Confused Impressions

[ellarien]

The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson

It must be about 25 years since I last sat down to write about a book of fiction, so please bear with me.



This is, of course, the second volume of the Baroque Cycle, coming after the impressive, if sprawling, Quicksilver.

The writing is distinctive, sprinkled with archaic spellings and the occasional sly contemporary pun. It's odd, but it works; the characters belong in their turn-of-the-eighteenth-century world, but the narrative voice belongs firmly to the turn of the twenty-first. At times, the description evokes images like contemporary woodcuts, teeming with grotesque life, stark with the ugliness of the times. The plot spans the globe, rambling from France to Egypt to India and back by way of Japan and Mexico, pausing occasionally for breathtaking set-pieces of battle and party and storm. There's gold and silver, mercury and phosphorus, smallpox and scurvy, piracy and high finance. The genre-ambiguity of Quicksilver lifts a little; the unnatural longevity of the mysterious Enoch Root is out in the open, at least. There was a moment when I thought that we might be in a world where necromancy plainly works, but then that curtain dropped back into place.

And then there's the ending. In the last fifty pages or so, the plot twists so often it ties itself in a knots and turns inside out. It all makes sense in the end, and most of it was foreshadowed, if subtly and a long way back, but it all unravels and re-ravels itself at bewildering speed.

I look forward to reading the final volume, but it may be a while. For me, these books read fast, but require a substantial block of free time -- not something I can get through in bits and pieces on the bus even if their physical bulk allowed that.