The summit of Mount Stephenson

Neal Stephenson occupies a unique place in the pantheon of speculative fiction-writing demigods, because he possesses both unlimited ambition and a colossal capacity for silliness. One needs only to recall the extended treatment of the Captain Crunch-consuming ritual of "Cryptonomicon" protagonist (and Daniel Waterhouse descendent) Randy Waterhouse, to appreciate Stephenson's ability to take an absurd premise and articulate it beyond all sane restraint. I hold no brief for cereal, personally, but the loving, obsessive-compulsive detail with which Stephenson depicts Waterhouse's efforts to combine milk and Crunch nuggets in the most efficient and delicious manner possible is a definitive example of his sui generis stock in trade.

There is a danger in cultivating wacky excess -- self-indulgence on such a grand scale can obscure the greater narrative and runs the risk of coming off as wanking just for wanking's sake. There are occasions in "The Baroque Cycle" where Stephenson bogs down, where so much time is spent drilling down to the last extraneous molecule that the effort of reading becomes tiresome, rather than an exhilarating flight of fancy. (Or as Stephenson spells it, "phant'sy.")

But, and this is one of the joys of reaching the finish line of the Cycle, there is more method to Stephenson's madness in these tomes than in any of his previous works. By the end, one realizes that in many cases what once seemed a foray into insubstantial irrelevance was a carefully placed foundation stone.

In "Quicksilver," the first installment of the Cycle, Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac Newton, two students at Cambridge, visit a local fair. Newton attempts to purchase some prisms. Instead, he gets a "lesson in the unbelievable shabbiness of the English coinage." In the ensuing pages, we are offered a quick and dirty introduction to the difference between shillings coined during the reign of James I, those that were minted during the Cromwell interregnum (and have since been "demonetized") and the new, perfectly circular guineas of Charles II (so named because they were made from gold that the Duke of York had mined in Africa). We are also introduced to the problems that ensue when such coins are clipped and worn down or otherwise debased.

It all seems a great lark, Stephenson riffing along about the bizarre variety of coins that Isaac Newton might have in his pocket. Isn't 17th century money just so cute! But there's more going on here than is immediately apparent. Newton and the prism seller aren't just arguing over price; they are arguing over how to evaluate the merits of the individual coins that are the very basis for exchange. They have to define their money before it can be spent.

Fast-forward to Volume 3. Newton -- who is, in the Cycle, as compelling a character as any Stephenson has ever brought to life -- is now the master of the Royal Mint, a position he held for 30 years, long after he made his name with his theories of gravity and optics. His life's goal is to bring order, sense and accuracy to the English coinage. (There's another purpose, as well, but since it involves the central fantastical mystery of the Cycle, I'll leave that for readers to discover for themselves.) Meanwhile, Jack the Vagabond King, whose exploits provide much of the drama in Volumes 1 and 2, has transmuted into Jack the Coiner, a counterfeiter who is Newton's bête noire.

The struggle between Jack and Newton is the struggle between old order and new -- one of the many birth pangs in the extended labor that results in the Enlightenment. Newton (whose third volume of "Principia Mathematica," incidentally, is named "The System of the World") wants to bring reason into full effect, monetarily speaking and otherwise. No more doubt and imprecision! No more need to weigh or bite or otherwise determine the provenance of a coin before making a purchase. And while he is adjusting the coinage of the realm, elsewhere -- on the London Exchange or in Amsterdam or a score of other innovative entrepôts -- stock markets and credit schemes and other financial strategies are ushering in even vaster changes.

This system of money is not without its detractors, reactionaries who see in the new Cult of Finance abomination and anathema. The chief villain of the Cycle is Edouard de Gex, a French Jesuit priest who hounds Jack and his life-love Eliza. Why does he despise them so? In Volume 3, with Eliza finally within his dastardly grasp, he proclaims (with a desperation that is clearly the last gasp of an expiring age) his hatred for all things numismatic.

"'Money, and all that comes with it, disgusts me,' said Father Edouard de Gex, 'within living memory, men and women of noble birth did not even have to think about it. Oh there were rich nobles and poor, just as there were tall and short, beautiful and ugly. But it would never have entered the mind of even a peasant to phant'sy that a penniless duke was any less a duke, or that a rich whore ought to be made a duchess. Nobles did not handle money, or speak of it; if they were guilty of caring about it, they took pains to hide it, as with any other vice. Men of the cloth did not need money, or use it, except for a few whose distasteful duty it was to take in the tithes from the poor-box. And ordinary honest peasants lived a life blessedly free of money. To nobles, clerics, and peasants -- the only people needed or wanted in a decent Christian Realm -- coins were as alien, eldritch, inexplicable as communion wafers to a Hindoo ... The makers, users, and hoarders of money were a cult, a cabal, a parasitical infestation, enduring through many ages, no more Christian than the Jews -- indeed, many were Jews ... This was repugnant but endurable. But what has happened of late is monstrous. The money-cult has spread faster across what used to be Christendom than the faith of Mahomet did across Araby. I did not grasp the enormity of it until you came to Versailles as an infamous Dutch whore, a plaything of diseased bankers, and shortly were ennobled -- made into a countess, complete with a fabricated pedigree -- and why? Because you had noble qualities? No. Only because you were Good With Money...'"

The great marvel of the Enlightenment is that the introduction of a new system of money was being matched simultaneously by new systems of science and religion and government. In every aspect of civilization, bold thinkers dared to reorder the cosmos, to sweep away the confounding murk of the past and replace it with a new and better way of doing things.

The ferment is extraordinary. But one could understand if such changes might trigger a crisis of faith.

Next Page: Is there room for God in the system? Newton and Leibniz tussle

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