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Where to start? Funnily enough, that
is the same quandary that Neal Stephenson must have had. This is the Neal
Stephenson, SF author who has written some excellent SF novels such as
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and modern novels such as
Zodiac & Cryptonomicon. The fact that I mention them, and have
reviewed them in earlier issues of this august tome, will indicate to the
reader that I enjoy Neal’s work immensely, and I looked forward with a
certain amount of eagerness to his latest work(s). As he mentions in the
Acknowledgements at the end of Volume 3 of the Baroque Cycle, this is a 3000
page novel which is split into 8 ‘books’ over the three volumes 1 -
Quicksilver, 2 - The Confusion and 3 - The System of the World. The volumes
are also littered with maps, family trees and a Dramatis Personae which help
to support the story.
The first surprise is that for a
known SF author, we are entrenched firmly in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Not being an expert on the history of that period, I have no way
of commenting on the accuracy of the work. But suffice it to say that it
seemed ok to me. Apart, of course, from references to
Qwghlm a
fictitious country off the northwestern coast of Britain.
Firstly, and most importantly for
the general readership of this review, there is not a whiff of SF or Fantasy
anywhere, apart from one possibly immortal alchemist. And it is loosely
linked to his earlier work Cryptonomicon which was based in part on
certain aspects of the history of the Second World War, as I believe that
some of the ancestors of the main characters appear in the latest work(s).
Although I am sure that numerous
characters are fictitious, The Baroque Cycle concerns the lives of a number
who are definitely not, for example Isaac Newton, the Baron Leibnitz and
other founding members of the Royal Society, together with the English,
French and Hanoverian aristocracy.
As I mentioned above, the problem
Neal had was where to start the story. Given a knife and a Danish pastry, or
more appropriately a Pretzel, it is inevitable that when cutting it you end
up with numerous pieces – a lot of middles, and it is difficult to find the
start. So to, it is with this work. Confusingly, the first book starts
towards the end of the life of Daniel Waterhouse, one of the main
protagonists. Born in the 1646, he goes up to Oxford with Isaac Newton,
experiences plague, and the Great Fire of London; is involved in the early
years of the Royal Society, and the complex politics concerned with the
succession of the Hanoverian Kings over the Jacobites.
The second book introduces us to
another main character, an Irish vagabond called half-cocked Jack (Shaftoe).
Half-cocked because of an attempt to cure a dose of syphilis that went
horrible wrong. Essentially, Neal Stephenson tells his tale through the
interactions of these and a number of additional characters, not the least
of whom is Eliza, with the rest of society. The work can be read on several
different levels, but the author’s primary purpose seems to be to document
how the current ‘system of the world’ came into being i.e how we arrived at
our current financial systems, and what was in place prior to this. The
previous state of affairs “… the unbelievable shabbiness of English coinage”
is described quite humorously early on in the first book (pages 85 – 88)
when Isaac Newton purchases some prisms at a fair where negotiations between
him and a Jewish stall holder proceed for several pages.
A secondary level would be an
outline of European politics at the time, and the attempts of the English
Tories & the French catholic king to restore the Jacobites to the English
monarchy, whereas the English Whigs with support from protestant Europe are
trying to invite the Hanoverian line to take over after the death of Queen
Anne.
In addition to this, you have Jack
Shaftoe’s extremely colourful life as a Barbary pirate, smuggler and forger.
I did contemplate providing an overview of each of the books, but ultimately
I believe this to be unnecessary. Either this review should be sufficient to
wet your appetite, or it will not. If you do start the first volume, I
should warn you that it’s climax is eye-watering, and mind boggling in that
such sophisticated medical procedures occurred at what I had believed to
have been quite a primitive time in history. Certainly there were no
effective anaesthetics or antiseptics.
The first two
volumes are already in paperback, The System of the World is due out
in paperback in October 2005. I cannot recommend these books too highly. You
have no excuse. Your life will be more the richer for having been acquainted
with Eliza! Get reading |
