The Confusion

*The Confusion* is the second part of Neal Stephenson's *The Baroque Cycle.* It collects two smaller novels, *Bonanza* and *Juncto.* If you've made it to the second volume, you are likely already sold on Stephenson's fascinating and amusing combination of historical fiction, adventure and science fiction. The basic arc of the entire set of novels is a massive intellectual shift in the early Modern period, where classical ideas (such as those of Aristotle) were waning and the emergence of the new science and philosophy changed Europe. Stephenson tells this story through a vast number of characters, including many actual people such as Newton, Leibniz, Louis XIV, William of Orange, etc., and three principal fictional characters.

Daniel show more Waterhouse comes from a family of Puritans and sits between Newton and Leibniz as a member of the Royal Society. Eliza is a former slave whose brilliant grasp of trade and modern economy has led her to the heights of power and intrigue in Europe, and Jack Shaftoe is a vagabond with the uncanny ability to make the most of just about any pickle he finds himself in. In this way, Stephenson's main cast gives us insight into the world of science and philosophy, the world of nobility, the world of finance and economy, and the lives of those with lesser means. This is only the barest synopsis, however, as these are novels of staggering narrative complexity which cover the globe over a long span of time. While at times it reads as a ripping good adventure story with a light and easy to follow narrative, really investing in the books requires keeping track of many characters, locations and plots. It is not a difficult read, but it is a read that requires close attention.

This volume largely follows the stories of Eliza and Jack. They have long since parted ways, and while there are a number of connections between their stories, they largely are involved in independent adventures. I found that the Jack passages were far more interesting in this novel than they were in the first volume, *Quicksilver.* In reading that one, I often found myself wanting to get back to Daniel and Eliza, because they were more directly engaged in the world of ideas than Jack. Jack's story here picks up for two reasons. One is that he becomes part of a Cabal of enormously entertaining characters, most particularly Dappa, Moseh de la Cruz, Otto van Hoek and Gabriel Goto. The second is that his adventures have expanded in scope, both in their daring and their geographical coverage. The expansive story of Jack's adventures is a nice counter-balance to Eliza's story. I still find Eliza's chapters to be riveting, but they mostly take place within Europe, and within the intrigues of court society.

One aspect of Eliza's story that is particularly well done is the reaction to the novel views of currency and finance that are developing at the time. We generally think that we are pretty comfortable with ideas like credit, and the fluidity of the market. We get it that money does not need to acquire its value solely from the materials used in it. However, these are radical ideas at the time, and Stephenson does a wonderful job making us feel the confusion (and see that ideas which might seem intuitive to us are anything but!). This is nicely illustrated in a memorable scene where Eliza uses the various members of the court as props in an elaborate demonstration of financial operations. The economic ideas take center stage in *The Confusion,* and they are handled with aplomb.

This does mean that we have to forgo the adventures of Daniel, which is a bit disappointing (particularly given how we left him at the end of *Quicksilver*!). I generally find Daniel's chapters the most interesting, as his academic pursuits most closely mirror my own (as a philosophy professor!). However, even without Daniel, the story continues on with the same wit and wonderful plotting.

It does also retain some of the weaknesses of the prior volume. The dialogue can occasionally be clunky. Characters are, more often than not, trying to talk with a great deal of wit and nuance. Whie this generally works, it does occasionally become difficult to imagine real people saying some of these things. This can also happen when characters make gratuitious references to the academic matters at hand. Stephenson wants to show us these ideas percolating into the culture as an entirely new way of looking at the world, but these references can occasionally be strained. These passages seem off for two reasons. The first is that it makes brilliant characters like Waterhouse look as if their grasp of the ideas is incomplete, and second, it can make for clunky, expository writing. These are the exceptions, however, and far from the norm. Stephenson generally shows a very strong grasp of the ideas he is discussing, and is able to work most of them into the text quite successfully.

If you enjoyed the first volume, there is no reason not to read *The Confusion.* It's more of the same, and that's quite a compliment. show less

The term ‘confusion’ can connote many things. It usually indicates a state of bewilderment. It also denotes a jumbled and chaotic time or place, a disjointed mingling of disparate elements and events that appear to have little in relation to each other.

It is, in other words, a perfect one-word summation of our world at the later end of the seventeenth century. It was a time of tremendous upheaval in numerous aspects of civilization, a period of intellect and innovation that many expected would lead to a new age of enlightenment.

Leave it to American author Neal Stephenson to make a rollicking pirate novel of it all.

The Confusion, Stephenson’s superlative second volume in his trilogy The Baroque Cycle, is, indeed, a confusion of show more high adventure, international intrigue, scientific discourse, and economic chaos. Stephenson even throws in math, cryptology, and the precursor to the modern computer, just in case he might be accused of narrative laziness.

Building on events outlined in Quicksilver, Stephenson wastes no time in thrusting the reader into the thick of things. Familiarity with the preceding novel is essential, as he has too much to write about without the additional bothersome worry of exposition. When you write of people who, “in a single grammatically correct sentence, [manage] to make reference to Apolonius of Perga, the Folium of Descartes, and the Limacon of Pascal�€?, back-story is so much wasted ink.

Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, is now a galley slave in Algiers, plotting with his fellow oarsmen (a mixed bag of Irish, Jewish, Russian, and Arabic men, plus one wayward samurai) to buy themselves free from servitude through an ingenious scheme. Hijacking a ship laden with Spanish gold, Shaftoe finds himself again in the thick of world events, sailing around the globe in search of wealth, fame, and his true love.

Meanwhile, in a second tale ‘con-fused’ with the first, former slave and peerless spy Eliza continues to quietly subvert the economies of Europe, working behind the scenes as England attempts to wage war with France with no financial support. Unlike Shaftoe’s bizarre exploits in India and beyond, Eliza finds herself in a changing world “where power came of thrift and cleverness and industry, not of birthright, and certainly not of Divine Right.â€?

Stephenson, a former science-fiction writer, has produced a seamless blend of historical fact and riotous fiction as vivid and imaginative as anything the great fantasists could ever dream up. His is a dazzling world of visionaries and treachery, an epoch of intellectual rebellion and cultural revolution that our planet has never again seen the like of.

It’s a confusing story to be sure, but Stephenson has a sure hand at keeping the flow steady, never getting bogged down in details. His effort is stunning at times, with a poignant cliffhanger ending that provides both closure and excitement for the upcoming final volume.
Eliza describes confusion as “a kind of bewitchment – a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.â€? By this definition, Stephenson has produced an epic confusion of his own, a clash of styles and themes that frustrates, enchants, and ultimately astounds. show less

Neal Stephenson is clearly having the time of his life writing these books, and The Confusion continues on nicely.

It drops the "three books, each about a single character or pair of characters" structure from Quicksilver in favor of two books intermingled: Bonanza, following Jack's adventures following his being sold into slavery at the end of Quicksilver, and The Juncto, following Daniel and Eliza navigating European politics.

Bonanza is a tremendously fun adventure tale that stretches the boundaries of belief just enough to be consistently amusing. If I were to dock it any points, it would be that it suffers too much from -- as the last part of Quicksilver did -- Stephenson eliding large stretches of time in order to move the plot show more along. The ending is a little pat, but makes for a hell of a Stephensonian "slam cut to black" while also neatly answering the question of where Jack is at the beginning of Quicksilver.

The Juncto, like Odalisque before it, is choppy, but manages to improve on its predecessor. Daniel ends up being absent, or just glimpsed through his letters, for much of the story (reasonable, considering his surgery at the end of Quicksilver), and most of the focus goes to Eliza, who is shaping up into an interesting character.

Overall, I'm really pleased with this -- I actually think I'll bump Quicksilver to a 5 -- and I'm looking forward to finishing off The System of the World this fall. show less

Jack wakes with a bang, a galley slave scraping barnacles on the shore of Tripoli. He finds he is part of a secret cabal of galley slaves who have devised a Plan, to steal a fortune in silver and so win their freedom. This is a heist novel, and as in many heist stories, wahatever about the heist itself, it's what comes after that's the really tricky bit. Jack and his crew go back and forth across the face of the known world, trying to survive and escape and fight their way out of difficulties, occasionally putting obscure bits of learning to spectacular use with unexpected results. Meanwhile Liza has her own problems - captured and held in Dunkirk, her fortune gone, she must use her wits and guile and torrid romanrtc attachment to the show more cryptographer of Le Roi to survive and thrive without her past activites coming back to kill her. Every now and then, the action pauses and people discuss Natural Philosophy. show less

As the Author’s Note informs the reader, The Confusion is really two novels, merged (or, in a pun this novel rather over-uses, con-fused) into one by interlacing their chapters, Bonanza and Juncto, with respectively Jack and Eliza as main characters (Daniel remains somewhat in the background for this volume). Events begin some time (years for Jack, months for Eliza) after we left them in Quicksilver, and that proves to be something of a problem – after enjoying the previous novel more than I had been expecting to, I almost gave up on The Confusion because of the incredibly clunky way Stephenson catches up on what happened in the time that has passed.

Stephenson is often praised as master of the infodump, but what we get here are a show more series of extremely clumsy dialogues that would have been cause of much eye-rolling even in a debut novel, but coming from someone who already has several novels under his belt and has shown that he can do better this is extremely annoying. He even has to give Jack amnesia for the sole purpose so that someone can narrate his own history back to him, which everything considered might be even worse than the infamous “As you know, Bob” variety of infodumping because it is such an obvious and at the same time so very weak attempt to avoid it that it smacks of desperation.

Fortunately, the novel eventually gets caught up and rolling, and things take a marked turn for the better compared to Quicksilver. Admittedly, the “Juncto” (Eliza) part of The Confusion still gets bogged down in the swamp of pointless details Stepenson drives the (often somewhat meagre) plot through as well as his continued attempts to be Deep and Meaningful; but then there are the chapters with Bob Shaftoe (Jack’s brother) as protagonist who somewhat make up for that by presenting a rousing tale of love and vengeance in the context of English warfare at the period.

And there is “Bonanza”, the other part / novel making up The Confusion which again has Jack Shaftoe as protagonist and which is even better than “King of Vagabonds,” the second part of Quicksilver. Jack travels not only in Europe this time, but gets to visit exotic places like India, the Americas and even Japan in a series of increasingly outrageously adventures, making and losing his fortunes several times over, acquiring the gold of Solomon and being chased for it by dastardly foes. He remains the lovable rogue throughout, and Stephenson thankfully does not skimp on the rogue part – Jack does not have many scruples in the pursuit of this goals, and is not someone even the most kindly inclined reader would enjoy spending time with. But he certainly is a lot of fun to read about, and more than once this particular reader wished Neal Stephenson had just written a neo-Picaresque novel with Jack as hero and dispensed with all the stuff about Science, Finances and Enlightenment – whose only real function is to give the author room to brag about the huge amount of mostly useless information he has accumulated – and focussed on travels, roguery and swashbuckling. I know, I know – I’m sounding like a complete philistine here, but it’s such a waste and a pity to see what could have been a splendid adventure novel buried under so much extraneous dross. Still, there is less dross here than in Quicksilver, so maybe there still is hope for Neal Stephenson, and the best volume of the Baroque Cycle is still to come. show less

Neal Stephenson has, from his first novel, displayed a couple of highly sought-after writerly talents: a yarn-spinning ability that is almost divinely Irish, as if his mother had given birth to him atop the Blarney Stone; and a knack for language that makes his books tower above those of other science fiction and adventure-thriller writers. Zodiac (usually listed as his first novel, but in fact his second, after The Big U) told the story of a group of all-but-in-name Earth First! direct-activists. This was followed by his break-out novel, the mind-boggling Snow Crash, which revealed a fascination that has held Stephenson’s gaze ever since: cryptography. From the peak of Snow Crash there was a bit of a downhill slide, to The Diamond show more Age, and then Cryptonomicon. The latter of these two was a disappointment: Stephenson’s prose had dipped into the merely workmanlike (though still head-and-shoulders above the other “cyberpunks” his was classed with after Snow Crash), and the story was, while full of twists and turns and surprises, that of a fairly straightforward thriller.

QuicksilverNow Stephenson’s dropped The Bomb — a vast saga called The Baroque Cycle. We have two volumes so far, with the third and final volume, The System of the World, due out in September. Already comprising 1,700-some pages, the Cycle is a history of seventeenth-century science, in the broadest sense of that term, wrapped in a picaresque adventure story so far-flung that by the end of the second volume, The Confusion, we’ve already sailed around the globe with co-protagonist Jack Shaftoe and his Cabal. (Cryptonomicon readers will recognize the name Shaftoe; there are a number of parallels between that novel and the new Cycle. Jack, about to get annoyed because he’s heard it all before, at one point asks, “Is this going to be one of those yarns about… some sunken treasure-ship?” Sunken treasure was, of course, the raison d’etre of Cryptonomicon.) By the time the Cycle is finished, we should have some 2,500 pages of historical fiction which bracket the life of two key players of that era. The Baroque Cycle is indeed The Bomb, and it’s pure, uncut funked-up fun.

Isaac Newton and Gottfreid Leibniz were independent co-discoverers (or inventors, depending on your penchant, or lack thereof, for platonic forms) of the calculus, the mathematical tool used by physicists and engineers to describe bodies in motion. The development of calculus, though largely unsung in high school and undergrad history-of-science classes, is as important as Newton’s discovery of the inverse-square law in relation to gravity: he couldn’t have found the latter without the former. From this co-discovery, there developed an infamous rivalry. We typically think Newton won, as he is usually given credit for calculus; but, in fact, it’s Leibniz’s notation and nomenclature that we use when we learn and use calculus. It’s the lives of the gay Newton and the celibate Leibniz that bracket the time frame of The Baroque Cycle. However, we get much more of Newton as a young man, in the first volume, Quicksilver, told from the point of view of one of the early members of the Royal Society, Daniel Waterhouse. Leibniz kicks in later, especially in The Confusion, where we get a fine lesson on his infamously difficult monadology.

Waterhouse had every right to say, “I coulda been a contender” in the world of science. He was Newton’s roommate at Oxford, and worked with Hooke, Oldenburg and other luminaries of what was rapidly becoming the Enlightenment. But his lack of courage, his fear of confrontation, and his desire to just get along and be liked, cut that path off: then, as now, the social “niceties” of science made for a fierce mistress. Instead he became a courtier in mid-life, and a damn good one. Waterhouse lived in a tumultuous time: the Civil War in England that took the head of Charles off his neck and brought Cromwell to power, a restoration that put Catholics briefly back in charge, and a “Glorious Revolution” that put William and Mary, Dutch Protestants, on the throne of England. Eventually, Waterhouse sailed away from all the fun, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and worked on Leibniz’s binary logic machine—the earliest forerunner of the modern computer.

Quicksilver begins with the relationship of Waterhouse and Newton, a relationship that never quite makes them lovers. After a few hundred pages, though, we’re introduced to the Shaftoe brothers, Bob and Jack, “mudlarks” from the gritty London slums. These two enterprising lads, in their opening scene, have started a successful business: they grab the dangling legs of hanged men to more quickly dispatch them (i.e., better a quick death from a broken neck than a slow one by strangulation). Such dear, sweet boys. Later, we find Jack in Germany and heading East. Beneath a Vienna under siege by Turks, Jack meets his co-protagonist and lady love, the harem slave and (temporarily former) duchess of Qwghlm, Eliza. (How to pronounce “Qwghlm”? Try a palatal fricative followed by a glottal fricative spitting into a liquid stopping somewhere in the nasal passages: if you pronounce this fictional way-north-of-Ireland island’s name while swallowing a mouthful of milk, you’ll know you’ve got it right when the milk comes squirting out your nose. Please be careful.)

Eliza is a great beauty enslaved, along with her mother, on the beach of Qwghlm. (In The Confusion, the stunning Eliza notes that “in a world full of men who only wanted to take her to bed, it was somehow comforting to know that there was one who, given the opportunity, would prefer to read through a big pile of stolen correspondence.” That one being Louis XIV’s cryptographer.) Eliza and her mother are separated forever when Eliza is traded for a horse (a very valuable horse, but still!) by a French duke to an Ottoman caliph. Eliza is your prototypical abolitionist, at least once she is removed from the Turk’s harem by Jack and has a chance to once again pursue her destiny. And this is where the history of science that underpins The Baroque Cycle widens out: Eliza is the mother of modern commercial economics, and we get many a funny lesson in the transition of European economies from land-based to market-based capitalism. Funny, yes, but the Cycle is not without its subtle, politicized jabs at the history of capital, as in this thought from Daniel Defoe, used as an epigram in The Confusion: “We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness.”

Jack and Eliza wend there way back west, with a long stopover in Germany, where they meet Leibniz and an alchemist, Enoch Root. They end up in Amsterdam, where Eliza proceeds to make a fortune wheeling and dealing. After a falling out with Eliza, Jack sets out on an ill-advised sea voyage — only to be captured by pirates and sold as a galley slave. Thus ends Quicksilver, with Jack’s fate an unknown quantity in motion — just the sort of calculus an author needs to suck a reader into the second volume of the Cycle.

If anything, volume two, The Confusion, is even more exciting and funny than the first, which drags a little toward the end in a long series of letters between Eliza and various “Persons of Quality” with whom she is concocting intrigues. In The Confusion, Jack joins up with a group of his fellow slaves to form the Cabal and implement the Plan.

The Plan involves a large quantity of very valuable metal (presumably silver from Mexico, but it turns out to be something else, and worth much, much more) and playing several greedy ends against the middle. The Cabal pulls off the Plan, and sail (and row) away with quite a haul. In the process, Jack and Cabal company have burned their European bridges behind them, so it’s off to India, the Malabar coast, more adventures, much loss and gain of life and treasure, and eventually a voyage around the world.

Meanwhile, Eliza loses her fortune to a French privateer, Jean Bart (“Black Bart,” the English called him), only to make another one. “Now as you may know,” she writes to one of her allies, “every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant.” The Cycle is full of such resonances between the present Age of Enron and the epoch in which the books are set.

Stephenson’s style in this epic is diamond bright, his wit razor sharp, and he brings to bear a ocean-vast knowledge of history and science. The late seventeenth century was a period of rapid intellectual and political change. As one princess write to another, “The upheavals of the last twenty years have been unbelievable: the kingdoms of England, Holland, and Spain have been transformed as fast as scenery in a theatre. When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.” Not every character, and not every scene, in The Baroque Cycle is true: but there’s enough truth mixed with fiction to make these volumes (at least the two we’ve got so far) both a challenging lesson and a pleasurable read.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book] show less

Another Baroque Cycle volume completed. So engrossing, so time consuming. This series is totally for history nerds with a dark cynical sense of humor. I love it, but I have spoken to a few folks who just can't get into Quicksilver. For variable reasons, this book is just too dense for the average reader. Stephenson is a superb and well researched writer who is dishing out so many nuanced details left and right that it may overwhelm. Some of the best moments in The Confusion come at unexpected times when all meaning is hinged on double or triple entendres and the reader's ability to remember a minor plot fact 300 pages prior. If you catch them, its fantastic, if not you are kind of left thinking that you missed something. Thus, I show more recommend reading this book in one go instead of putting down from month to month while you peruse some other book. You will be rewarded with a plot web so dense and dramatically strewn across history, the globe, religion, science, people, and economics, that by the end you will feel like you have taken 6 different seminars on 17th century world affairs. All of this is lined with such biting dark humor and intermittent bouts of swashbuckling that you will forget that you are reading a historical fiction book about the Enlightenment. show less