I recently finished this historical novel by Neal Stephenson. I actually started it about a year ago, when I was exiled to a conference in Las Vegas, a place I loathe. I liked the book very much, but put it down when I got home for something easier. For this is not an easy book - none of Stephenson's books are. His prose is dense with ideas and imagery, and I often feel it takes every bit of intelligence I have just to follow him. But there's something rather wonderful about that, is there not?
Anyway, I recently took it up again, and finished it, and loved it. It is the first of three books in what Stephenson has chosen to call "the Baroque Cycle." After a pretty successful career writing edgy science fiction (Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age) Stephenson has turned his attention to the past. There was a transitional book called Cryptonomicon which probably deserves its own thread. If any of you have read Cryptonomicon, you will recognize some of the characters in Quicksilver: there are several Shaftoes - evidently ancestors of those in the later book. Enoch Root shows up at critical turning points. And there's a Daniel Waterhouse who is evidently the ancestor of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. Oh, and there is further mention of Qwghlm.
Quicksilver is about... the flowering of human understanding in the 17th century, and how what happened then continues to resonate in our world. Among, well, other things. Many of the characters are historical: Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibnitz, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Samuel Pepys, Louis XIV of France, Charles II of England, William of Orange, and many others. There are also plenty of fictional characters of all types.
I think I understand its genesis, at least in my own way. As a college student, studying calculus, I spent many hours meditating upon Isaac Newton - the man who, during a summer in the plague year of 1665, invented the system of mathematics I spent years learning. I cannot think of him without awe, but in truth the world has not produced many stranger men. It has been speculated that he was borderline autistic. He was an alchemist, a religious fanatic, and, eventually and rather bizarrely, the Master of the English Mint. He never married, and was never reported to have any sort of romance. He probably died a virgin. Yet this odd, troubled, lonely man was arguably the greatest physicist and mathematician who ever lived.
I think Stephenson has thought about Newton a great deal too. But he went further than I did -- this book is a meditation upon the whole age: its fancies, its follies, its greatness. And its adventures. For the world was still a very wild place in the 17th century. The book ranges from England and France, to Germany and Austria, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There is brief mention of the Barbary Pirates, of whom we see more in the second book in the cycle, The Confusion. Quicksilver covers, among other things: the Plague Year and the Great Fire in London; the flowering of modern business practices in Amsterdam and The Hague; the court of Louis XIV; and, as the brochures say, much, much more. There is much discussion of contemporary science, both its brilliance and its silliness. We also spend quite a bit of time with the "King of the Vagabonds" in pure adventure mode.
I think this is a work bordering on genius, and I recommend it without reservation. Well, not quite without reservation. It is not an easy read. The prose, though delightful, is dense - packed with ideas. Plan to furrow your brow from time to time if you decide to take it on.
I'll quote a few passages just to give the flavor of the writing.
From Quicksilver - a description of an alchemical meeting:
Smudged faces turned towards Daniel, sequins of perspiration tumbled from drooping eyebrows. He immediately recognized Robert Boyle and John Locke, Fellows of the Royal Society, but, too, there were certain gentlemen who tended to show up at their garden-gate at perverse hours, robed and hooded -- as if they really needed to conceal their identities when the King himself was practicing the Art at Whitehall. Viewing their petulant faces by firelight, Daniel wished they'd kept the hoods on. For, alas, they weren't Babylonian sorcerers or Jesuit warrior-priests or Druidic warlocks after all, but an unmatched set of small-town apothecaries, bored noblemen, and crack-pated geezers, with faces that were either too slack or too spasmodical. One of them was markedly young -- Daniel recognized him as Roger Comstock, he of the so-called Golden Comstocks, who'd been a scholar along with Daniel, Isaac, Upnor, Monmouth, and Jeffreys. Isaac had put Roger Comstock to work pumping a bellows, and the strain was showing on his face, but he was not about to complain. Too, there was a small and very trim raptor-faced man with white hair. Daniel recognized him as Monsieur LeFebure, the King's Chymist, who'd introduced John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey and others -- including the King himself -- to the Art, when they'd been exiled in St.-Germain during the Cromwell years.
But all of these were satellites, or (like Jupiter's moons) satellites of satellites. The Sun stood at a writing-desk in the center of the room, quill in hand, calmly making notations in a large, stained, yellowed Book. He was dressed in a long splotched smock with several holes burnt through it, though the hem of a scarlet robe could be seen hanging beneath. His head was encased in a sort of leather sack with a windowpane let into it so that he could see out. Where Daniel stood, that rectangle of glass happened to be reflecting an open furnace-door, so instead of the bulging eyes, he saw a brilliant sheet of streaming flame. A breathing-tube, comprising segments of hollow cane plumbed together by the small intestine of some beast, was sewn through the bag. Isaac had tossed it back over his shoulder. It dangled down his back and ran across the floor to Roger Comstock, who pumped fresh air into it with a bellows. So they must be doing something with mercury this evening. Isaac had observed that quicksilver, absorbed into his body, produced effects like those of coffee or tobacco, only more so, and so he used the breathing apparatus whenever he had begun to feel especially twitchy.
From Quicksilver - a conversation between Jack Shaftoe, the King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, the English (actually "Qwghlmian") girl he rescued from Turkish slavery:
"Oh, I'll hold up my end of the partnership. Years of dangling from hanged men's feet taught me the value of honest dealings." Jack stopped talking for a moment to stifle his mirth. Then, "Yes, the advantages of being on the road with Half-Cocked Jack are many: no man is my master. I have boots. A sword, axe, and horse, too. I cannot be but chaste. Secret smugglers' roads are all known to me. I know the zargon and the code-signs of Vagabonds, who, taken together, constitute a sort of (if I may speak poetically) network of information, spreading all over the world, functioning smoothly even when damaged, by which I may know which pays offer safe haven and passage, and which oppress wandering persons. You could do worse."
"Why then did you say I might be better off there?" Eliza said, nodding toward the great nunnery with its wings curling around toward the road like a beetle's tongs.
"Well, some would say I should've mentioned this to you earlier, but: you've taken up with a man who can be hanged on arrival in most jurisdictions."
"Ooh, you're an infamous criminal?"
"Only some places -- but that's not why."
"Why then?"
"I'm of a particular type. The Devil's Poor."
"Oh."
"Shames me to say it -- but when I was drunk and battle-flushed I showed you my other secret and so I've no way, I'm sure, to fall any lower in your esteem."
"What is the Devil's Poor? Are you a Satan-worshipper?"
"Only when I fall in among Satan-worshippers. Haw! No, it is an English expression. There are two kinds of poor -- God's and the Devil's. God's poor, such as widows, orphans, and recently escaped white slave-girls with pert arses, can and should be helped. Devil's poor are beyond help -- charity's wasted on 'em. The distinction 'tween the two categories is recognized in all civilized countries."
And this from The Confusion, just because I think it's a lovely anachronistic joke (probably helps to have been in one of those hellish corporate 'figure out a mission statement' sessions
):Has anyone read this book? I really need to talk about it. Will probably crosspost at HoF in hopes of finding another fan..."Then what do you mean when you say you understood his plan?"
"I understood his basic principle: that a group of slaves who, taken one by one, were assigned a very low value by the market, might yet be worth much when grouped together cleverly... " Vrej rolled up to his feet and grimaced into the sun. "The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh's plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts... "
Jack stared at him blankly.
"It sounds brilliant in Armenian." Vrej sighed.
I really enjoyed Snowcrash - it was a wild ride. I look forward to reading this book and will let you know when I'm done with it.
But his enthusiasm is infectious, and once I really got into the book I found I enjoyed it very much.
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