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Quicksilver: Volume One of The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson

[A review of the complete novel The Baroque Cycle has been posted.]

In the opening chapter of his 1999 work Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson wrote, "Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume...." At the time one could easily have dismissed that comment as a typically Stephensonian, offhand "but that's another story" narrative device. It turns out, however, that the author had something much grander in mind: The Baroque Cycle, all three thousand or so pages of it, delves into that issue, and many others.

Quicksilver is the first volume of the Cycle and contains three books within its hefty 927 pages. It quickly plunges us into a dense, intricate, epic tale of Science versus Alchemy, with healthy doses of political intrique and high finance, set in the late 17th Century. The title itself can be construed as a metaphor for the multiple layers and themes of the novel, for "quicksilver" contains a wealth of connotations. As a noun it is the element mercury, "a heavy silver-white poisonous metallic element that is liquid at ordinary temperatures and is used especially in scientific instruments." Mercury is used in many of the experiments conducted by the Natural Philosophers in the novel, and even is consumed as a tonic against syphillis by several characters (though it does them little good). As an adjective, quicksilver means "mercurial, characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood," which describes this novel quite well. It especially has a tendency to careen from ribald comedy to dreadful tragedy within the space of a few sentences.

If we wander further into the realm of metaphor, we have:

• The Philosophick Mercury, the symbol of "mind" sought by Alchemists.
• Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, who presides (figuratively, as well as literally, in the form of statuary) over the financial exchanges of Amsterdam and London.
• Hermes is the Greek equivalent of Mercury, and Hermes Trismegistus was "the alleged teacher of the magical system known as Hermetism of which high magic and alchemy are thought to be twin branches." I.e., the patron god of Alchemy. (This just goes to show how obscure the multi-faceted title can get.)

As an historical fiction, the novel places fictitious characters side-by-side with real-life historical figures. Book One introduces one of the main characters, Daniel Waterhouse, college schoolmate of one Isaac Newton (yes, that Isaac Newton), and covers perhaps a dozen years (all told in flashback) culminating at about the time that Newton invented "the calculus." Book Two backtracks in time to introduce the other leads, Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. She is an escaped harem slave turned financial player, and winds up the Countess of Zeur, a pawn (perhaps) in the royal court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Books One and Two tell wholly divergent stories (excepting the appearances of a few common characters), while Book Three proceeds with both, leaping in chapters from Daniel to Jack to Eliza, with the implication that their fortunes will soon be closely intertwined.

If those names seem vaguely familiar to readers of Cryptonomicon, they should be. The Waterhouse and Shaftoe families are central to both works. One could consider Cryptonomicon to be, perhaps, a 20th Century "prequel" to the Baroque Cycle. (One character, Enoch Root, is apparently ageless and appears in both eras, making it quite obvious that each story takes place in the same Universe.)

What I've been pondering most while reading this tome is the close similarities between the 17th Century players and their 20th Century descendants. Jack Shaftoe, also known as "Half-Cocked Jack" both due to a physical impediment and as an allusion to his rash behaviour, is a wild-eyed vagabond and privateer; if he'd lived during World War Two he might have wound up as a crazy, gung-ho Marine just like his scion, Bobby Shaftoe. And both Daniel and Lawrence Waterhouse are mathematician/scientists who come from a long line of itinerant Protestant preachers (as is, not coincidentally, Stephenson himself).

It made me think: three hundred years, and nothing has changed in these families. It left my disbelief unsuspended for a while, until I thought of an example closer to home. I work in computers. My dad is a professor (emeritus) of computer science, which at the time of his degrees was a discipline of electrical engineering. His father was a mechanical engineer. My grandfather on my mother's side was a chemical engineer, and his father was an horologist, owning a clock and watch shop. That's four generations of scientist-engineers. I guess there's something to be said for a family having a bias toward occupational similarity (even though if I go further back in my genealogy, farming becomes much more prevalent).

So how is Stephenson's magnum opus so far? It's fun, and entertaining, and I am certainly eager for the second and third volumes to be released. The science is interesting, and the action is hilarious. As is typical of his work, Stephenson does an excellent job of maintaining the perspectives of the main characters, as each chapter is told from the viewpoint and with the voice of whichever character it centers on, rather than some omniscient third person. It's a terrifically complex tale, filled with deep philosophical discussions, a broad historical scope, and more than a few references to the Cryptonomicon of John Wilkins, a (fictitious) work which of course figures prominently in Stephenson's previous, eponymous novel. To be honest, Quicksilver's drawbacks are entirely the fault of this reader, not the author. I found the political intrigue somewhat confusing at first, primarily because of all the multiple titles held by the nobility that are used interchangably with their names. And for someone who never needed to go much beyond Economics 101, some of the wheeling and dealing was obscure to me. I began to be concerned that somewhere in the second or third volume I will find myself hopelessly lost, and when it's all over I'll probably need to read it all again — this time with bookmarks stuck into all the pages containing family trees of the royal houses.

The fact that the three volumes' release dates average six months apart also doesn't help, and for a while there my reading speed was treading an odd balance between biding my time with Quicksilver — to shorten the hiatus between it and The Confusion (the aptly-titled Volume Two, due out in April, 2004) — and quickly finishing it so that I might move on to something else in the interim. I chose the latter, meaning that I'm even more certain to be lost by the time The System of the World (Volume Three) comes out in September, 2004. (Then again, Volume One wrapped up fairly neatly, so continuing the story might not be as perplexing as I once feared.)

One last recommendation: if you read Quicksilver, take a couple of days after finishing it before starting something new. I did not, delving straightaway into O'Brian's Master and Commander, and found it took me about a hundred pages to put Stephenson's writing style out of my mind and get the feel for another author's very different prose. Caveat lector.

By , 04 February 2004.