Earlier this week, I finished The Confusion, the second volume in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. I read Quicksilver in November 2003; I’m eager for volume three, The System of the World, promised for September of this year.
I love a complex read which still, well, reads well. Powerful ideas, intricate plotting, myriad characters, historical allusions — none of these need interrupt the turning of pages, but often enough they do. Not here. Stephenson includes some “telling” via his characters, but mostly he lets action take hold.
The Confusion takes the characters set in motion in the first volume, and sends them careening around Europe or around the world. The physical laws elaborated by Newton (a strong secondary character here) help explain the seemingly erratic orbits of Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. Shaftoe is a magnet for trouble and action; he’s an inadvertent catalyst, always party to significant events. Only the time spent in Mexico seems to stretch too far even for Stephenson’s nifty historical connections: there’s even a tie-in to the mythical Jewish settlement in New Mexico. A few incidents like this made me think of Leonard Nimoy from the old TV show In Search Of… but I forgive a few few flights of fancy. Overall, the history is fascinating, and I’d like to read more about this period (late 17th-early 18th century). My history and literature studies always started ~50 years later, in the more immediate lead-up to the French Revolution.
Eliza fascinates, in part because she gets to serve as the main actor in the trilogy’s exploration of the beginnings of modern financial mechanisms. Money is pretty interesting stuff, after all — and it doesn’t always make sense, if you move beyond the daily assumptions we all make. The best scene in the entire book is the party in St.-Malo, where in 16 pages (p.350-366 in hardcover) Eliza leads a collection of French nobles through an explanation of how credit works. We readers are not treated like simpletons, as are some of the lesser nobles, but we get the full story and an understanding of why these new concepts surprised so many in that era.
I only worry that any histories I read of this era will pale in comparison to Stephenson’s weaving. I don’t know where he’s departed from fact, but his usual practice leaves me confident that the tapestry of history he’s using is not all of his own creation.
The Confusion is a step up from Quicksilver. At times, it nearly equals the incredible Cryptonomicon, which had the advantage of being self-contained. Again, I’m looking forward to September.
P.S. Here’s Slashdot review of The Confusion, which I’ll read when I’m finished with this post. Probably less disjointed than my own thoughts.