Few people see a 3,000 page novel and think to themselves “Sure, I’d love to get scoliosis carrying that around the city,” even after the pages have been mercifully broken up into 3 hardbound volumes. Fewer still have occasion–or desire–to layabout and read such a book for a second time. I’d read and enjoyed “The Baroque Cycle” a few years ago, but while looking over my bookshelves before a Thanksgiving trip to Charlotte, I grabbed the first volume “Quicksilver,” and was drawn back in immediately. And what went from having something to nostalgically enjoy for a few hours to and from CLT became another, holidays-long, subtly satisfying reading experience.
Those familiar with Stephenon’s “Cryptonomicon” will recognize the names Waterhouse and Shafttoe. They will also know that by employing them Stephenson lets the reader know that he’s in store for a lot more than some clever storytelling and wordplay. Stephenson cut his teeth as the king of cyberpunk with “Snow Crash” and “The Diamond Age,” imagining dystopian worlds corrupted by the very technologies meant to better them. In “Cryptonomicon” Stephenson turned his gaze to the past and World War II, creating parallels between the Allies efforts to decrypt German codes, and that of the prospects of a modern-day impenetrable data haven. “The Baroque Cycle” takes historical fiction to the level of epic.
Stephenson’s great asset is to make what could essentially be rudimentary freshman history courses (albeit on rather opaque topics) both humorous and dramatic, to present scenes with a clever, unique pen, and, most formidably, to imagine complex stories within a framework of modern history. In “The Baroque Cycle” Stephenson takes a mighty swing at explaining the birth of modern governance, finance, and commerce, all through the intrigues and adventures of Waterhouse (Daniel) and the Shaftoes (brothers Jack and Bob).
The first book opens with the journey of Daniel Waterhouse in the winter of 1713. An old acquaintance, a mysterious alchemist by the name of Enoch Root arrives in Boston where Daniel has spent the prior two decades establishing the Massachusetts Institute of Technological Arts. Root arrives from New York just in time to see some witches put to the stake and bearing a message from a woman Daniel knew when she was merely a child–Princess Caroline of Hanover. The Princes needs him to return to the city of his birth, London, and attempt to mediate a long-standing dispute between his longtime friends–and the world’s two most celebrated natural philosophers–Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Daniel, at 60-some years, understands that this is no mean request. It is a request that requires him to leave his wife and only son in Boston, make a dangerous winter crossing of the Atlantic, and involve himself in politics that he had long ago put in his past.
Daniel’s journey back to England gives Stephenson occasion to flashback 50 years to final days of the English Interregnum, before Charles II returned to England and restored the monarchy. It was during this time, all those years ago, when Daniel, a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, befriended one Isaac Newton.
It’s tempting here to dive into every plotline that knots the great muddle Stephenson throws at you. But to do that would require a book-length review. Suffice it to say that as the story is introduced, the maelstrom of politics and religion and the parallel developments in what is blandly understood in 1655 as Natural Philosophy have all been asimmer for just long enough for their essential differentiators to begin pushing these groups apart, and as is inevitable, dividing the acolytes of their respective sects into warring factions. Stephenson’s gift here is not losing sight of his goal, which is not to give us a history book, but to tell his characters’ stories. As I’ve said to friends who I’ve told about the book: It’s not about the men who did great things. It’s about the guys behind the guys who did great things. Stephenson’s genius is to have imagined just what experiences and relationships would allow Daniel Waterhouse and the Shaftoes to do the things they do.
So what’s it about then? In brief: It’s a telling of the emergent underpinnings of the modern world; the establishment of banks, paper money, the gold standard, stock exchanges, biology, Newtonian physics, technology, and the cultivation of power in every sense of the word. And within this epic moment, it is about rare, adaptable men put in impossible situations. There are swashbuckling piratical exploits and the subtlest political slight-of-hand. It is about men mastering fear as well as being mastered by the binding nature of love. At turns you’re reading an old high-seas romance, at others an instruction on the failures of developing an organizing structure to a library. (No really. It was apparently difficult to figure out.) In one scene Jack Shaftoe paints himself in liquid phosphorus to thwart an attack of Indian highwaymen, hoping against hope it doesn’t dry and explode before he can wash it off. In another Daniel Waterhouse will be operated on to remove a life-threatening kidney stone by none other than his good friend Robert Hooke, who promises him:
You may bite down on that if you wish, or you may spit it out and scream all you like–this is Bedlam, and no one will object. Neither will anyone take heed, or show mercy. Least of all Robert Hooke. For as you know, Daniel, I am utterly lacking the quality of mercy. Which is well, for it would render me perfectly incompetent to carry out this operation.”
There are cudgel-weilding Malabar pirates and quick, suave asides that serve the same purpose by the Sun King Louis XIV in jealous ballrooms at Versailles. Japanese ronin and the [English] King’s Own Black Torrent Guards will attack and retreat. There are ear-biting English Lords, French cryptographers (for how could we get a Stephenson book without a little cryptography?), street fights involving Russian Tsar Peter the Great and a one-armed assassin, and mini-lectures on the making of watered steel and The Engine for Raising Water by Fire (you’ll understand). Stephenson will take you around the world as the first, silk-thin lines of a global economy thread, and the reader will be rewarded with an adventure as impossible as it is engrossing.