention of the pizza in Mason & Dixon, Bruno and Daphne visiting a hip new Budapest nightspot:

Each table here has a small circular cathode-ray tube or television screen set flush in the tabletop, throbbing more than flickering with shaggy images of about 100 lines' resolution. Viewers sometimes do not agree on the nature of the image. Pareidolia is common. You look down into it, like a crystal gazer, and faces loom unbidden. Numbered push-button switches allow you to connect to any other table in the place and watch each other as you chat.

"The future of flirtation ... here they call it Gesichtsröhre, or 'FaceTube.'"

So Pynchon's still Pynchonning, which seems to have disappointed some readers who were maybe hoping he'd turn into Jonathan Franzen or someone and produce a big novelistic denunciation of contemporary American fascism. But Pynch hasn't spent the best part of the American Century immersing himself in American psychoses and the American subconscious for nothing. He knows fascism of the contemporary American kind isn't so different from the 1930's Euro kind, which also came in an American flavour, one distilled from the anti-labour movement of the 19th century into the applejack of unfettered capitalism that was the Elect's principal elixir through the 20th and ultimately landed us in this mess. In fact I can't think of a better setting for a novel of our times than the 1930's. In the words of one Brit spy:

"It's a strange time we're in just now," Alf reflects, "one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact ... many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved."

And in the words of Nigel Trevelyan, also a Brit spy (the Pynchonverse has been a Brit-spy-free zone since Against the Day so he's making up for lost time here):

"...now'd be the time to start making arrangements — exit routes, dummy post office boxes like those already in Lisbon and Shanghai, secure places to sleep...

"Not that there's a hell of a lot of money available for this, nobody in London, Washington, anyplace helpful is willing to step an inch out of line."

Time to get away. And that's another thing I've just realised about Pynchon's characters — they're never at home, all of them are drifters, refugees, travelers whose destinations and "secure places to sleep" are ever receding or changing, dissolving like mirages or flooded or covered by dunes. He's a thoroughly undomestic writer, now writing in a time of generational disinheritance economic and political, facetube-induced atomisation and Americans dreaming of New Zealand, Portuguese, even Canadian visas. As Hicks's assignments pile up and supersede one another, each ticket shadowier than the one before, he finds himself lost in a Europe that's maybe in the process of switching fates with America... it's far from clear (what isn't?), but it seems this quintessential Pynchonian hero has in fact gotten away from some Planet of the Apes — or Atlantean, or Ozymandian, at least — American apocalypse:

Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field. Nothing else around for uncounted miles of ocean, only the lofty figure, wind, weather, ocean. Her facial expression, hair and brow at their forbidding height undefined, an openwork visor of some darkly corroded metal protecting, some say hiding, her identity, though now and then aircraft at this altitude have reported glimpses of something like a face behind the mask, more specific and somehow more familiar than faces commonly found on public statuary, keeping a direct gaze at the viewer, as if she's just about to speak. Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.

Is this vatic image the upshot of the military-industrial cheese-coup alluded to in the last few pages? Seems so, coming penultimate to Skeet's last dispatch from America and maybe Pynchon's last from the American century. Is it too late for us all to learn Esperanto and be pals? From Byron the Bulb to la lampo plej malbongusto. Shadow Ticket is as contemporary and conclusive as it's possible for a novel to be these days.