n the long and gracious paragraphs of acknowledgements that he inserts into The System of the World after a final few iterations of coda stuff have ended his three-volume 3,000-page Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson thanks everyone who assisted him through the seven years of hard work it all took in its immensity to complete. After speaking well of a lot of live friends and colleagues, Stephenson then mentions two writers to whom he owes "a certain kind of debt, which might make sense only to novelists." These writers are Alexandre Dumas and Dorothy Dunnett. He was right to thank them. Because they are writers of historical romances, and a daft deft historical romance hides within the petrified corpus of The Baroque Cycle.
Dumas in particular.
In the 1840s, taking to school the examples of Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, Dumas forged several linked sequences of novels about the destiny of Europe—the most famous being the extremely long Musketeers series—which together espoused a vision of history as a sequence of benign conspiracies consciously embarked upon by heroes in order to preserve the privileges of the existing social order while simultaneously bringing about a better world. The principal figures responsible for improving that world (while retaining their own positions in the Europe to come) include savvy monarchs, loyal savants, doughty generals, sturdy yeoman with special skills, unquenchable swashbuckler protagonists (some of them picaros, some of them praetorians) who are ultimately loyal to those higher up the social tree than they are, and surprisingly intelligent court females whose wiles are described according to 19th-century conventions governing the description of female wiles (cleavages may be adduced but not addressed). (The habit of italicizing slightly askew appositions, after one has encountered a dozenfold plethora of them in the thousandfold incessant pages of The Baroque Cycle, is much easier to commit than to defend.) Villains include democrats and other radicals, advocates of the wrong variety of Christianity, property speculators. The late Dorothy Dunnett (much praised by many) distilled some sense out of much of this nonsense (she knew a lot of history, and she knew how to draw complex characters), but her books always gave off a feeling (like those of Dumas, or of Neal Stephenson, or of any author of a fantasy of history) that her spokespersons got into them by timeslip. They are visitors to romance; Stephenson's 1714 (say) is realest to his protagonists when it is most like 2004.
Deep inside the vast swathes of The System of the World, in other words, spelunking through the corked midnight oil of interminable exposition (I was not kidding about the nearly 3,000 huge pages the Cycle takes to finish its simple story), lurks a swashbuckling romance. There were hints in Quicksilver that this would be the case, moments when Jack Shafto and Eliza seemed to stroll through the 17th century as though it were a stage they could strike if things got too hairy, moments when Stephenson's thought-experiment exercise in distilling the codes of modernity from the ashes of the sleepwalker past thinned dangerously into a trad Whig theatrical about taking the right side in the Who Owns the Future stakes. But we kept on reading in hope of a better morrow.
(My review of Quicksilver does go on at considerable length about these issues and about some other problems I thought I detected; I regret nothing in that review except its expectation that Quicksilver had to be a curtain-opener, that by the time we reached The System of the World a vast momentum of revelation would sweep us all down a great Amazon of story—which is certainly what happened in Stephenson's superb Cryptonomicon (1999), to which The Baroque Cycle claims to be a prequel. In that expectation I was wrong. But readers of my somewhat puzzled review should perhaps also glance at Paul di Filippo's coverage of The Confusion, as his analysis of this middle volume of the Cycle takes a somewhat more sanguine view of Stephenson's enterprise.)
Breaking a contract of trust
In the end, the problem is not Dumas. If The Baroque Cycle had actually been written in a fashion that clearly and forcefully valued the broad-gauge romancifying at its heart—after all, Dumas managed to write three huge novels about D'Artagnan and crew without losing the thread for more than a few hundred pages at a stretch toward the very end—then we might have happily been careened down the river of narrative to the moment when Jack and Eliza finally reunite. But The Baroque Cycle does not, in the end, honor its inner child. It is fairly difficult just exactly how to define this failure, though right off it might be noted that Stephenson is in fact so little concerned with the delineation of either Jack's or Eliza's souls, or with any normal obedience to the principle that good stories honor moments of climax or joy or great sorrow, that he allows that final union to take place offstage. (Likewise the first meeting between Newton and Leibniz, which is what the Cycle claims to have been leading up to for 2,500 pages.) But that is not enough to explain the extraordinariness of The System of the World.
To get at the monumental blockhead obdurate wrongness of the book, we need to begin at smart. Almost every single sentence Stephenson writes is exactly that: vividly and visibly intelligent, sprightly, witty, learned, sly, often camp; every sentence, taken in isolation, conveys a storytelling urgency, a sense that a contract of trust between teller and hearer, between smart novelist and smart reader, has been honored. It is only when we begin to understand that the contract has been honored in the detail but not the whole that we begin to see how System has gone so badly wrong: because the larger units of the novel, some of them hundreds of sentences long, have been bolted together with no regard at all to the pace of the whole. There are thousands of good turns of phrase in the 900 pages of System, and almost every one of them strangles in the stony abomination of Unsort.
It is not just hugeness, it is a frozen paroxysm of hugeness, an immovable and unstoryable stone face of data incantation, a deafening dead shout in which nuance or elision or pace or shape seem literally to be unthinkable. A single chapter of this frozen unstory might read as a tour de force, an impertinence of overkill—because of the astonishing energy and grasp of Stephenson's portrayal of the inner grammars connecting 18th-century architecture, city planning, philosophy, politics, economics, into a series of great intersecting arguments about the nature of consequences. But two chapters, laid end to end, alarm the reader; and a hundred chapters drive the reader into self-protective hypnagogy, into a Darwinian dream state in which bits of story slide through the battered mind like straws to grasp, though not for more than an instant can the fact be avoided that never in this vast desert superba, never in this overweening pridefulness of infodump, does the author blink, never does he relent into telling his tale at a pace human beings can breathe to. We were not designed for this. We were not designed to sprint marathons. The Baroque Cycle is too big for folk. It is too deeply frozen into size to be told. There can be no doubt that Stephenson wrote The Baroque Cycle; but one might, I think, fairly ask: Did he ever read it?
Falling back into the stone
A few things can be said to add to what Paul Di Filippo and I have already mentioned. The System of the World is much better constructed than The Confusion. Its three main sections each climax in long virtuoso scenes (one of them lasts more than 100 pages) told almost in real time (like 24, but without the saving elisions granted by commercial breaks). As we read, we do begin to understand that something profound is happening to the Western world during the years of the Cycle, and we begin to understand the significance of the use of the word "currency" to describe money: because money may be dumb, but currency is information.
And there is one scene in London (pages 668-693, 12,500 words), when Newton and Leibniz meet and engage in a long though indecisive debate under the watchful eyes of both Eliza and Caroline (daughter of Princess Sophie, wife of the future George II), and the whole long jambed Cycle comes to life for an instant, turns into a tale with actors audible to us. As is appropriate in a Dumas-style romance, it is the future monarch who is the wisest of all. She tells Newton and Leibniz that she has had a dream of the world engulfed in flame. She suits action to words by rolling a wooden globe across the room, then setting it alight.
The globe was of wood, and too heavy to catch fire readily; but paper gores printed with images of continents had been pasted over it. The paper caught fire, and a ragged flame-ring began to spread, consuming the cartographer's work and leaving behind it a blackened and featureless sphere. "Sophie kept trying to tell me [Caroline then says] ... that a new System of the World was being made. Oh, it is not a terribly novel thing to say. I know, and Sophie knew, that the third volume of your Principia Mathematica bears that name, Sir Isaac. Since she died, I have become quite convinced that she was correct—and that the System is to be born, not at Versailles, but here—that this shall be its Prime Meridian, and all else shall be reckoned, and ruled, from here. ... I think of the globe, with its neat parallels and meridians, as the Emblem of this System. ... But I am troubled by the vision of such a Globe in flames."
And for an instant the Globe—and the Story—does seem to spin. But we fall back into the stone, we fall back into a world of words which, like primitive money, sits there inert in the ground, in the cloaca of the given, waiting for a breath of Solomonic Gold to turn it into information. In the end, the problem with the entire Baroque Cycle is that it is not currency.
