Customer Reviews

The Confusion: Volume Two Of The Baroque Cycle

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a slow-paced narrative, without a clear straightforward plot, which requires more reading patience that your average historical novel. But the style is rich and the characters are engaging and very well-developed. The reader will be swept away by an adventurous tale of slavery, freedom, and fortune-hunting, among other storylines interwoven in this ambitious work. Indeed, this literary tale might not satisfy readers of more lightweight commercial fiction, but Neal Stephenson is a great stylist whose writing will appeal to the scholar in you.

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

Stephenson follows up his marvelously detailed and entertaining "Quicksilver" with a continuation worthy of its predecessor. Jack Shaftoe, one of the three protagonists, drives his portion of the plot forward with swashbuckling abandon, travelling from his enslavement in Africa, to his daring heist of Solomonic Gold from a Spanish ship at Bonanza, to the markets in Egypt to try to sell this gold, to India where he begins as a near untouchable, working as a "feeder" of bloodsucking insects and ends up with a minor peerage. Finally, on to Japan to trade and then to the Americas, where he is double-crossed and imprisoned because of the treachorous Jesuit, Edouard de Gex. Scores are settled, new ones are tallied, and Jack takes it all with his deadpan humour, aplomb, and fatalism. Will he ever see England or his fair Eliza again?

Meanwhile, Daniel Waterhouse attempts to save Isaac Newton from the influence of Fatio, a Swiss sycophant and minor savant, who has encouraged Newton's descent into madness and continued obsession with Alchemy, to the detriment of Natural Philosophy. Waterhouse, torn between the doctrine his father left him with and the chance to change the course of history through politics (yikes!), economics (say it ain't so!), and science (egad!), hopes to reconcile his life of intrigue with his Puritanical upbringing.

Eliza continues to dabble in matters financial, using her oeconomic skills to gain favour in various courts. She befriends Caroline, a German princess, and Caroline's mother--not knowing that they will be in line for the crown of England.

Stephenson's detail, wit, and ability to craft a captivating story (albeit a long one!) shine once again in this novel, which adequately sets up Volume 3 ("The System of the World") and makes for a promising conclusion indeed.

This is a beast of a book, wild, ferocious and full of mystery. One of those mysteries is the origin of the modern world. Using the medium of fiction, Stephanson strips away layer after layer of recieved wisdom and shows us how a few extrodinary people, and a great deal of ordinary ones, invented the modern notions of finance, banking, credit, trade, stock markets, globalization and the little matter of science. Yes, these people invented science as we know it. And Stephanson will show you the world they inhabited, page after page, untill you feel that you are amongst the greatest minds Europe ever produced.

Which is not to say that The Confusion is all about dry academic discourse. The first page of the book finds Jack Shafto miraculusly cured of syphilis, wandering confusedly on a beach while a fifteen hundred gun salute is fired in the honor of the Caliph. From there, we are engaged in one of the best travelouges, adventure stories and general assembiledges of all out mayhem ever collected in one volume.

In the spirit of equal oppertunities, this is not strictly a lads book. Equal time is given to Eliza, a former Harem virgin,and by her own wits and courage created a duchess in two nations. Also, by the end of the book, a mother of three.

Now, this is a long book, and jam packed with details. Like the art which insipred it's name, the book contains ever increasing levels of ornimentation and detail, built on mathimatically and geometricly pure lines. Well, curves actually. Quite often, the reader can become lost in the welth of images and imagry. Not to worry. Stephanson provides both Newton and Liebinitz to explain the nature of those curves and ornimentation. Even if the titans occasionally disagree.

Neal Stephenson's second volume in The Baroque Cycle, "The Confusion", is the best work of fiction I've seen from him in years. It is an intriguing, swashbuckling tale that is part of a three volume prequel to his celebrated "Cryptonomicon", of which this novel can be regarded as a historical fiction prequel. However, unlike "Cryptonomicon", Stephenson has offered an exciting tale of adventure, describing the advent of the information age during the end of the Baroque period and the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment. Here Stephenson continues his dual saga featuring the "King of the Vagabonds" - adventurer and former slave - Jack Shaftoe as he travels through the Muslim world, India, Southeast Asia and the Americas with a motley crew comprised of Northern Europeans, Arabs and a Japanese Roman Catholic priest and Eliza, the Countess de la Zeur, his former lover. Stephenson has wrought daring sea battles reminiscent of Patrick O'Brian's best in the acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series. And like O'Brian, he excels in writing dense, descriptive prose with some rathering modern twists thrown in. Until I read "The Confusion", I thought Stephenson's best novel was "The Diamond Age", but this is not a "confusion" but instead, a splendid celebration of Stephenson at his best, crafting lengthy, but exciting tales of adventure.

Put simply: this book blows Quicksilver out of the water. All of the potential that the opening act showed really did come to fruition in this opus.

I'm not sure what else there is to say. To all of those people who gave up on Quicksilver because of its meandering and glacial tendencies, I would certainly recommend that you give this a whirl. It starts with the formation of one of the most unlikely cabals in all of literature, progresses to the hijacking of a ship filled with gold, then a circumnavigation of the world. And that's just half the book.

Back in Europe there is all sorts of intrigue -- spies, alchemy, infedelity, etc. Of course, there are trademark Stephenson educational tangents about things that have nothing to do with the story, like how watered steel is created.

Add it all up -- pirates, convicts, spies, alchemy, swashbuckling, war, science, and sex -- and it makes for one hell of a novel that doubles as a history book about the evolution of modern finance.

And it ends with one of the best cliffhangers in recent time. I can't wati until October!

I was one of the ones that loved Quicksilver, but only gave it four stars. As other reviews pointed out, and as was immediately apparent when reading it, "The Confusion" is tighter, cleaner, twice as action packed and dazzling. It's the intellectual equivalent of "Indiana Jones". The plot is truly baroque beyond belief. But I had already thoroughly suspended my disbelief by the vivid, compelling reality Stephenson has put on the page, so
the plotting is almost beside the point--I mean, this all could really happen, and DID in someone's imagination.

You must read "QuickSilver" to tackle this one, but in my opinion Eliza's boring encrypted letters of Book One (which kept it from getting five stars) were worth it if they led to the thrills of Book Two.

I eagerly await "The System of the World".

I enjoy Stephenson's writing, when he's hot he's hot, but he's still working hard to learn how to piece together his inspired moments. Despite the floppy ending I think Cryptonomicon is his best book, but Confusion is second. Unlike quicksilver, which was a bit of a slog at times, I remained interested for the duration of this book. The descriptions were richer and more involving, perhaps more visual.

The historic times and places of this novel are captivating, and I strongly recommend it as an unchallanging historic cavort.

I just love reading the words Neal Stephenson writes. I love the swashbucking. I love the intrigue. I especially love his many digressions into subjects banal to esoteric. When, after years following the Cryptonomicon, I heard that he would release 3 volumes of a trilogy in the span of a year, I hoped that each would be a thousand pages. I have not been dissapointed.

When people ask me about Stephenson, I am never sure how to describe his work. If you define science fiction VERY broadly then it fits there, because it is fiction and science or technology plays a role. Snow Crash and Diamond Age were clearly scifi, Zodiac was more detective fiction, Cryptonomicon was techno-thriller/historical thriller. This trilogy is historical novel / swashbuckler / within a scifi or technothriller framework?!? In addition to the storyline which other reviewers have summarized nicely, the books deal with a variety of interesting themes like: comparitive social classes and structure in england, france, the german states, india, and a few others; the evolution of jargon; cryptology; the birth of modern science; and the birth of modern economics. And all this with a healthy dose action, how can you go wrong?

I think just as many people were bored with Quicksilver as excited by it and for those in the former catagory, I can only say that it does get better. Many of those complaints centered around the impression that the book wasn't going anywhere, that the plot was sort of nebulous and static and most of the time it was just hordes of characters talking about things that nobody cared about. Stephenson must have listened to his critics because a number of those problems have been fixed in this, the second volume of his enormous trilogy. This novel, still gigantic but not as huge as the first volume, continues the stories already in progress, but Stephenson cleans up the pacing somewhat by dividing the story into two separate novels, but cutting back and forth between them, which fixes a huge problem I had with the first novel, namely that you had blocks of exciting, action oriented portions of the story and then when that was over it was nothing but talking heads until the end, without any break or suspense. Breaking it up works so well that I don't why he didn't do it the first time out, since it creates a sense of tension by building cliffhangers into the story and by alternating the political manipulation stuff (Eliza's sections) with the adventurer/world traveller bits (Jack Shaftoe's) it makes the novel feel more integrated, a sense that it's all happening at the same time (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't). The novels also benefits from having a somewhat more coherent (ie straightforward) plot, in the first book everyone manipulated and schemed but it wasn't clear if it was going anywhere and the apparent lack of direction really hurt the story, making it seem flat and somewhat bland. This time out everything is much sharper, there's a definite sense that all the plotting is actually building toward something, even if it still remains to be seen if we're going to build toward something grand or something abstract. But at least all the talking and scheming has some payoffs this time out, even if those are varying quality, it's nice to see plots move forward, even if it's unclear how they impact whatever main plot is driving the book. Also on a nice note, Stephenson has reduced the number of annoying footnotes, which were far more irritating than clever (again to authors: if no one likes when David Foster Wallace does it, we won't like it when you do it). And I do give credit to Stephenson for scope and ambition, this is big novel that spans over a decent amount of time, with a huge cast of characters and a wide area of geography, touching on a variety of moods and situations. I think Stephenson does a good job of putting the reader into the late 1600's with the characters and I can't really tell which people are historical and which are just made up (other than the obvious ones). So it's a definite improvement over the first novel, but I don't see it as a "great" novel, it's entertaining in parts, but I really only care about some of the characters (Eliza, Jack, his brother, even the Sun King is pretty entertaining) and while the plot is stronger this time out, there's still a sense of "so what?" pervading the whole enterprise, everyone is running around and talking and whatnot, but it's not clear why any of this should interest us in the least (although Stephenson manages to pull off a handful of memorable moments, while the last book really had none, it was so even) and the rambling, digressive nature of the narrative really is a big hurdle, without thrilling moments or exciting prose to make the slog worthwhile. I'll have to maintain that opinion that Stephenson's book is a fitfully entertaining diversion and not the historical-literary masterpiece some are clearly hoping for. But it's too soon to give any final opinions on the work as a whole, with one book left to go it remains to be seen how he can tie this all up and what he can make of everything. So while this was decent, and a big step up from Quicksilver, I think it's the last book that is going to decide everything and let us know if it was all worth it or not. Here's hoping.

Why you should read this:

Stephenson remains one of the most thrilling of authors. His wit, his prose, his dialogue, his drawing of characters, they really are almost unsurpassed. We feel that Stephenson continues to improve as a writer in general and those characters of Eliza, Jack, Waterhouse, Leibniz, and Newton have never been so palpably real. For those who were thrilled with Quicksilver, we feel they will be even happier with The Confusion. The anachronisms will seem less jarring, the progress of the novel is more linear and easier to follow, the writing a bit tighter. This is the central novel of an astonishing trilogy of books and one should most certainly continue them once started. For those interested in the history of calculus and in general the Age of Enlightenment, this is not a novel to be missed.

Why you should pass:

We don't believe that one should begin any trilogy with the second book. If you've not read Quicksilver, then you can muddle your way through this book-and probably be happy with it-but really it loses some depth. As before, if you're expecting laser gun battles, space wars, robots, or other tropes of sci-fi you ought to go elsewhere for those thrills. While this is generally quick read, the book is long and therefore heavy to drag around. If length will perturb you, wait to read this book until you have the time, leisure, and muscle to take it on.

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