Customer Reviews

The System Of The World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3)

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In 1714, Daniel Waterhouse finishes his long trip from America to England. He is prepared to mediate a vicious argument between Newton and Leibniz about who invented calculus first. But he is quickly caught up in diverse adventures: building a logic mill, sleuthing out a bomb maker, playing shell games with gold, and planning jailbreaks. Jack Shaftoe pops in here and there sowing mayhem and counterfeit coins. Eliza, the Countess de la Zeur by way of being "Good with Money", continues her behind-the-scenes royal intrigues and her efforts to end slavery.

Conflicts galore weave together into a complex tapestry: the power struggle between the Whigs and the Tories, the battle between Newton the Minter and Jack the Coiner, the feuding calculus inventors, and the clash between alchemy and science. In the end it all boils down to this: will the new system of the world be based on free markets and science? Or feudalism and alchemy?

The third and final book in the Baroque Cycle is just as weighty as the first two. It features a quick synopsis of Quicksilver and The Confusion for those who need a refresher. Even with the summary, I wouldn't advise starting with the third book. Each of the books in the series has its own character. Quicksilver was all about set-up, so while it was rich in detail and characters, it could be slow and a bit disjointed at times. The Confusion was full of madcap adventures and the pieces just flew around the board. The System of the World wraps all of the previous threads together, and strikes a nice balance between philosophy, intrigue, and action.

Stephenson keeps up the expected torrent of words, but as with the other two books, he keeps your attention with an iron fist of plot in a velvet glove of delightful prose. Stephenson manages to seamlessly combine serious discussions, obscure trivia, and profound silliness. As a reader, you have to pay the same attention to all, because you never know what small detail the plot is going to hang on next.

Daniel Waterhouse is the driving character for most of this book. If you loved The Confusion because it centered on Jack and Eliza, you might be disappointed in the smaller roles they play in the third book. But if you can get past that disappointment, you will find that Daniel has evolved into a more interesting and active character than he was in Quicksilver.

The Baroque Cycle requires a substantial investment of time and attention, but it is well worth the effort. The System of the World is a satisfying end to a great series. With Stephenson, as in life, the journey is more important than the destination, and he definitely gives you a lot of journey in the 3000-or-so page trilogy.

The Baroque Cycle as a whole is one the most wholly remarkable series of books written by any author that we are aware of. It is an important read for anyone willing and able to change their thinking about how things work, how societies come to be, and how one should go about living theirs. Its scholarship is breathtaking. Its point supremely important and accurate. The Baroque Cycle will not have so much an effect on the genre of speculative fiction as it will on the fiction as a whole and answering the question of why do people bother to read? It is to read things like The Baroque Cycle that we read: to discover things about ourselves and the world around us. It will be interesting to see if, in 10 or 15 years, other authors dare to extend their concept of science fiction in to the past as Stephenson has done.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS:

Anyone who is reading this review has probably already invested a substantial amount of time in reading Quicksilver and The Confusion. It is unthinkable that, after reading those books, that they will not attempt System of the World. We will not deter them--they should run forth and purchase because it is refreshing to see such a work of astonishing scope come to a sort of satisfactory conclusion. The Baroque Cycle as a whole we feel will ultimately become a defining work in literature marking the early 21st century. The only thing that may hold it back is its length, which is daunting but wholly necessary.

WHO SHOULD PASS:

There may be a certain segment reading this series only for Jack Shaftoe and his exploits. While he is here in this book, he is not the focus and he seems somehow diminished in his age. We can't imagine anyone continuing to read these books only for adventure narrative but, if that was your main draw, it is largely absent in System and is much more focused on philosophy, economics, and politics.

READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW AT INCHOATUS.COM

My five stars are specifically for The System of the World, not the entire series.

In the acknowledgements, Stephenson refers to a mid-course correction with regards to his writing approach. He does not describe what it is, but I think I know. In the first book, there are many passages that are so oblique, tangential, and orthogonal only to style that I found it difficult to stay with the program the whole way through. This tendency lessened in The Confusion and nearly disappears here in System. Good for him, good for us.

My only real complaint for this book is Mr. Stephenson's need to provide painfully detailed driving directions of old London. I appreciate his descriptive powers (I really do!) but describing what street flows into which, where, and whether to turn left or right, &c. [ ;-) ] is a bit irritating. His map on the inside cover is not detailed enough for following along, assuming that you accept such embellishment is necessary for advancing the story. E.g., one of the two climaxes is at Tyburn, the streets around which are described for PARAGRAPHS. Go ahead and try to find it on the map.

Why am I bitching? I have no idea. I loved the characters, loved this book, enjoyed the Confusion and had faith through Quicksilver. Maybe I'm put off because he's SO CLOSE to being a true literary genius of my generation, but he's not QUITE there yet. Hey, there seems to be a 200 year gap for him to work with now...

The Baroque Cycle is an epic work, which highlights Mr. Stephenson's meticulous and exhaustive research into 17th and 18th century European, Asian, and North African cultures. That is both the strength and the weakness of this series. This is not exactly light summer reading, and much of the content, particularly with respect to the Newton-Leibniz thread, assumes a great deal of familiarity with the subject matter.

That said, this series, along with the loosely-related Cryptonomicon, sets the bar very high for the genre of historical fiction. (I know, you will find it in the Sci-fi section at Barnes and Noble, but only because the publisher is afraid that fans of Mr. Stephenson will never figure out what happened if they move him over to the literary fiction section, where he belongs.)

The first two novels of this series swing back and forth between the pragmatic and fantastical elements of the book, and the tension between alchemy and empirical science is a central theme throughout. Ultimately, Mr. Stephenson does a good job of bringing the two competing theories to an uneasy truce. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that this is fiction, so the truce that Mr. Stephenson reaches does not necessarily have to agree with the historical victory of pure science over alchemy.

The last 150 or so pages are pure Solomonic Gold. You will want to resist the temptation to burn through them in one sitting. Rather, cherish some of Stephenson's best writing to date. I don't happen to think that this series is his best work -- it gets too bogged down in details and loses focus, particularly during the aptly named "Confusion" -- but the reader who sticks it out through the series' middle lull will be richly rewarded by this book.

System of the World brings the Baroque Cycle in line with the high-octane, dense-yet-readable style that Mr. Stephenson perfected in Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. If you liked those books and felt a little let down by the Confusion, this book is for you.

I just finished this series, and I can now safely say Neal Stephenson is my favorite writer. To give you some points of comparison, my previous favorite was Philip K. Dick. Here is a list of my other favorites: Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, Christopher Buckley, Robert E. Howard, and John Keegan (historian).

So why is NS my favorite now? He does everything my favorite writers do--word play and dialogue like Shakespeare, philosophy like Lewis, weird distinct characters like Heinlein, truly surprising and novel ideas like PKD, wit like Chris Buckley, swashbuckling adventure like Howard, and living breathing history like Keegan.

I just finished the cycle, over 2,400 pages, and I want to read it all over again from start to finish; in fact, I did just that today, at least in bits and pieces, re-reading the first meeting of Jack and Eliza, Waterhouse's first appearance as an old man, etc. The cycle shows a rich love of continuity and depth of meaning in which I stand in awe, especially as an aspring author myself. The entire cycle begins and ends with a hanging. It begins with Waterhouse being summoned on a mission we (and he) understand not for 2,000+ pages, but, just as in life, eventually we can make out some purpose to it all once we arrive.

While some passages SEEM long-winded, it all matters. Every description of the streets of London, etc. have meaning to the entire book. Those who say the plot of the cycle could be told in 50 pages are correct. This is just one of the many things I love about the books--they are distinctly not about plot. Rather than discursively going on and on with plot, the cycle focuses on thematics, character, and development of an idea. Those who read the last discourse between Leibniz and Newton (arguably the whole point of the cycle itself) and think NS fumbles the ball in the scene miss the whole purpose of the cycle. Everything in the cycle is about reconciling fact with faith, science with religion. Not only does NS not fumble the ball in that later scene, he amazingly makes the point of the book real to modern readers as the princess sets the ball--er, globe on fire, pointing out that if we humans cannot settle the classic argument of L. and N., then we might as well set the world on fire and continue the pointless destruction that makes up the vast core of the plot.

I love the cycle for its high-brow and low-brow moments, and everything in between. Like Shakespeare, one can see it all as swordfights and bawdy wordplay, or one can trust the writer and look deeper and see the agonizing humanity of it all.

I am going to have a hard time reading anything else for awhile because this was so good.

I have just finished this book. I have read it in five minute to half hour blocks since the day it was released. I have loved this entire ~3000 page work. The primary feeling I got from this final volume was that it was the longest painful/exquisite tease I've ever read. Unfortunately the payoff was a bit of a letdown. The main questions of the trilogy, Will Jack and Eliza reconcile? and will Newton and Leibnitz reconcile? are answered. Neither are answered in a way that matches the buildup. 2900 pages of buildup and 100 pages of resolution. Several times while reading these books I thought of Suskind's _Perfume_ which takes place in roughly the same time and place. That book which is an amazing read, has an orgiastic ending that left me stunned for days. You will not get that from the Baroque Cycle.

The good thing is that Stephenson's many tangents are executed with his usual skill. I just love reading the things that he writes. The pleasure is not in the finish but in getting there. Some of the other reviews have complained about the length of the books, suggesting that they would be better had they been edited into a shorter work. I disagree. The glory of a Stephenson book is in all of the detail, all of the tangents, and all of the exposition that you get along the way. I probably would have loved the books more if they were even LONGER!! Give me more! In fact I will likely pick up Quilcksilver and start all over again when I get home.

The book being reviewed here is one of three books which are from the Baroque Cycle Trilogy by Neal Stephenson. Since there does not yet appear to be one title under which I can post my review, I have triplicated this review and placed the same review under all three titles. The sequence is Quicksilver, The Confusion, and the System of the World.

I read voraciously of both fiction, non-fiction and that in-between category of historic fiction in which one can learn considerably about the age but still enjoy the plot of an ideal narrative, or, in the case of the Baroque Cycle, an intertwining of several narratives. In the last say, three years, I have read literally hundreds of books and I can unequivocally name the three most influential works (apart from "Postcards of Nursing," the one I wrote myself, of course,) during that period. They are the 20 Aubrey/Maturin historic novels of Patrick O'Brian, "Shantaram," by Gregory David Roberts, and the three books in the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.

I find it hard to critique Stephenson's work. His writing and research genius is so far beyond my poor abilities that if I come across an aspect of his writing which gives me pause, I have to look to my own deficiencies rather than his. But nowhere did I find the book to be condescending. And the subtle (and not so subtle) humor was superb.

And the characters: Ah the characters. When I had finished the books, I felt I *knew* Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Hooke, and Wren. Half-Cocked Jack and Dappa were real to me. Eliza lived and breathed.

Also, I began to discover that I was beginning to understand the international monetary system and the trappings of power surrounding it. I began to appreciate the conventions of letter-writing, the mind set when years might go by between a correspondence and its reply. I felt I understood something of the tangled tapestries of royal affairs in the 18th century. I was transported. Utterly. Words fail me.

Each book in the trilogy was better written than its predecessor, and the first one was superb. When I was reading O'Brian's novels, and was on say, novel #5 in the series, I was in heaven, knowing that I had 15 and a half (so to speak) more novels to go. When I was finally finished with 20, I started grasping at straws. I went to see the movie which, to my delight, showed me something of the ship HMS Surprise, but to my extreme disappointment, miscast Maturin so badly that it robbed the film of its portrayal of one of the most complex characters in literature. I read the unfinished #21. Not enough. It was only when I came across Quicksilver that I began to let go of the O'Brian characters and came to "invest" in Stephenson's.

And yet, by the time I was halfway through the "System of the World," the final of the three books, I began anticipatory grieving. I knew I might not see these folks again in such a personal light. They had become my friends. The fact that I had already read Cryptonomicon, a work by Stephenson based in part on one of the descendants of Dr. Waterhouse, was not a consolation. I miss those folks. I will probably read the books again in a year or two, but until then, since O'Brian is dead, and since probably Roberts will not top his first novel, I will have to wait for another of Stephenson's books. By the way, and this is not a spoiler, the resolution of the Baroque Cycle is thoroughly complete and intensely satisfying. It's just too bad it's over.

This three-volume, 9-book set is, believe it or not, a *prequel* to his previous massive effort, Cryptonomicon. In the Baroque Cycle we find the ancestors of no less than NINE characters of that modern day tale of cryptography. But the Baroque trilogy covers much more ground. The fictional characters are used to take the reader through the lives of very real historical characters. The topics that Stephenson deals with in detail are the history of banking, medicine, international finance, cryptography, espionage, mathematics and computing. Not a light read by any stretch of the imagination, it is still enjoyable.

On a personal note, I gained great insight into the turbulent period when William of Orange chased the Jacobites out of Ireland. I had always wondered why my ancestors departed Ireland for Penn's Colony in 1689 until Stephenson documented William's march across Ireland in that same year. My pacifist Quaker ancestors had seen enough.

I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the three volumes of the BAROQUE CYLCLE. Even the middle volume did not suffer from the normal "middle of the trilogy blues". This volume, though is the trump card. It too is a masterpiece.

In volume one, the reader was treated to a series of narratives that bounced back and forth between the latter 1600s and the early 1700s. The same principle character, Daniel Waterhouse, appeared sometimes as a young man in England and sometimes as an old man in New England. After the first third, we are left hanging with Daniel on the way back to England and nothing more is heard of this story line until volume 3. Most Frustrating!

The wait was worth it though. All of the many threads are tied together nicely and the individual stories come together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts . (And the parts are very good indeed!) It is, dare I say it, like a masterful baroque organ fugue.

Jack Shaftoe, the King of the Vagabonds, has been given a mission by Louis XIV of France. He is to destroy the English system of currency set up by Isaac Newton, the greatest genius ever. Louis's hold on him is through the one woman who Jack really loves. Jack may not be well educated but his daring and cunning make him a formidable adversary.

Daniel Waterhouse has been called back to England by the heiress to the English throne. He is to patch up relations between Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Liebnitz, the two greatest minds in an age filled with them. He becomes sidetracked by a plot on his life. The solution to that plot sets him to scheming against those who most trust him.

The story seems deceptively simple but it is not. It abounds with unexpected twists and turns, lots of humor and even more trivia for those who are fascinated by the period. Those who do not like such details would be better served with another book but for me, this entire series was delightful!

The System of the World is the brilliant capstone to the Baroque Cycle, a 3,000 page tome whose remarkable scope is only matched by its near limitless intrigue & implications.

Where to begin?

1) this story is ultimately one of eternal hope, victory & the liberation of the "anima" (soul) of mankind.
2) this trilogy is about enduring love.
3) it is about discipline of the psyche & the reconciliation of the physical self & emotional passions with rational thought.
4) it is about political & mechanical innovation & processes, as well as political & mechanical machinations
5) this is the story which makes you want to leave a mark on the future by writing a worthy history while you are alive (in spite of the inevitability that future generations will not be able to cite you as the author).
6) this is The Sytem of a World & Universe built of pulleys & ropes, dictated by tension, torque, gravity & hard fast rules.
While the heavens & Earth may appear a system of chaotic happenstance, have no doubt they were built with foresight & care... and are governed by those who built them.

Stephenson is the best living author I have read in my lifetime. I feel honored to have had this comet pass through my neck of the solar system. This Baroque Cycle is the gold standard for all of Stephenson's peers. I firmly believe he will be likened in the years that come to master Tolkein himself.