Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Neal Stephenson's new "Quicksilver" takes a fantastical, circuitous tour of the 17th century in search of the roots of science and the nature of the universe.
Sep 24, 2003 | A little more than a third of the way into "Quicksilver," the new novel from Neal Stephenson, Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, gallops on a stolen Turkish war horse to chase an ostrich through a tunnel under the city of Vienna. He ends up in a large underground room where Turkish soldiers are systematically murdering the harem women of their own (just defeated) sultan.
Never mind why Jack is chasing the ostrich, how he came to be in possession of a charger, or what impels him, once in the subterranean chamber, to suddenly act like a hero and rescue a damsel in distress. All the reader needs to care about is that it is a ludicrous, delirious scene, the kind of thing we've come to depend on from Stephenson -- the author of, among other novels, "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon," two books that rank high on the top-10 lists of many computer geeks.
In "Quicksilver," Jack (who happens to be the ancestor of Bobby Shaftoe, the World War II-era Marine who is one of the four main characters of "Cryptonomicon") repeatedly gets himself into trouble on a gigantically absurd scale. The incident in the tunnel is just a warm-up for the nuttiness that ensues later in the novel when Jack (mounted on the same horse) crashes a costume ball held by the Sun King, Louis XIV of France.
We expect nothing less from Neal Stephenson than sustained ecstatic zaniness. In his first novel, "The Big U," a food fight in a college cafeteria is staged as if it were a replay of the battle in which Zeus and his cohorts overthrew the Titans. In his second novel, "Zodiac" -- an "eco-thriller" -- there's a laugh a sentence as the "granola James Bond" rockets around a polluted Boston Harbor. "Snow Crash" somehow figured out how to mix virtual reality and Sumer. Its successor, "The Diamond Age," is a nanotechnology lark lavished with heaping doses of neo-Victorian China. And "Cryptonomicon," a huge sprawl of a novel, plumbs the depths of modern computer geekdom more exhaustively than any other novelist has hitherto dared, while at the same time rollicking along through the many theaters of World War II action.
"Quicksilver: Vol. 1 of the Baroque Cycle"
By Neal Stephenson
William Morrow
927 pages
Fiction
But if you're looking for a reprise of "Cryptonomicon" in "Quicksilver," which despite its thousand-page length is billed as only the first volume in a three-volume "prequel" to "Cryptonomicon," then you may need to look again. "Quicksilver" is a different beast. It is a novel in which plot seems to be a secondary, or even tertiary, concern. More important to Stephenson, it appears, is bringing to life the world of the late 17th century in such a way that he can have fun with some big ideas about science and God and history.
The clear connection between "Quicksilver" and "Cryptonomicon" extends beyond the amusement of the former being populated by the ancestors of the latter's characters. In "Cryptonomicon," Stephenson traced out the roots of the digital computer age; Alan Turing, one of computing's pioneers, is a key character. In "Quicksilver" we go back much further, to an extraordinarily fecund period of history in which Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and other giants of science and philosophy are laying down the basics of the scientific method -- making discoveries that would set the stage for the entire Industrial Revolution and ultimately the computer age. As befits the descendant of a family of engineers, Stephenson has always been interested in how things work, and in "Quicksilver" he seeks the source of the Nile, as it were, for how modernity has come about.
And yet, somehow, the novel isn't quite as fun as his previous efforts. I teased out the ostrich incident at the beginning of this review because to the best of my recollection it was the first time I laughed out loud while reading "Quicksilver." Reading previous Stephenson novels, I erupted in gut-wrenching chortles on nearly every page. In "Quicksilver" it's as if Stephenson is in such a rush to tell you what kind of clothes a particular earl is wearing, or what the derivation of the word "saboteur" is, or how the dynastic relationships of Europe's ruling families are interwoven, that he loses sight of his story, and of his ability to delight.
But that's OK. As seen through Stephenson's eyes the late 17th century is endlessly fascinating, and so is the focus on the intersection of religion and science. Once I stopped worrying about where the novel was going, and just let myself relax and settle into it, as if it were a giant hot tub, I found myself unable to put it down. And I began to wonder whether maybe the whole volume, all 927 pages of it, was just an elaborate stage-setter: Tune in next year for the real action.
