With this enormous volume, the Baroque Cycle comes to a close. While there is the same kind of speeding up, adding new plot threads and jumping from one set-piece action scene to another that is typical of Stephenson's endings, I thought he actually succeeded at tying everything up in this one. I guess he can do that when he's got an entire epic-length novel in which to end things, as opposed to the fifty pages or so he tends to devote to endings in his stand-alone novels.In this volume, unlike its predecessor, the three books blend seamlessly into one another, and the mega-novel reads just like it had all been written at once. (Maybe it was --- it was published first as a three-in-one volume, and only later were the individual books released.)Daniel Waterhouse, the first of the three protagonists to be introduced in Quicksilver, is also the first to show up here. Having been drawn out of his long retirement in Massachusetts by Enoch Root, to try and mediate Newton and Leibniz's decades-long feud over (nominally) the credit for inventing calculus and (ultimately) differences of opinion on cosmology, he has arrived in England, where he is standing in a field that will be the site of an "Engine for Raising Water by Fire" (i.e., a steam engine). From there, he goes on to London in the company of a mysterious person named Threader, whose innumerable discreet business transactions with various wealthy townsmen make the trip take far longer than it should. Daniel figures out that Threader deals in the newfangled paper money that Daniel finds so baffling. At the end of this long, meandering trip, something explodes near their coach. Daniel recognizes the flame as that produced by phosphorus, which tells him 1) the explosion was not an accident and 2) whoever made the bomb is an Alchemist.This one simple task that Daniel is given --- get Newton and Leibniz to talk to each other and start working together instead of at cross purposes --- mutates into an imposing snarl of "side quests" in RPG parlance: Newton is Master of the Mint, and plagued by a mysterious counterfeiter named Jack the Coiner, whom Daniel ends up helping him hunt down; Leibniz has found a royal patron for his Logic Mill project, and he wants Daniel's help in getting the thing built, as well as giving it raw information to encode. There is also a succession crisis --- Queen Anne is childless, old and sickly, and both her brother James and her cousin George have claimed the throne --- and a criminal investigation for Daniel to embroil himself in.Both of the other protagonists, Jack and Eliza, have entered the story by now: Jack is, of course, Jack the Coiner, working covertly for Louis XIV to undermine Britain's economic power, and Eliza has attached herself to the Hanover court, as she is a close friend of Princess Caroline, whose mother wed George August, who is now one of the claimants to the English throne. Eliza and Daniel are playing for the same team --- Daniel is a Whig, mostly for cultural reasons (he's a Puritan, and there is strong overlap between the Puritans and the Whigs), he's helping Leibniz, whom Eliza also tries to help, and he's helping Newton, whom the Tories are trying to discredit as Master of the Mint. But Jack is working against both of them, which must cause him some internal conflict because he still loves Eliza, though he tries to make himself forget this. Other characters figuring in this volume are Jack's brother Bob Shaftoe, who is still a sergeant in the Queen's (later King's) Own Black Torrent Guards, and who, with his regiment, helps Daniel and Newton raid a castle belonging to a Tory lord where they suspect Jack the Coiner may be hiding, and later takes part in some skirmishes with Tory militiamen. His regiment is also charged with guarding the Pyx, where samples of coins taken from circulation at regular intervals are kept under lock and key, stored until such time as someone high-placed takes it upon himself to have their purity assayed in a Trial of the Pyx. There is also Eliza's handsome and resourceful German-born son, Johann; a Puritan shipbuilder named Nathan Orney, who has some wonderfully arch exchanges with Daniel (they call each other "Brother Nathan" and "Brother Daniel," though their feelings for one another are pretty far from brotherly); the huge, one-armed Russian agent provocateur named Yevgeny; the wily Jesuit priest Edouard de Gex, who is in England supervising Jack's sabotage of the English currency; Dappa, who has left Jack's employ for Eliza's, and who has taken up the pen to write articles condemning slavery; and Charles White, an odious person who serves the Viscount Bolingbroke, leader of the Tory faction, and who decides that Dappa, being a black man in England, must be someone's property, so he might as well be his, Charles White's, property. He has Dappa thrown into jail, from whence he directs all his pamphleteering at White personally. Their feud culminates in what may be the most absurd dueling scene this side of Twain's "The Great French Duel."The ending of the book is truly epic: two climaxes build at once, cutting from one to the other. They have been long in coming: they are the Trial of the Pyx and the execution of Jack the Coiner. Stephenson draws them out, longer I think than any other scene in any of the books. But the drawing-out doesn't feel slow at all; it gives those scenes a sense of grandeur and finality. Another thing I loved about the ending of this book --- which, after the two climaxes play out, consists of a series of epilogues showing where each major character ends up --- was its thematic coherence. Toward the middle of the book the title is explained: Princess Caroline is presiding over the reconciliation of Newton and Leibniz, and she tells them she wants them to work together because she senses that a new System of the World, a more rational one guided by science, technology and commerce, was being born, but that it was a fragile one that would require both of their combined efforts to keep on track. She specifically worried that the flowering of science would lead to a withering of Christianity, and she called on both philosophers to try to forestall that. At the end of the book, Daniel is standing in the middle of a mine that has been pumped dry by one of the new steam engines, and he reflects that the new System has succeeded in displacing the old. Throughout the saga, Daniel and Eliza have been instrumental in bringing it forth: Daniel has furthered the cause of Natural Philosophy, and Eliza has championed commerce. Eliza's anti-slavery labors also fall under the rubric of this new System: as Daniel sees it, the machines the new System enables man to build will do the work that slaves used to do, and will render slavery obsolete as well as morally wrong. (I do not think that this is true; I know that slavery has survived the machine age.) Newton seems to have one foot in the old System and one foot in the new; he's the world's pre-eminent Natural Philosopher, and as Master of the Mint he oversees the rationalization of England's economic system, but his great passion is Alchemy. Indeed, he tells Daniel he only took the Mint position to try and get his hands on the fabled Solomonic gold, the gold suffused with the Philosophic Quintessence that makes it heavier than all other gold and that, distilled, hardens into the Philosopher's Stone that grants eternal life. And Jack seems to be entirely a man of the old System, thriving on chaos and unpredictability. Everything he does --- undermining Newton's coinage, trying to have Daniel, Newton or both of them killed, throwing his lot in with the absolutist King Louis XIV, as opposed to the ever-more-republican English government, stealing the Solomonic gold and unleashing it upon the world --- seems opposed to the forces of Reason and Modernity, except that he also exemplifies some very modern values, like individualism and egalitarianism. As King of the Vagabonds, his command of the Mobb, and his appreciation for the Mobb's power and knowledge of its nature, prefigure the modern era when most countries are democracies. And in that way, Jack comes off as the most forward-looking of the characters, seeing the potential of mere peasants to be political actors when Daniel and Eliza are fixated on Kings, Barons, Dukes, Princes and Princesses. Long story short, Neal Stephenson is a genius. I do not doubt I will revisit this series many times.
Well, I'm now officially depressed. I finished reading the Baroque Cycle. To say that I enjoyed reading the series would be to stretch the word "enjoyed" to the breaking point. It would be rolling the word "enjoyed" off to the juicing room. It would be hanging the word "enjoyed" until half dead, and then drawing and quartering the word "enjoyed" by four sturdy teams of horses, in the hopes that somewhere in the process "enjoyed" would choose to reveal the location of its ringleader, a much more powerful verb, more thoroughly capable of conveying the intricacies of the action. One might imagine a brutal member of the Spanish inquisition leaning over the word "enjoyed", asking it "Who taught you these heresies? Was it 'relished'? 'Savored'? Perhaps it was 'adored'?" Here the inquisitor looks down at his documents, "My friend Thesaurus suggests that you work for 'cherished'! Is it 'cherished'?!"Lest I belabor the point a bit too long, I'll suffice to say that the series kept me absolutely enthralled, this last book somehow doing this with greater fervor than its predecessors, and move to the reasons that this was so:1. What I like to affectionately label "Holy Shit Moments". The definition of such a moment is simple: When the moment comes, the audience (in this case, the reader), is likely to exclaim "Holy shit!" or some similar outburst. System of the World is full of them, and they are a diverse lot. 2. This book has something for everyone. While perhaps less so than in The Confusion, there were buckles to be swashed. There was much political intrigue. This is true in the pure sense of some truly epic politicking between the Tories and the Whigs, but also in more colloquial Survivor-secret-alliance senses as well. The general trend of scientific and philosophical endeavors continued in this book as well. There's romance, action, mystery, very much in abundance.3. Rewarding payoffs. You look for these towards the end of a series. Lots of loose ends to be tied up nicely, lots of characters who need their minor (inconsequential?) arcs tied up. Jerks that need to get killed (you hope). This book ties up the series pretty darn flawlessly, with positive resolutions and negative resolutions distributed amongst the various plotlines in generally pleasing ways, albeit at times in predictable ones, if you are familiar with the historical period. 4. Neal Stephenson is very observant, and has a way of utilizing these observations to great effect. A common praise giving to stand up comedians is that "he's saying what we're all thinking", due to their ability to point out the oddities of society so well. Stephenson's ability to do so (not always for humorous purposes) is phenomenal. I've already got one person to add the Baroque cycle to their to-read list, and I've got a non good reads user started as well (with two more in the wings). I think this series is right up there with The Game of Thrones and Bridge of Birds now as my go to recommendation. It's that good. Read it. Read it now.(starting with these quotes):"Mr. Threader was a meat tabula rasa, like the exposed cliff of a roast beef left by the carver's knife" (p. 18). If you can think of a better way to describe someone as nondescript, I'd like to hear it."How many sheep in England? And not just in January 1714, but in all the millennia before? Why had the island not sunk into the sea under the weight of sheep-bones and sheep-teeth? Possibly because their wool was exported--mostly to Holland--which was in fact sinking into the sea! Q.E.D." (p. 20-1)."All salvaged, not because they had innate value, but because they'd been given to the Royal Society by important people. They'd been kept here just as a young couple keeps the ugly wedding present from the rich aunt" (p. 64)."'Its badness is proof of my sincerity,' Roger said modestly. 'If I wrote her an excellent love-poem, it might be said of me, that I had done it only to flaunt my wit'" (p. 71-2)."Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time" (p. 168)."Which only went to show that Englishmen could live anywhere. Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he'd plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone" (p. 200)."If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity--e.g. being hurled at his face--then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference" (p. 457)."Myself, I am comfortable with the notion that we are Machines made of Meat, and there's no more free will in us than there is in a cuckoo-clock, and that the spirit, soul, or whatever you want to call it, is a faery-tale" (p. 679)."But that was one of those errands that, if not achieved in the first twelve hours, would remain undone centuries later. And, as all of this was shewing, the fetching-out of these three items had long since ossified into a ceremony" (p. 830)."The Old Testament [reading:] is a length of black grosgrain ribbon that takes him into the type of passage whose sole purpose, in a Christian service, is to demonstrate just how much trouble we would all be in, if we were still Jews" (p. 833)."To be hanged bu the neck until dead is one thing; but to be forced to listen to a reading from the Old Testament twice, why, that is not only Unusual but Cruel" (p. 834).
What do You think about The System Of The World (2005)?
My favourite way of describing Neal Stephenson as an author is that his ambition vastly outstrips his talent; and the Baroque Cycle is a good point in case, I think. It is fairly obvious what he wanted to do here (mainly because Pynchon already did it before him) and it is even more blatantly obvious that this is not the chef-d’oeuvre describing the emergence of an age and short-circuiting that age with our present time that Stephenson wants it to be.The first novel, Quicksilver had three protagonists, the second, The Confusion, had two of those, Jack and Eliza, with Daniel being mostly relegated to the background; so it is probably no great surprise that in The System of the World we see Daniel take center stage again, with Jack and Eliza moved to the wings. Also, this third novel takes almost exclusively part in England (and most of that in London – as world-roaming as The Confusion was, so confined is The System of the World), and generally this is by far the most focused novel of the Baroque Cycle, one could almost call it tightly constructed. But only almost, as this probably would just not be Stephenson if he would not go on long tangents at every occasion that offers itself, culminating towards the end of the novel in a moment-by-moment description of the “Trial of the Pyx” (basically, a test of the validity of British coinage) that rambles on and on and on over hundreds of pages (felt pages – actually it’s more like several dozen, but still absurdly long).There also is some mumbling about the threatening chaos of quicksilver being contained into a solid system of the world – a weak and totally unconvincing bit of legerdemain to make readers believe there is some kind of Deeper Meaning at work in the Baroque Cycle rather than a random agglomeration of pointless facts by which of course nobody is taken in. The thing is that you just might get away with piling up heaps of facts and pieces of information in a non-fiction work, but if you want your text to work as a novel, you need to somehow connect that facts in a way that infuses them with significance – take a look at Moby Dick if you want to see how it’s done properly, or Gravity’s Rainbow (or really anything by Thomas Pynchon who is the supreme master of turning facts into metaphor). Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, just keeps shovelling facts, facts and even more facts into his novels in the hope that they’ll magically cohere into something meaningful – which of course they don’t. At best, the facts are curious in interesting in themselves, at worst they’re just a heap of boring pedantry that – except for the, in this case really minor, difference of their being historical rather than made up – could have comfortably fitted in any of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels and that only distracts from what remains at heart a rip-roaring adventure story.Thankfully, that heart beats strong enough in The System of the World to make itself felt through all the intellectual waste Stephenson piles on it, and its rhythm is compelling enough to keep the reader turning the pages even when they are filled with tedious descriptions of irrelevant detail. This third novel of the Baroque Cycle is to my taste at least the most entertaining, with two major struggles driving the plot forward – the rupture between Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibniz about the authorship of the calculus which Daniel tries to mediate on one hand, and the struggle between Master of the Mint Newton and master forger Jack Shaftoe in wich Daniel also is involved. It is mainly the second one (no surprise, as Jack plays a central part) which keeps things going and the reader interested as Daniel first hunts down the forger with a group of unlikely investigators (most of which turn out to have – at least! – a double agenda) and then once again becomes a mediator trying to unite the opposing factions in a common purpose. We get a big heist (targeting the tower), a duel (with cannons), a wild chase (with coaches) and quite a few colourful and exciting things more.Summing up (or well, repeating my sermon for the umpteenth time), The Baroque Cycle could have been such a wonderful book if it wasn’t for Neal Stephenson’s delusions of grandeur. Someone really should rescue the fun adventure novel hidden in the trilogy by pulling an S. Morgenstern on Stephenson and make an abridgement with just the good parts.
—Larou
Of the many reasons I do not play chess, the main one is that I’m lousy at strategy. I struggle to think more than one or two moves ahead, can’t easily reposition pieces in my mind’s eye, and am hapless when it comes to sniffing out and thwarting my opponent’s battle plan. I’ve had similar troubles trying to follow and parse the machinations of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, the first two volumes of which I found to be dense, sprawling, and restrained in their capacity for illumination. The System of the World, however, is a worthy conclusion to this raucous verbal repast. Drawing from the best elements of the previous two books, Stephenson manages to bring seemingly disparate concepts and characters together in a fashion that feels almost magical––or alchemical.The System of the World’s success is predicated on Stephenson’s decision to put Daniel Waterhouse front and center. Daniel is the heart and mind of this tale, the Logic Mill, the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, the vegetative spirit that animates the beast. Now an old man, Daniel returns to London to complete the task assigned to him way back in the first scenes of Quicksilver––the reconciliation of long-estranged geniuses Sir Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz. As we expect from Stephenson, Daniel spends most of his time on ancillary pursuits and only touches briefly on this central quest. Fortunately, his other activities prove intriguing and ultimately tie into the larger story, a quality greatly lacking early in the series.The complex shenanigans in which Daniel becomes embroiled are far less interesting than the kind of man he has become. Though I have criticized this series for what I perceive to be its many flaws, I can now say with certainty that Daniel Waterhouse is one of my favorite literary characters, and certainly my favorite from any of Stephenson’s works. He is a midwife of progress, a lesser savant who walks in the shadows of titans even as he dabs the spittle from their chins and gives them that friendly push out the door so they can keep revolutionizing human thought. He is a champion of materialism far ahead of his time, a non-violent anti-authoritarian, and a gentleman scholar. But most of all, he is a man who wants to end his life feeling he has acted in accordance with his principles and done right by those he loved. To follow Daniel through the completion of this journey is more than enough to make up for The System of the World’s shortcomings, which aren’t any more or less egregious than those of the first two volumes.This book’s other main strength is how it throws historical perspective on notions of progress, particularly in terms of money and democracy. Though I happily make use of money and am glad to live in a democracy, I often bemoan my culture’s obsession with monetary gains and my country’s political gridlock, which is the result of a system that values the checking of power over the ability to institute political change by fiat. The System of the World reminded me that, as much as money can be a drag, the history of money is a mixed bag. Yes, it is a tool that the powerful can wield against the poor, but standardized currency also helped dethrone Europe’s aristocracy by creating an ostensibly objective form of value that could be possessed by anyone, not just bluebloods. And when it comes to politics, even a government as obdurate as our current Congress is preferable to the petty disputes and whims of monarchy. Stephenson himself acknowledges that new Systems of thought and governance will be far from perfect, but offers excellent support for the idea that we are headed in the right direction.The conclusion of Jack and Eliza’s story is fitting, but failed to move me the way I thought it might. Jack remains a mysterious and charismatic thorn in the side of powers that be, and Eliza continues to pursue her dream of abolishing slavery. Both characters fade into the background of Daniel’s story, which is fine by me.Given that this is the conclusion of Stephenson’s most ambitious work to date, it seems appropriate to comment on the author’s tendency to fizzle out where more prosaic writers seek climax. Endings are not Stephenson’s strong point, and the final pages of The System of the World, while containing glimpses of poignancy, are rather disappointing. Jack’s storming of the Mint in London, which occurs in the first third of the novel, is more of a traditional climax than the slow unwinding of plots and relationships that follows. The exception is the final confrontation between Newton and Leibniz, which is inconclusive but also comfortingly open-ended. The only point on which the quarrelsome prodigies can agree is that their metaphysical debate will indubitably rage long after they are both dead. I take this non-resolution as Stephenson’s nod to the spirit of ongoing scientific inquiry, a strangely satisfactory end-point for two great fuses on an Infernal Device whose explosive power would resonate for centuries.This book did not please in all the ways I hoped it would, but it did surprise and delight me in ways I couldn't anticipate. Stephenson has made neat work of a very messy buildup. He is a kind of wizard––or chess master––and The System of the World spells checkmate.This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
—Miles
well, I like Neal, but like most of his stuff, all three books in this cycle could have used a better editor. The mere fact that I read all 2736 pages is a testament to his story telling, but I mean come on at least 1432 pages detailed 18th century architecture and fashion. That level of detail is endearing when he is talking code-breaking or operating systems, but the discussion of periwigs lacks glamor.His characters on many levels are extremely profound and complex, except when it comes to their personal relationships. Relationships tend to occur based solely on physical proximity and the authors need to move the story along. This is most evident in the scene in which the protagonist, Daniel is summoned to his best-friend and benefactors house only to find him dead. He died in a sex-bender with his much younger wife. Daniel upon physically moving the corpse is suddenly and inexplicably seduced by the now-widowed younger wife who, overcome with grief at having killed her former husband resumes with Daniel in the same bed. I liked this series and continue to like this author, but this is definitely not on the re-read list.
—Alec
