Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
by Neal Stephenson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Neal StephensonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-09-21
ISBN: 0060593083
Number of pages: 917
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Book Review: Science and history make this fun even if the plot rambles
Summary: 4 Stars
"Quicksilver" is too long and its plot takes hundreds of pages to get going. My own crude measure of the latter is when I no longer have to push myself through a book, and instead remain riveted to it, happily neglecting the world around me. By this measure it took Stephenson more than 600 pages to get this baby up to speed, fully two of "Quicksilver's" three books.
He piles in too much detail. His efforts to recreate the picaresque style, particularly in the second book, are often strained. And he commits certain sins of style, to my taste.
Despite these flaws, this is ultimately a worthy book. His portrayal of science's birth in the late 1600s, the time of Newton, Leibniz, Hooke and Huygens is fascinating, fun and enjoyable. He also renders comprehensible the politics of the time, as byzantine as at any point in history, with the ever shifting battlelines and loyalties of religion and dynasty.
Stephenson's massive detail sometimes borders on genius but often weighs the book down. The line between these can be fine and indistinct. His writing seems most solid in the first book and those parts of the third book centered on protagonist Daniel Waterhouse, a young Puritan attracted to science. He is close to Isaac Newton and a protégé of John Wilkins, doyenne of the salon of England's greatest scientists and the one who steered them through the political battles of an era when Catholics and Protestants, Anglicans and Puritans still murdered each other. Waterhouse is believable and Stephenson has a feel for his character. Stephenson occasionally uses outlandish events to move his story but does so within the bounds of believability. His characters affect 20th century speech and viewpoints at times, and in the Waterhouse passages this style works, for educated, clever people introducing modernity to their own world. Using modern speech rather than the (to us) convoluted idiom of the day helps bring them closer to us, clarifying their thoughts and motives.
The same cannot be said of the interminable second book, where we are introduced to Half Cocked Jack Shaftoe the Vagabond King, and Eliza the escaped blue-eyed harem slave. Too much of what works for Stephenson in the first book, doesn't work here.
Jack and Eliza meet when, at the siege of Vienna in 1683, the mercenary Jack frees her from her Turkish captors. Jack is a former London street urchin kicked onto the streets at age 5 with his brothers to scavenge a living. An illiterate vagabond, Jack often talks like Noel Coward and displays an sophisticated knowledge of the world. I'm not convinced.
Eliza is kidnapped as a child by pirates and sold into harem slavery with her mother. Freed in her late teens, she emerges with an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, the wit and aplomb of a princess raised in Versailles. When she and Jack find their way into Amsterdam's commercial world, she wheels, deals and sounds like a 20th century Wall Street arbitrageur. I'm not convinced by this, nor by her easy melding into the arcane and international scientific world of Leibniz and friends.
Stephenson uses these characters, particularly Eliza, to inject some sex into the book, but I find this offputting. Eliza the harem slave knows too much for one still a virgin when liberated. (Her deflowering was being reserved as a treat for the Grand Vizier to celebrate a Turkish victory which never came to pass.) One scene involving fisting and a hot tub is just a little too cutesy San Francisco for me.
In another unconvincing modern wink-wink moment, two Venetian gondoliers arguing after colliding their boats are described as having "Canal Rage."
Jack and Eliza seem to take forever to find their way north into Germany. I never do understand the importance of quicksilver mines there, which occupy entirely too much of this book's plot, or why the book is named that. I'm sure Stephenson explains it at some point but it just gets buried in the blizzard of characters and activity. I got lost trying to follow Eliza's business and intrigue with Newton's rival Leibniz, as well as Jack's further adventures in France.
Stephenson seems more like a science fiction writer at heart, more absorbed in the details of the world he creates than in the characters who inhabit it. He departs from reality at times: Eliza hails from a fictional island with an unpronounceable name, and while Stephenson ultimately reveals a reason for his concocting this, it seems a bad fit for a book otherwise written with a great deal of historical accuracy and detail. Science fiction and fantasy writers get to make up lands; historical fiction writers don't. And the sci-fi writer in Stephenson gets so absorbed in explaining 17th century science he forgets to convincingly link it to the historical and political plot.
Stephenson leaves many things untied at the end. As Quicksilver is the first of a three-novel, nine-book series, I'll keep reading, assuming some of it may wrap up later.
The book's dragging and slow start might argue for three stars. Its huge scope argue for five. I'm splitting the difference and giving it four stars. If they allowed halves I might have knocked it down to three and a half, but I'll give it that last half star benefit of the doubt. There is so much science and history and lore here, it's fun even if the plot rambles.
Summary of Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.
It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe -- London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds -- risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox.
And it is the tale of Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance.
A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life, Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time.
And it's just the beginning ...
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson launches his most ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with the ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for MIT in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to resolving an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the Minerva, readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with young Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early drawings of microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious radicals, and the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and enjoys a lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-?all before the year 1700.
In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked" Jack (also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a Turkish harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by Eliza's lust for fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of Daniel in the third book of the novel.
The book courses with Stephenson's scholarship but is rarely bogged down in its historical detail. Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory. Though replete with science, the novel is as much about the complex struggles for political ascendancy and the workings of financial markets. Further, the novel's literary ambitions match its physical size. Stephenson narrates through epistolary chapters, fragments of plays and poems, journal entries, maps, drawings, genealogic tables, and copious contemporary epigrams. But, caught in this richness, the prose is occasionally neglected and wants editing. Further, anticipating a cycle, the book does not provide a satisfying conclusion to its 900 pages. These are minor quibbles, though. Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics. --Patrick O'Kelley
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