How many war books do you read that make you think 'That makes Catch-22 look rubbish'?

That's how I felt at the end of this polychromatic, fractured, architectonic, sly, bleak and uproarious book. Seriously, it's a blast - in so many ways - but I can't recommend it to those who haven't firmed up their reading liver with less toxic material. It's aircraft carrier massive, it flits around locations, viewpoints and realities in the same chapter, and often the same paragraph, and it's reputed to contain about 400 characters, if you believe Wikipedia.

What's it about, you ask? Set in the twilight year of WWII and after, Gravity's Rainbow fires shards of events in all directions around the picaresque story of our nominal protagonist Slothrop, a likeable schmo whose casual seductions seem to match exactly where the deadly V-2 rocket will land. He ends up wandering through the post-war, post-everything Zone of middle europe, where the collapse of the war machine has led to a bizarre, anything-goes anarchy that's sexy and scary in equal measure. Meanwhile, the satanic warmongers use the alchemy of modern science to bring about ever more beautiful and deadly bombs, zooming across the continent in gravity's rainbow, the arc of the rocket. Like a bizarro Lord of the Rings, this is a futile quest for a device of ultimate power across a Germanic landscape, and somehow it captures moments of that epic's lonesome grandeur, as if seen in a fun-show mirror. (Not deliberately, of course. At least, I don't think so. But never assume They haven't been planning it all along!)

But Slothrop is just one thread of a narrative about a world in love with war, death and money. It's some kind of insane gazetteer of the post-war world, combining inch-perfect reconstructions of 40s events with freakshow surrealism and above all, paranoia. We've got a man disappearing down a toilet (the prototype for the Trainspotting sequence), a custard pie fight between people in an air balloon and a plane, endless showtunes, talking dogs, an immortal sentient lightbulb and black nazis. To scratch the bare surface.

The surrealism isn't just dropped in to spice up a dull moment, though. Every page is dripping with lust, madness, fragmentation and a kind of grim joy, until it feels like the world's best ghost train and rollercoaster ride. It's laugh-out-loud funny, intensely obscene and heartbreakingly cruel. And Thomas Pynchon can write a sentence like nobody else - a sentence whose meaning can rotate and flip around before you get to the end of it, a sentence which often does its best to rewire your brain in the reading.

It's also the complete template for Neal Stephenson's jawdropping Baroque Cycle - read this to find out where he gets his inspiration from and almost every page will have you pointing and nodding in an annoying, knowing way. Stephenson wears Pynchon's influence on his sleeve, so seeing some of the same locations and situations was illuminating.

In many ways, Gravity's Rainbow is the ultimate modern novel. It seems utterly annoying and contigent at first; but somewhere in the Zone you realise that someone - They or the author - is manipulating every arbitrary word, scene, transition and dream-state with virtuoso precision. And for an effect - an effect on you, the reader.

Go on, give it a go. Like all good Wonderlands, you'll come out a different person than you went in. And that's got to be a good thing... right?