Hoo boy.
I've completed a marathon of reading comprising 2600-plus pages of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. The work is divided into eight novels, bound into three volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. It's all one story, though, and I don't think a single segment would stand alone, though it would entertain.
Stephenson is most well known for his science fiction classics Snowcrash and The Diamond Age. But he followed those up with Cryptonomicon, which takes place during World War II and the present day, and has little or no speculative aspects at all. (I read it when it was first released, and, tempted though I am, I won't be rereading it just now.)
Cryptonomicon is part historical novel, mixing fictional characters with real-life figures such as Alan Turing, Douglas MacArthur. and Winston Churchill, and part techno-thriller, as characters set up a complex data haven and money deposit center. Both stories discuss and use cryptography and cryptanalysis extensively, and a recurring theme involves the spread of information and disinformation and the burden of secret knowledge that can't be acted on.
The Baroque Cycle is a sort of prequel, though not really. Its timeframe involves events from the late 17th and early 18th century involving characters whose otherwise unrelated descendants star in Cryptonomicon.
There are three main characters in The Baroque Cycle: "Half-Cocked" Jack Shaftoe, an illiterate "mudlark" from London who lives a charmed and charming life as a vagabond. In his early twenties, while serving as a soldier during the Turkish siege of Vienna, he meets Eliza, abducted as a young girl from North English Islands and raised as a harem slave. From there they journey across Europe and meet the great German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Eliza's quick intelligence and beauty take her into the courts and salons of Europe, while Jack's foolhardiness and luck take him literally around the world.
The third character is Daniel Waterhouse, son of a Puritan dissenter who helped put Cromwell on the throne. As a young man, Daniel rooms with Isaac Newton at Cambridge. His religious and political past and love of the nascent field of Natural Philosophy -- what we'd now call science -- put him at the center of multiple and overlapping movement in England, in Europe, and in the American colonies.
A fourth character is the mysterious, wise, funny, and literally ageless Enoch Root, who shows up throughout the series as well as in Cryptonomicon. He gets some of the best lines.
As background to all this, our characters (and thus we) are witness to:
- the shifting allegiances and power of Europe's interrelated ruling classes, who spend decades at war with the nonchalance of chess players
- the bitter rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, which is superficially about who invented the calculus
- the related birth of Natural Philosophy as both a more mechanistic view of the universe and a reaction to the religious and mystical underpinnings of alchemy
- the rather alchemical properties of money, as trade moves from barter to cash to credit, and money's value becomes less tied to the intrinsic worth of specific metals, especially gold
- the degradations and sheer filth of everyday life in Europe.
Stephenson has done some amazing homework to create this work. It's both a rollicking adventure (I'm reminded of Dumas's Three Musketeers) and an educational tour of life at the beginning of the age of enlightenment, a la Braudel. As always, what I loved most was seeing the origins of things we daily take for granted.
I'll finish with an excerpt featuring Enoch Root, who was the only Western member of a ship allowed to visit Japan, which at that time had kicked out all foreigners and closed itself off from Western trade.
To Jack the only thing he said was, "It is a very strange country."
"How strange?" Jack asked.Enoch shook his head and answered "Enough to make me understand how strange Christendom is."
