Deeper into the wordy quagmire that is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. As with n  Quicksilvern, this volume contains a considerable dose of magical moments dissolved in a nearly impenetrable sea of overdone gibberish. It’s brilliant gibberish, but not brilliant enough to make this book shine the way I typically expect from Stephenson. While enhancing the Baroque Cycle’s thematic strengths and moving the saga forward in promising ways, The Confusion is ultimately every bit as languorous as Quicksilver.

This volume neglects the Baroque Cycle’s most interesting plot thread––Stephenson’s fictionalized account of the intellectual development and personal squabbles of 17th century Europe’s Enlightenment figures––for nearly 500 pages. Daniel Waterhouse is the most maligned victim of Stephenson’s overreach. Save a decidedly moving scene in which he brings a floundering Isaac Newton to his senses, Daniel’s narrative is largely put on hold here.

Our consolation is that the lives of Jack Shaftoe and Eliza of Qwghlm become more complex (if not always more interesting). These two signify the social upheaval and economic recalibration that swept through Europe (and the rest of the world, to varying extents) as the 17th century came to a close. They are the figureheads of Confusion, that great handmaiden of Progress.

Jack Shaftoe, it turns out, is not dead. His body having purged itself of the maddening French Pox, Jack teams up with an eclectic cabal of similarly disenfranchised galley slaves to win their freedom. The antics of this motley bunch are variously inspiring, puzzling, and yawn-inducing. During the decade leading up to 1700, they gallivant through Barbary, the Middle East, “Hindoostan,” the Far East, and the New World, before returning to Europe. Along the way, they manage to steal a boatload of “magic gold,” which enhances Jack’s already considerable mystique as Europe’s most audacious rapscallion. Jack solidifies his reputation as a ruthless pragmatist, and his diverse gang of freedom-seekers serves as Stephenson’s metaphorical conduit for inserting a modern sense of self-determination into a thoroughly antiquated historical setting. As a general idea, it’s clever and fun. Jack is charismatic and exhibits just enough moral complexity to pique my curiosity about how his unfolding odyssey will terminate. Unfortunately, his story is cluttered with bizarre, boring adventures that rarely influence the Baroque Cycle’s overarching plot. Important events do happen, but slowly, ever so slowly.

Eliza has grown on me. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her after Quicksilver, but I think it’s fair to say she propounds a strange sort of feminism after all, and isn’t quite the bimbo with brains I thought she was. Similar to Jack, she is a vehicle for unlikely (but inevitable) fits of progress in a stifling world. She is unusually assertive and laudably subversive, but also tragically subject to the confines of Baroque gender roles. Her most intriguing quality is her relationship with the French aristocracy, which turns up its nose at her humble origins but can’t deny her intellectual cunning and financial savvy. Despite her past, Eliza is eventually declared a Duchess by Louis XIV––a historically significant concession that marks the decline of monarchic power and the rise of the mercantile class and free markets. Later, she marries (unhappily) into a very powerful French family. Though Eliza is forced to assume traditional wifely responsibilities, she retains her passion for independence, her economic acuity, and her steadfast hatred of the slave trade. She is a woman of contradictions sprung from traits and perspectives ahead of her time. Unfortunately, as with Jack’s tale, Eliza’s story is tarnished by Stephenson’s inability to quell his discursive predilections. Ideas that could be communicated in a few carefully-chosen scenes get lost in a barrage of monetary minutiae, epistolary doldrums, and tiresome aristocratic bickering.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of both Eliza and Jack is that they seem more coherent when understood as symbols rather than as actual people, a quality that makes for excellent intellectual fodder but prevents me from making an emotional commitment to them.

The farther I fall down the Baroque Cycle’s rabbit hole, the more I find myself begrudgingly enthralled by the project’s scope, if not its nuts and bolts. Perhaps I am just desperate to justify my efforts after 1,700+ pages, with nearly 900 left to go. I’ll stand by my claim that it’s far from Stephenson’s best work, but I’m beginning to doubt that I will get to the end and feel I’ve wasted my time. Despite its flaws, The Confusion concludes with a series of highly entertaining and genuinely meaningful flourishes, mostly having to do with Jack’s return to England. Perhaps it’s not too much to hope it all might come together in a climax most marvelous, one befitting Stephenson’s ambitions and undeniable genius.

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.

Neal Stephenson books are less novels and more interesting digressions disguised as exposition. The plots are usually interesting, but not 800 pages of interesting. Fortunately I really like all the stuff he writes about.

I’ll read the third book, but damn, I gotta take a break.

knjiga je mrvicu slabija od prethodne, ali i dalje urnebesna, nevjerojatna, sumanuta i na trenutke mučna, kao vožnja na rollercoasteru. 4.5

this review is for all 3 books, and i'll keep it short... Neal Stephenson is fascinating and erudite and well-educated and absolutely insane... this trilogy is just a not-so-subtle way to get people to read and learn history! hah! the fictional parts of the books are rather dull, but the walk through history was interesting... problem being i already ready history, as non-fiction, and these books aren't much from a fiction/fantasy/science fiction/historical fiction standpoint when the goings on of actual happenings are removed... for me they failed as fiction, and only get 2 stars instead of one because i do love history and that was what kept me reading... too much fact, not enough make-believe for me...

Stephenson's penchant for putting his characters into extreme situations and watching how they work their way out is in full and greatly entertaining effect in this volume. It's packed with detestable villains (De Gex, Arcachon, Upnor) and delightful new friends (Moseh, Dappa, and Goto, to name just a few) and a soaring adventure that takes our heroes through almost the entire world.

It takes a good writer to make a detailed account of a currency manipulation scheme as thrilling as a swashbuckling campaign across Africa and Asia. I'm excited to read the conclusion.

Books 4 and 5 are the highlight for me of Stephenson's [Baroque Cycle], along with Book 2.
Jack Shaftoe and Eliza are among Stephenson's most enjoyable characters; it seems like he is having fun thinking of things for them to do and say.

I'm writing this review of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion after finishing it and the final book in his The Baroque Cycle. So you can be sure that this review is going to be full of the sort of specifics and vivid details that make book reviews interesting. And you can be sure that, if I didn't think the entire concept took away from the art of reading and writing, that last sentence would have an upside down exclamation mark at the end of it, opensarcasm.com style.

My main problem with The Confusion, as with the entire cycle, is the sheer amount of detail. It seems strange that I, as a lover of the nineteenth century novel, should ever voice this complaint. But there it is. There were some fantastic moments in The Confusion, full of action, suspense, and surprise, but I felt like, to get to them, I had to read through chapters and chapters of descriptions--nautical details, explanations of economic theory, or complete prose maps of cities from the arches of famous monuments to the consistency of the gravel streets to the filth of the underground sewers--that slowed my reading to a halting and tedious speed that could only be compared to the speed of a frail woman wading through tar in a heavy velvet ball gown. (It can only be compared to that: no other metaphor will do.) I feel as if I can't really fault Stephenson for this. If I forced my mind to focus, his descriptions or explanations were lively, controlled, and often witty, but my mind wanted to leave the tar-wading woman behind and get to the action.

Though Stephenson's cast grew to include new and engaging characters like Moseh, the clever man with the plan, Dappa, the articulate linguist, and Jeronimo, the hot-headed warrior, and continued to develop characters from Quicksilver like the schemer Eliza and the sergeant Bob, Jack, the king of the vagabonds, dominated my interest in this installment of the cycle. Like the pirate that shares his name in the multimillion dollar motion picture franchise, Jack is a sort of chaotic neutral character with inimitable style that is constantly forced to choose between what is honorable and what the imp of perverse in his mind is selfishly egging him on to do. Though the reader knows Jack well and can likely predict which side he is going to choose, Jack is by no means predictable. He is far too cunning and wild to be predictable. Readers may know what he is going to choose, but never how he will choose it, and Jack's style makes him all about the "how".

My strongest commendation for The Confusion is likely that, as soon as I finished it, I was more than eager to start the The System of the World.

"For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme--of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme--pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be again."

"People could only make sense of complicated matters through stories."

Finally! I've finished this book! In this second tome of the Baroque Cycle, most of the characters who were together in the first book are off to the four corners of the world doing different things. This lends itself to a myriad of rich descriptions of different places and customs...but it seriously stalls all the arcs between Newton and Daniel, between Eliza and Jack, between Leibniz and Newton, etc. In fact, though the author did take this book where I expected--that is, he turned his attention to world markets, finance, and nascent philosophies surrounding them with a particular eye to investigating how wealth is generated (and not only through agriculture or goods, but through invisible relationships in the same manner as Newton's mysterious "force")--the book was still incredibly boring and bloated. I loved the vignettes with Leibniz about monadology and arithmetical machines, and I also loved a lot of the dialogue surrounding the character Jack...but the author went on so many byways as to be totally unfocused. This book reflects the vast interconnections between people and markets and places and ideas....and as such is unfocused, flitting to and fro without going deeply into anything. I liked it, and I will read the next book. It is surely a demonstration of Stephenson's intellectual prowess but sadly not a demonstration of his ability to tell a good, tightly woven story.

What on earth did I just read? I'm still not sure but it was a great romp, sometimes with read-aloud astonishment, with money, alchemy, piracy, intrigue, princesses, queens, battles, the Inquisition, and stunning reversals all playing a role, along with historical figures such as Newton, Leibniz, and Peter the Great. I haven't digested this much detail on trading since reading Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life and the 2 other volumes by Fernand Braudel. I'm rather sorry that I jumped into this trilogy at Vol #2, but that just lets me assure you would-be readers that it's OK to do that. I picked up the story from that point with ease.

The real joy, though, was not in the intense characters or plot or in the amazing detail of ships, weapons, and economic exchanges, but in the sometimes outrageous prose. A sampling from my Kindle highlights:

"In a world full of men who only wanted to take her to bed, it was somehow comforting to know that there was one who, given the opportunity, would prefer to read through a big pile of stolen correspondence."

"His ability to misapprehend even the simplest declarations had been driving his acquaintances into frenzies of annoyance for years. Finally he had discovered a practical use for it."

"Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor’s geometry-books. Now, though, he understood that geometers and word-wrights alike were nothing more than degraded and by-passed off-shoots of the South Asian weapons industry."

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.”

"I have secrets so dark that I myself do not know them! I phant’sied the Inquisitor might somehow wrest out of me through torture what I could not discover by prayer and meditation."

"Jack’s chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors’ patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent."

This was a much more readable volume than the first one, Quicksilver. I really enjoyed both major storylines: Eliza navigating the courts of Europe in search of sex and profit, and Jack navigating ports wide and far for a way to get back home, hopefully with a few sovereigns in his pocket. The action was much more interesting (mostly because we had far less Daniel and Isaac) and the whole book was really a blast. I am moving on to the sequel now.

Fino's Neal Stephenson Reviews
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No diversion goes too far afield, no tangent is too barock or philosophickal, and no intrigue is too ornately improbable for me in this yarn. If it were written on a roll of Turing machine tape, extending infinitely into the horizon, I have no doubt I would continue reading as long as I breathe. Alas but there is only one tome remaining in the trilogy for me.

There are four appeals [of the novel] to which I am especially responsive.
tThe appeal of play. . . . novels conceived as grand games.
tThe appeal of dream. . . . the fusion of dream and reality.
tThe appeal of thought. . . . to marshal around the story all the means ― rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative ― that could illuminate man’s being.
tThe appeal of time. . . . to broaden the time issue beyond the Proustian problem of personal memory to the enigma of collective time.
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

I am occasionally tempted upon turning the final page of such of Stephenson’s novels as Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, Anathem, or this one currently under discussion to compare them with the headier works of Thomas Pynchon such as Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. Now, however, I am prepared to seem odd to all those who will question my feeble attempt to show that perhaps Stephenson has become more akin to the Hermann Hesse of Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, or, as it has sometimes been styled, Magister Ludi, Latin for Master of the Game). This is not the figure from Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth described thus, “The schoolmaster is termed, classically, Ludi Magister, because he deprives boys of their play.”

In these sprawling novels, Stephenson seems to conflate the two identities ascribed to him on Wikipedia, author and game designer, and to give the reader at least some of each, novel and game. More than that, I find that he stretches toward that telling phrase from The Glass Bead Game, “We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.”

In laying before his readers lengthy observations upon, as well as alternative reworkings of, history, Stephenson also brings to my mind another of the Magister Ludi’s dictums: “People know, or simply feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.”

I think it is not an entirely untoward observation that Kundera might find The Confusion appealing.