Long-winded, but still really entertaining. I get the feeling that Stephenson has buried in encryption an entire other story underneath these three novels which might explain some of the more overly described passages, but I'm not smart enough nor do I have enough time to figure it out, and I'm not obsessed enough to do a Google search and fall down any rabbit holes to see if anyone else has done any digging into it. Maybe next reread. I think the key to it was laid out in Quicksilver by Eliza, but again, I'm too lazy to check right now, and I'm honestly probably not smart enough to figure it out anyhow, so I'll leave it to the bigger brains of the world to decrypt and enjoy. It really would make the indulgent attention to detail make more sense than just being lackadaisically edited, though.

This book actually didn't take as long to read as the first book (Quicksilver). Perhaps it was because I already knew the characters well and didn't have to "ramp up" each time the book switched focus to a different set of characters. Really, though, I think it's because The Confusion is more of a swashbuckling adventure story, which large parts of Quicksilver were not (even though I really enjoyed the long first part of Quicksilver, involving Puritanism and science, it was a slow read). The Confusion is a page-turner, definitely over-the-top at times, but a fun read and just as packed with historical references as the first book. Unlike the first book, adequate closure to the main adventures is received at the end. I'm looking forward to starting the third book, but for practical reasons I must choose something smaller to bring on my upcoming travels...

Wow. If you've read the first book, "Quicksilver", you know pretty much what to expect but I found this a more satisfying read. It's the parallel tales of Jack and Eliza in the next dozen or so years after "Quicksilver". I preferred the story of Jack Shaftoe aka. half-cocked Jack, L'Emmerdeur, King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak, breaker of chains etc. etc. He fights battles, steals treasure and travels the world with his Cabal of ex-slaves. Eliza writes clever letters, has babies and plots complex money making schemes.

We ditch the later Daniel Waterhouse thread, presumably to resume in the final book. This leaves more space for Jack's rambunctious adventures in North Africa, India and Mexico, with a brief stop off in Japan. His band of fellow rogues and their quest for freedom and treasure are a lot of fun. There are fewer self-indulgent philosophical diversions in this book but plenty of cameos from famous Enlightenment figures: oh look, there's Peter the Great and isn't that Samuel Pepys relieving himself against the garden wall? The villains are great, especially Edouard de Gex/de'Ath, a Jesuit priest who finds the Inquisition too soft. Oh yeah, he returns from the dead to carry on his work undercover. Nice.

The tone varies from knockabout fun to dissertations on alchemy and economics but it's never dull. The two 'con-fused' stories (get it?) converge in a terrific finale that sets us up nicely for "The System of the World". I'll be back for the final act once I've regained sufficient equilibrium of head and heart.

PS. My William Heinemann hardback has a lovely cover consistent with t'others but some maps would've been nice for those bears of little brains like me.

The second epic volume of Neal Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle Trilogy, The Confusion begins several years after the end of the first book, Quicksilver. The disease-and injury-induced delirium of Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, former King of the Vagabonds, finally burns itself out, only for Jack to find that he has been serving as a slave on a Barbary pirate galley since falling out with Eliza in Amsterdam, and that he has been taken in by a cabal of fellow slaves who have a daring plan to win both their freedom and untold riches.

Meanwhile, in France, Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, finds herself once again penniless after being stripped of her wealth by a privateer working to bolster King Louis XIV's dangerously depleted treasury. Eliza is now a mother, and with the need to find security for herself and her offspring, begins exploring ways to leverage her knowledge of financial markets to regain her position, just as France prepares for war with England in support of the deposed King James' quest to reclaim the British throne.

When Jack and the Cabal succeed in stealing a massive quantity of Spanish gold for which the French Navy had its own plans, it touches off a series of events and plots that reach across the globe to ensnare Eliza. While Jack wins and loses fortunes, battling his way from the Barbary Coast to Egypt to Hindoostan, then on to Japan and Mexico, before finally setting course for Europe, Eliza finds herself in a feud with a powerful Austrian merchant banker, a prime mover in a new and burgeoning world of finance powered by letters of credit, stricken by a deadly plague, and a pawn in a larger game played by courtiers every bit as cunning as she.

As with all Stephenson novels, there are asides and tangents and things happening all at once, but in The Confusion, this trademark style takes a bit of a backseat to the plotting and machinations in Eliza's world and the picaresque quest in Jack's. We once again live alongside each of them, and watch as they continue to evolve as people; Jack's brash wildness is tempered with experience and even wisdom, and Eliza's bold cunning is increasingly balanced against the needs of her children.

At more than 800 pages, The Confusion is shorter than Quicksilver (!!!), but the detailed, deeply realized world of 17th century Europe and Asia Stephenson has crafted is one the reader won't want to leave.

Years ago, I started the first book in this series, Quicksilver, but only got about 1/4 through it and gave up. But I love Neal Stephenson's other, more sci-fi, books, and having read just about all of them except the Baroque Cycle and The Mongoliad, I decided to try again. I enjoyed it more this time, and had the patience to let it go, waiting to understand "what it was about." I thought it was about the conflict between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebnitz (re which invented calculus first) as seen by the fictional character Daniel Waterhouse, but the author also spent a lot of time on other characters, particularly Jack Shaftoe, ancestor of a main character in Cryptonomicon (which I loved). I finished that book, and while I still didn't know "what it was about," I enjoyed it enough to start the second book, The Confusion.
I now believe these books are less about "something" (meaning a plot point or conflict), than about exposing the reader to what life was like in the last 1600's for various types of people, by telling their stories. Sailors, pirates, vagabonds, minor players in the community of "People of Quality", and others. It also delves into the concepts of currency and finance, and how it evolved. A couple things I learned about early currency: pieces of eight were literally coins that could be broken into eight pieces to allow for smaller amounts (sort of like exchanging a quarter for five nickels, except you'd snap the quarter into five pieces), and that Isaac Newton was in charge of England's mint in his later years.
So to summarize, these books give a great insight into actual life in the 1600's, while telling intriguing stories. This book in particular has a number of hair-raising stories of Jack Shaftoe's adventures, gaining (as the author puts it) all the money in the world twice and losing it twice. His Trial by Ordeal as ordered by a pirate queen is particularly good!

Finally finished!

Oh my God! Those damned books take forever to read. And they're so hard to rate too!

Put simply, this is the telling of the trials and tribulations of a slave become countess and a vagabond become slave at the turning of the XVII century.

There are two books in this one, Bonanza, the slave's journey around the world as he's attempting to make and keep a treasure. This one reads more like a traditional adventure. The second one is Juncto, the story of a countess as she's nagivating the worlds of finance and politics to carve a place for herself in the world.

That is a gross oversimplification, obviously. Stephenson is writing about the period in which the Baroque style thrived and those books are a perfect exemplar of that style. They are exuberantly detailed and ornate. Every room, every character, every event is described in minute details. All of the twists and turns are described for pages and pages.

It's a stylistical tour-de-force, but it is extremely exhausting. After ten pages of reading, my mind felt completely numb. Combine to that the fact that Stephenson spends an innumerable number of pages digressing on the minting process, natural philosophy, computing, politics, economics, war, etc. and it feels as if you're never making any progress at all.

That's why I must give this book, like the one before it, only an average grade. The story is wonderfully entertaining and the characters are delightful. The world is richly described and it is wonderful to read and learn about the immense discoveries of that time. Reading what feels like firsthand accounts of Newton and Leibniz's rivalry or accounts of the lavish parties that were held in Versailles with appearances from Louis XIV, Pontchartain and other figures of that time.

However, it's just too much. Many times I read and wondered and kept asking myself why I was going on when a summary would've been much more efficient. You feel like the story is finally going somewhere when it's cut by a long digression on the workings of the markets of Lyon and everything grinds to a halt once again.

A great book for those who love science in all of its forms and its history. A great book for those who have time on their hands and a lot of patience. Definitely not a light summer read.

Ultimately, I liked it, but I feel like I nead a long break now and probably won't read the sequel, The System of the World, for two years at least!

I don't know if the same rules apply to books as they do to movies, but I feel like there's got to be a fairly similar crossover when it comes to sequels. Ones that improve on their predecessors are rare indeed- and happily for Neal Stephenson, book two of his Baroque Cycle, The Confusion is an incredible improvement on it's predecessor Quicksilver.



First, there's the structure of it: The Confusion actually is very well organized- its actually two novels Bonanza and The Juncto that are intertwined with one another and while you think that might be confusing, the two stories actually dance around each other and come closer and closer until by the end of the book, they tie together in a perfect knot.



Bonanza tels the story of what happened to Jack Shaftoe. In Quicksilver, we leave him tied to an oar, a galley slave, sinking deeper into is syphilis. Three years later, he manages to catch a fever strong enough to sweat the disease out of him and restore him to his sanity. His shipmates during that time have pieced together a plan: they wanted to capture silver illegally shipped from Central America by a Spanish envoy. They convince the Pasha of Algiers to sponsor their heist in exchange for their freedom and a cut of the profits. They pull of the heist, but instead of silver, they find gold. They flee Spain and head to cairo where they plan to hand over the gold. They meet with Duc d'Arcachon- who is after Jack, who ruined a party in the first book and whom Eliza wants to kill for being the man responsible for enslaving her.



In Cairo, Jack cuts off the head of the Duc and declares he's doing it for a lover. The Cabal escapes and heads for India, but is waylaid and scattered by pirates. A year later and Jack gets the band back together to fight their way through to the Emperor's capital and is rewarded with a temporary Kingship in south India for his troubles. Three years later and the Cabal has built a boat made out of durable teak wood and they make a series of deals to trade their way back around the world-- first with watered steel to Japan and then picking up a cargo of mercury and getting shown the secret way across the Pacific by a Spanish galleon so they can sell their quicksilver in the silver mines of the New World and then, the get silver and around the Atlantic side of the New World and get invited back to Eliza's home in Qwghlm.



The Juncto, recounts what Eliza has been up to in all of this. Her role as a double agent for William of Orange (in the previous book) is revealed and under blackmail from d'Avaux, Eliza is forced to loan her vast fortune to support the King's war efforts. Forced to return to court life, she finds out that the duc d'Arcachon was the man who enslaved her and begins plotting to kill him only to find out that Jack has killed him instead-- and before her relationship with Jack can be revealed she married Etienne the son of the Duke and becomes Duchess of d'Arcachon. Her illegitimate child with her lover, Rossignol is kidnapped by the banker, Lother von Hacklheber, so naturally, denied revenge on d'Arcachon, she sets her sets on Hacklheber and conspires to bring him to his knees.



Meanwhile Bob Shaftoe is still kicking around, working as a soldier, first fighting in Ireland and then ending up in the Netherlands, where he finally liberates the white slave, Abigail Frome that he's loved for years. The rest of the book tracks the lives of the main characters across the next ten years. Waterhouse confronts Newton over his unstable behavior and gets him to take a job as director of the Mint working for the newly created Bank of England. Eliza survives smallpox. Princess Eleanor's daughter, Caroline is adopted by the new Queen of Prussia sophia Charlotte where she forms a friendship with Leibniz.



Everything comes back together when Jack and company arrive on Qwghlm only to step into a trap set by Etienne who wants revenge on Jack for the death of his father and being Eliza's lover. The King of France, Louis XIV however frees him- he finds out there's a traitor amongst the Cabal, who soon redeems himself by shooting Etienne dead and then killing himself to protect his family before Jack and Eliza are separated- perhaps forever and Jack is sent to London with orders to sack the Tower of London and debase England's coinage to cripple their economy.



Overall, I would pronounce this a wonderful sequel to Quicksilver. There's less focus on Daniel Waterhouse in this one and, as a result, we don't wander off into deep discussions of natural philosophy and science and calculus all that much. Keeping the focus on Jack especially creates a rip-roaring globe trotting adventure that really communicates just how big the world was back then and how small it's become now- though that might be to it's detriment these days. Stephenson's humor is dry and his wit delightful and The Confusion is an adventure in every sense of the word. We'll have to see if the third book in the trilogy can bring it home to a satisfactory end. My Grade: **** out of ****

Stephenson knows how to write long, sometimes tedious books, but they are always worth it in the end. No one does speculative and hard-science fiction like Stephenson. He's a modern day Jules Verne.

The Baroque cycle is...difficult to read, but that is because it is written in a baroque style! Isn't Stephenson clever!?

I didn't realize that I had been waiting my entire life for a pirate-adventure-feminist-comedy of manners-court intrigue--historical novel of ideas about banking until I read one. My favorite out of the Baroque Cycle, because

1) Galley slaves-Ocean's Eleven mashup
2) Sword fights
3) Alchemy
4) Samurai
5) Characters with names like Moseh de la Cruz
6) More sword fights
7) Elopement
8) Leibniz, yes the mathematician and philosopher
9) Newton, yes the mathematician and alchemist
10 ) A Court Masque
11) Samuel Pepys
12) Taking your revenge via the international money market
13) Elephants
14) The Spanish Inquisition
15) The Sun King

and much, much more.

I actually wasn't going to pick up this book after finishing  quicksilver, but I enjoyed the ending of quicksilver, so I thought I would give this one a try. The Confusion was OK. It was a slow read, that wasn't always the best escape for me from my world of studying. The end of The Confusion was well worth the read, but I can't say that I really enjoyed every step of the way. It's more... if I hadn't read the middle of the book, there would be no way to enjoy the ending. Now, I am not ready to take on the third part of the trilogy at this time; but since I own  The System of the World, I am inclined to believe that I'll be reading it soon. If nothing else, I learned that life is long and that many many things happen everyday. The surprising part is that even the smallest things can come back to make a huge difference in the end.

I read the three books of The Baroque Cycle as they were released in 2003 and 2004. They snagged three spots on the list of my all-time favorite books, and this year, I started wondering if they still belonged there. I decided to reread Quicksilver, the first in the series, but because I’m not big on rereading books (there are way too many books I haven’t read to spend time rereading), I didn’t think I would reread the other two. But the minute I finished the last page of Quicksilver, I turned to the first page of The Confusion. In the same way, I moved on to the third book, The System of the World.

Even though there wasn’t a lot of time between the original publication of the three books, I remember being a bit confused at times because I had forgotten exactly who some of the characters were. That was my fault, and it easily could have been remedied, but I was too lazy. Reading them back-to-back-to-back took care of this issue, and I think I got a lot more out of the second and third books this time than I did the first time.

And they are every bit as amazing as I remembered.

I can’t do the books justice in a description because they are so creative, not only the stories themselves, but also the style and structure. The less traditional elements serve the overall story; there are no gimmicks.

Although it’s woefully inadequate, here’s a list I used to try to explain Quicksilver to a friend.
•tIt's set from about 1670-1714, but much of the story is told in flashbacks. 
•tIt mixes real-life characters, such as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Louis XIV, with fictional characters.
•tIt is about* the beginnings of the English Royal Society**, but interweaves that story with an adventure tale about a street urchin who becomes the "King of the Vagabonds." 
•tIt provides interesting and accurate history about England's wars and takes place not just in London, but in Paris and Amsterdam as well. 
•tIt includes a mix of today's English and the English that they spoke then. 
•tIt's long, but it is so entertaining that I want it to keep going on and on.

*It is about many other things as well.
**The members of the Royal Society laid the foundation for modern science.

Read these books!

This is the second book in the Baroque Cycle. I found it to be much more enjoyable and faster paced than the first book. It is essentially two books placed into one volume and as the reader you follow two separate story lines occurring at the same time.

The flow of the book is very different in this second book than the first. Most likely this is due to the fact that I already knew the characters and their introduction stories. I would recommend this book if you enjoyed the end of Quicksilver.

In my opinion, The Confusion is the best book in this trilogy.