he weight of Quicksilver, just less than four pounds, is a jail. Deep inside the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson's vast new novel can be discerned, pacing the prison yard, a small slim underlit curtain-raiser of a tale whose task it is to warm us up for the real performance to come, the massive drama Stephenson is presumably planning to unfold in stages two and three of what he is calling The Baroque Cycle. Volume Two of this cycle is to be entitled The Confusion, and Volume Three The System of the World, a phrase already associated here with Sir Isaac Newton, who loomed large over late 17th-century Europe, where almost all of Quicksilver is set. The next stages will depict in story form the re-coding of the ancient world into the modernized world we think we know; they will unfold the story of the making of the System of the World, whose lenses are the way we look now (I guess).
But whether or not these proposed volumes do in fact fulfill a remit of this sort, what seems clear at this point is that the quicksilver heart of Quicksilver beats solely to rouse us for this full drama, this panoptic staging of thought, this new story of the world (I guess). It is also clear that most of the carapace—the jail—the bulk of the book is an ash-heap of the been, a burden of detritus that Stephenson must wish us, in our minds' eyes, to shuck before we really start. Quicksilver is a small tale of astonishing, nightmarish, arousing acumen caught inside a gigantic tome whose badness is of such deliberated immensity that it beggars description.
So what has happened here? Perhaps the past. The Baroque Cycle seems to have been designed to serve as a vast prelude to Cryptonomicon (1999), Stephenson's masterpiece to date, a book that seemed to lay down rules by which the entire world could be understood as storyable. Set in World War II and the 1990s, Cryptonomicon was supersaturated with story to tell, implications and arguments to roll in its tongue, and vibrant with the joy of it all. I don't think I'm alone in taking it as one of the two or three contemporary SF novels to give us some real understanding of how we govern—code—instruct the world we live in. It is a very great accomplishment of the fiction of our times, it is what SF is all about. But it renders anything Stephenson now writes—certainly any novel explicitly connected to it, like Quicksilver—vulnerable to intolerably high expectations. Indeed, it may be for this reason that Stephenson sidestepped the Sequel Thing and has written instead a kind of travel guide designed to lead us up to the earlier book, a manual to be studied before parole can be granted. Certainly the prison-house labyrinths of enumeration and anecdotage that fasten Quicksilver to its 17th-century setting do seem primarily meaningful as lessons in that which is to be transcended: lessons in the pre-modern world, in the alchemical ways of "knowing" that, faced with the vast clutter of the matter of the world, cannot transmute shit into gold. So maybe what has happened here is that Quicksilver really is a prison, a compendium of the muddle of the world that only the real story (which Stephenson does not tell in this book) can compute. It is only the real story that could ever be described as being about quicksilver, which is which mercury or Mercury—the God who is the Network of the Gods. Maybe what has happened here is that Neal Stephenson really meant to do it.
The unbearable lightness of mathematics
Book One of Quicksilver begins in 1713, in Massachusetts, with Enoch Root, the very first word of the several hundred thousands being "Enoch": so we are warned, we are smack in the world of Cryptonomicon, whose most mysterious figure is Enoch Root, a seemingly immortal magus or Secret Master who advances his secret agenda for the world mainly by advising and/or manipulating the more human protagonists of the book. Beyond seeming to wish to change things for the better, Enoch has no ultimate goals that either volume has yet divulged, though there are knots here and there that, when pulled tight, may generate sense: Here in Quicksilver, for instance, we learn that Gottfried Leibnitz has founded a journal (in 1682) called Acta Eruditorum; in Cryptonomicon, we now remember (if we're lucky) that Enoch's email address is root@eruditorum. But that's as far as we get.
In any case, here in Quicksilver, back in 1713, Enoch has sought out Daniel Waterhouse (ancestor of the Waterhouses who figure so largely in Cryptonomicon) and persuades him to return to England, where a long-standing feud between Newton and Leibnitz, over who invented the differential calculus, has become poisonous. Just as Lawrence Waterhouse serves as an inspiring epigone of Alan Turing during World War II, so his ancestor Daniel has spent decades (the 1660s and 1670s, mainly) nurturing the unworldly maguslike Newton as he sleepwalks toward the Principia Mathematica (1685-1786). Daniel boards the England-bound Minerva, a ship captained by a man named Van Hoek with one arm (there is also a Mrs. Goose in the vicinity), and begins the journey eastward.
It may be a joke on Stephenson's part, or perhaps he just needed to keep the 1713 strand of Quicksilver dyked off from the main story—but the Minerva is caught by unfavorable winds while still in sight of America, and only on page 335, after a long battle with the pirate Blackbeard, does the becalmed Waterhouse—who has spent his (and our) enforced leisure hours remembering his early life in England—actually begin to make headway toward the Old World, at which point this 1713 strand of story disappears utterly, along with any reference to the urgent mission that brings Waterhouse to England (and brought us into the book); presumably, at some point in the next volume or so, the voyage will recommence. The great bulk of Book One, having no trip to complete, focuses instead on Waterhouse's memories-while-pent of his life between about 1660 and 1773 as a scholar and mathematical philosopher. Like many 17th-century polymaths (and rather like a Heinlein Competent Man), he is a kind of jack-of-all-trades, and in most eras would have been exceedingly eminent. But he is surrounded by genius—Newton and Leibnitz, and Robert Hooke (a clever choice on Stephenson's part, as Hooke has only very recently begun to be recognized as one of the prime intellects of the 17th century), and Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle—and he takes his colouring from them. Most everyone belongs to the Royal Society, awash in whose deliberations many pages of Quicksilver hyperventilate; occasionally Enoch Root passes on a sage hint.
There is one other, slightly earlier figure: John Wilkins (1614-1672), author in real life of The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), a kind of proto-SF disquisition on the possibility of other habitable worlds; and also the author of an early 1640s book here called Cryptonomicon, a profound study of codes and ciphers within a frame of understanding that displays the world in terms of decodable information: a world that can take messages. In the real world, Wilkins was the author of a book called Mercury; or, the Secret Messenger (1741), which is about the same thing. Like Leibnitz after him, Wilkins' primary project is what Stephenson's own Cryptonomicon is all about:
To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it all down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge out but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers—and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end....
There is perhaps a steampunkish flavor to Stephenson's description of this 17th-century project, here and elsewhere in Quicksilver. He may use the word "computer" a little too often for comfort—on page 661, for instance, he actually has one of his characters refer to a "digital computer," a phrase that could not have meant then anything remotely like what it means now, or what we are meant to assume it means here. And there may be something overneat in his conflation of philosophy, mathematics, politics and the invention of the stock exchange into an isomorphic set of iterations of the freedoms gained through the "quicksilver" of computation. But it is a triumph of the book that it convinces us that something very radical was indeed happening in 17th-century London, that "to translate all human knowledge [into] numbers" was a genuine goal of real people of high genius; that great minds were thinking thoughts that had not been thought before, struggling to map the inconceivable. At one point Waterhouse speaks bewilderedly to Newton:
"The inner workings of gravity, you seem to be saying, are beyond the grasp, or even the reach, of Natural Philosophy. To whom should we appeal, then? Metaphysicians? Theologians? Sorcerers?"
"They are all the same to me," Isaac said, "and I am one."
The first of these two quotations from Quicksilver gives us much of argument of the book in a nutshell; and the second acutely renders the state of mind of Isaac Newton, who was a genius more or less beyond our ken. Both these quotations are instinct with story: The first makes recondite material visible to the mind; and the second, in its context, flares on the page, lighting up Newton in his trance. But we must return to the enormity of Quicksilver itself; in order to find concise quotations that justly demonstrated the strengths of the novel and of Stephenson's overall grasp, I had to travel a long way past Book One. The first quote is from page 476, toward the end of Book Two; and the second from page 688, well into the final book. So what's been happening here? What's been happening between the sentences of story?
A promise of more cunning things to come
We enter Book Two, which for long stretches buttonholes us with an extremely enjoyable imitation of the mode of the picaresque. Its main characters, both new to Quicksilver, are Jack Shaftoe, whose family also figures in Cryptonomicon, and a young woman named Eliza who was sold as a child into Turkish slavery but who has remained a virgin all this time; both are the kind of figures found in the great picaresque novels of the Western world. Also typical are the venue, a series of war-torn desolated landscapes; the geographical drift of Book Two's storyline across Europe from Vienna to Versailles and beyond; the savagery of the events it depicts, because the 17th was one of the centuries in which Christians were very eager to kill each other for being Christians; and the sad fate of the picaro at its heart, for Jack ends up a galley slave, mad from syphilis, destined to die. This is pleasurable, for stretches; but it is a diversion. Eliza, who becomes a spy and something of a cryptoanalyst and helps invent the stock exchange, and who sleeps (eventually) with people it is important for Quicksilver and its sequels to be on the right side of, could have been delivered to the central line of story in a few dozen pages. But it takes Stephenson something like 105,000 words to carry her home; and no pleasures of the text can really compensate for the loss any reader experiences when a scherzo romp like Book Two is caught up in nitpicking cobwebs of detail work. The effect, strangely enough, is not of weight. The unnecessary passages of a book like Quicksilver drown Story in noise, which is exactly what a story is not. A story that cannot be heard is a book that does not cast its weight. It is a book without a shadow.
There may be some point, all the same, to some of the crepuscular Europe-After-the-Rain meanders of Book Two. We do feel a small thrill, for instance, when the codes that "Vagabonds" use throughout Book Two are described as "networks of information, spreading all over the world, functioning smoothly even when damaged. ... ," for we suddenly think of Mercury, and of Enlightenment, and of systems (like extremely long books, perhaps?) that incorporate lots of redundancy, so they can function smoothly even when damaged. ...
It may also amuse the reader to find that the Scheherazade routine Eliza utilizes on page 386—she stops telling stories halfway through, so her listeners will keep her alive in order to hear what happens next—is only referred to by name on page 852, by which point it's too late to kill the book. And when Eliza and Jack link up with a weird character out of the commedia dell'arte known only (in Book Two) as the Doctor, it is oddly thrilling to realize that this Doctor is in fact Leibnitz himself, and that Stephenson has very cleverly re-imagined him as stage figure, and that this "Doctor" is prestidigitating "Europe."
And, finally, Book Two overflows with the literal shittiness of the world, a motif that permeates the whole of Quicksilver. Vast gushes of disgusting effluvia shit from every orifice of almost every character, almost constantly. Deaths are described in terms of the liquids spewed by the dying. Food is likely to be disgusting, and vomited. Sex is effluents. Childbirth involves a lot of horrified male staring at vaginas, a lot of waiting for something unspeakable to emerge dripping. This is all good 17th-century stuff, though I wonder about how the word "vagina" is actually used here, and it all intensifies Stephenson's larger argument, which some of his protagonists historically espoused: that the world is in its essence fecal, and that to de-code the world is to apply an enema.
But each one of these lessons has been extracted from meanders of story, not shown us. Surrounded by size, by the terrible lightness of been, we clutch at straws.
Coda. Though most of these problems persist until the final page is turned, most of Book Three is more fun than most of what precedes it. Politics (Charles II of England dies, and the demented James II takes over until he's booted out) and scatology come more to the fore. A 23-page chapter is presented in the form of a play, underlining the sense that Stephenson thinks of 17th-century Europe as a theater, and of Waterhouse and the others as buskined players in the great Thought Experiment of becoming Modern; this gives perspective, cuts sight lines through the warehouses of size. And Eliza foxes most of the crowned heads of Europe en route to London, and before the end of the tale has become the Duchess of Qwghlm (see Cryptonomicon for some hilarious descriptions of this dreadful rain-soaked island off the coast of England; it is pronounced with most of its consonants silent), all of which seems fun enough.
But there is an issue here. It is less misogyny on Stephenson's part than what reads to me as an incapacity to write women. The Eliza of these pages reads like a boy-geek's fantasy, a female who sounds like a man pretending to be an out-front gal, a guy who (just kidding!) gets a bit boastful about the alluring female bits he's magically donned, for as long as the vaudeville of pretend history lasts. Eliza seems, in other words, strangely immune to the appalling things she sees and experiences; she is more like some Temporal Adventuress out of Michael Moorcock than a real person caught in real time eating the real shit of the real world.
Still, we do need to remember, even after being teased for 500 pages, that the heart of Stephenson's enterprise is precisely to elucidate the loosening of the real, to delineate the liberation of the world from the ash of unsort. Eliza must be seen as part of that process of prying free (I guess). This sense of the meaning of her long presence in the text gains credence from the last two chapters of Quicksilver, both of which raise the ante of the telling to a level reminiscent of the best conjunctions of Cryptonomicon. In the first of these chapters, dated August 1689, Eliza writes a ciphered letter to Liebnitz in which she describes giving birth to a son in The Hague. If she lives, she will take the baby to London, into the future; "The baby and I," she says, "will go west." In the next and final chapter, dated October 1689, we find Daniel dying of the stone; he can no longer urinate—the stone of the world, the golem claws of the past, have got him. He is too terrified of surgery to countenance it; but his friends drug him, and he awakens bound and exposed to Robert Hooke, who holds a scalpel in his hands. Hooke is a great surgeon, and a great inventor, and a great intellect. He has exposed the chaos of old earth to quicksilver. He approaches Daniel with his knife. He will cut him free of the stone of the world. The knife approaches. The book shuts.
It is a superb slingshot ending. It makes us almost forgive the merciless exudations of unsort we have had to wade through. It soars us into the next book. That book, we hope, will be fuller than Quicksilver, and faster, and will have shaken the ash from its locks. That book, we hope, will be quicksilver.
