ABSTRACT
Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel of such vastness and range that it defies — with a determination unusual even in this age of ‘difficult’ books — any summary. There is a good deal of well-informed technological reference in the book — inserted not gratuitously but to demonstrate how technology has created its own kind of people with their own kind of conscious. Gravity’s Rainbow does indeed have a recognizable historical setting. The ‘Rainbow’ inevitably triggers reminiscences of the rainbow in Genesis, which was God’s covenant to Noah ‘and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth’ that there would be no more destruction on the earth. Gravity, by contrast, is that law by which all things — ‘and all flesh that is upon the earth’ — are finally, inexorably, drawn back down and into the earth: an absolutely neutral promise that all living things will die.
