Odalisque: The Baroque Cycle #3 (The Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson (2006)

better than book 1, worse than book 2... i'll keep checking them out

This is the third book in the eight-book Baroque Cycle, and also the third part of the first volume. So it involves a fair amount of tying together separate characters and story arcs introduced in the first two books, Quicksilver and King of the Vagabonds, which is mostly accomplished by having Eliza meet up with Daniel Waterhouse in England. (Jack Shaftoe does not appear at all in this book, though he is alluded to a few times by other characters. His brother, Bob, does make an appearance near the end, introducing a story arc of his own that intersects with those of Eliza and Daniel.)

Structurally, this book follows the latter part of King of the Vagabonds in switching back and forth between two geographically distant characters' points of view. Where in the second book it was Eliza and Jack, here it is Eliza and Daniel, who are much more similar in temperament and habit --- both are smart, cautious characters who observe, plan, and then act, rather than heedlessly throwing themselves into the thick of things. This makes for more suspense, and more sense that each narrative is building toward something, as opposed to just listing along from one episode to the next. But it also makes for fewer entertaining incidents, so if you really liked Jack's part of the last book, you might find yourself bored by this one.

Eliza by now is ensconced in King Louis IV's court at Versailles, where she has a sponsor of sort, the comte d'Avaux, whom she met in the previous book and who has gotten her a position as governess to the children of some noblewoman. That's only a pretext for her to be at Versailles, though, where she has several more important roles she keeps shrouded in varying degrees of secrecy. Nearest to the surface, she acts as personal finance manager to practically the entire court, most of whose members are nearing bankruptcy trying to maintain their households and wardrobes at a suitable level of opulence. Known to fewer people, she corresponds with d'Avaux, keeping him updated on what goes on at court; she also corresponds with the Natural Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who has published his calculus. She uses a couple of different codes to write her letters; the letters she writes to d'Avaux are written in a simpler code that she anticipates will be broken by Dutch spies, who are her real audience for those missives. (D'Avaux, it was revealed in the last book, is working to undermine King Louis, but is not pro-Dutch either. I'm not 100% sure how much his agenda and Eliza's overlap, though I don't THINK he knows the Dutch are reading his correspondence ...) Anyway, at the highest level of secrecy, she's spying for William, the Prince of Orange, who intends to seize power in England.

And, reading that paragraph, you will start to see why I don't like the title of this installment in the Baroque Cycle. An odalisque is a woman whose defining feature is her idleness; she's kept by others to be idle, and beautiful, for them. Eliza, who has to be the one the title refers to, is dizzyingly active ALL THE TIME, simultaneously doing two or three incredibly difficult things, and making sure no one sees her doing them, at any given time. Stephenson might well have chosen the title ironically; that's the only way I can see it making any sense.

I mentioned that Daniel Waterhouse comes back into play in this book; he does, and when we meet him he has come into his own as a political power player. He's still a Fellow of the Royal Society, but he doesn't conduct any research of his own. Instead, he hangs around King James II's dwindling court, watching his doctors try to treat his advanced syphilis and talking with other people about what's going to happen next. He intercedes on behalf of his fellow Puritans, getting them released from jail whenever they get rounded up on suspicion of fomenting another rebellion (remember that in the first book, Daniel's father Drake was instrumental in bringing Oliver Cromwell to power, and was rewarded for this by having his head cut off once Charles II was restored to the throne). While he's watching and waiting, the Glorious Revolution happens around him. He knows he has played some role in bringing it about, but he mostly just wanders around dazed once it actually starts unfolding. Mostly, he tries to keep an eye on his friend Isaac Newton, who is going off the deep end, abandoning physics for some sort of esoteric metaphysics. His parts of the book, especially compared to Eliza's and especially toward the end, are anticlimactic.

The voice actress portraying Eliza in her epistolary sections nailed it. THAT is Eliza, not some faux sultry kitten.

I thought this was more of a science fiction novel. I just don't care for this type of story. Only read about 30 pages at the beginning and about 20 pages toward the end. Nothing caught my interest.

Read book one & loathed it. I planned to get to this & I might someday...but for now, I'm logging it as ejected and awarding it one star based on my opinion of the preceding novel, which was too corny for my tastes.

As with all books so far in this series, interesting reading, not sure where it is going. Traces a time period in the late 1600s when the world was quite a bit different. Royalty lived in their own world of power, seduction, and intrique. This book covers events in France related to taking the Alsace-Loraine area and expand their territory to the Rhine while the Netherlands had their eyes set on England. The characters are interesting and the audio book was great. Overall though, I felt the story line just is not quite there yet.

Not bad, but a bit of a letdown after the first two books.

https://ucplbookchallenge.blogspot.co...

not quite as good as book 2 "king of the vagabonds". still much better than book 1, which was often like reading a text book.

So this is my quick review of the first 3 volumes of The Baroque Cycle (8 volume version). I originally read the first book in this series when it first came out way back in 2003. I started the second book, the Confusion, shortly after it came out but for whatever reason I could not get through it. I listened to these on audio, and they are interesting but honestly it is hard to keep track of what is going on. They jump around in time and from character to character and it is hard to see how all the plot threads are connected. I had planned on just barreling through the whole series but I decided to take a break. I feel like maybe I should have been taking notes to help keep track of things, but that is not usually something I look for in my fiction. I will try the next book in a couple of weeks and see how it goes.

Not quite as good as the first two books. Maybe partially because of its format where a lot of the story was conveyed by reading letters that one of the protagonists sent. Still a decent read.