The Confusion

jmweeks writes "Neal Stephenson's The Confusion is an exhausting read--not simply in keeping track of the dozens of major characters, many with two or three names or titles or hyphenated titles; not due to its quite literal circumnavigation of the globe; not even, or at least not only, because of its interminable cycle of fortune and misfortune: Its 800-plus pages are much more taxing for what Stephenson leaves out than what he includes." Read on for the rest of jmweeks' review. The Confusion author Neal Stephenson pages 813 publisher William Morrow rating 8 reviewer Jose M. Weeks ISBN 0060523867 summary An exhausting and extraordinary read from the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.

The Confusion is the second volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (preceded by last year's Quicksilver , to be concluded later this year with The System of the World). Quicksilver tells two stories: the political and scientific development of Europe at the beginning of the Enlightenment, through the person of Daniel Waterhouse, and the adventures of "Half-cocked" Jack Shaftoe, a vagabond tramping around France and Germany, as he rescues a young woman named Eliza and does his best to win her. As the story develops, Eliza leaves the life of adventure and enters the world of politics, acquiring for herself along the way the title of Countess in France and Duchess in England; Jack falls so deeply to adventure that he disappears completely from the final third of the novel. We leave him to a certain death, an oar-slave aboard a pirate ship, half-insane with syphilis.

As The Confusion begins, Jack, in the first of dozens of reversals of fortune, wakes cleansed of syphilis by a boiling fever, rowing for a much less brutal master than expected, and somehow a member of a cabal with (I suppose by definition) a Plan. Eliza finds herself relieved of a staggering fortune and held, for practical purposes, under house arrest.

This volume follows the largely-separate stories of these two characters over the course of fourteen years, interweaving them chapter-by-chapter, as they move toward some ultimate climax that, of course, we will not have reached by this volume's conclusion. Stephenson labels each of these, though they are non-contiguous, as a book of The Baroque Cycle. Jack's story is book four, "Bonanza"; Eliza's, "Juncto", is book five.

Lazy critics will certainly remark that The Confusion has an appropriate title. Those who read at least two-thirds of it may notice that Stephenson presents a definition of "con-fused" (solids melted and then allowed to run together and mix) that bears a certain resemblance to the structure of this novel. But I read the title more as a reference to a period of time, at the cusp of the Enlightenment, in which all of Europe seems taken aback (another term for which Stephenson provides the origin, which he positively revels in doing). The world is in the midst of a deep depression, and the great confusion then is, what exactly is money?

Indeed, one gets the impression that The Baroque Cycle could just as well have been titled "How Money Got To Be That Way." Late in this novel, when Stephenson compares foundries to heartbeats, it becomes very clear that what we've been witnessing throughout The Confusion is the path through the gushing arteries and trickling capillaries driven by that heart. I recall now that in Cryptonomicon Stephenson spent an uncomfortable amount of dialog on the financial inner-workings of corporations. At the time I dismissed it as the ramblings of a particularly pedantic character; now I'm beginning to wonder if, inside Stephenson's hacker/geek-novelist facade, there isn't an accountant just screaming to get out.

Yet I make it sound dry, and Stephenson is anything but: in The Diamond Age he made Turing machines seem exciting, in Cryptonomicon it was cryptography and computer programming and mathematics in general--and he did so without the cheating we've been forced to accept these days, especially in film. And here, in the ebb and flow of silver, Stevenson constructs revenge plays, alchemical conspiracies, and an engrossing picture of the Way Things Work. There is a slow and deep pleasure in learning, in understanding; his talent is to impart this with all the visceral immediacy of swordplay.

That is not to say that he is above actual swordplay. Or conspiracies of piracy and murder and torture. In the world of Jack Shaftoe we have adventure packed so thickly that Stephenson finds he can't quite fit it all in: We follow Jack through each daring escape, each execution of an intricate plot that doesn't quite go according to plan--then we cut to the next chapter, months or years later, in which Jack has somehow found himself again destitute and in great peril. We spend half the chapter trying to figure out exactly what he's gotten himself into, and how, and what precisely happened to all of his co-conspirators, and the other half (once they've coincidentally reunited) watching them plot once more.

The worst of these is about half-way through The Confusion: After Jack and his cabal leave us successful in carrying out a particular plan, we return to Jack to find he's been working in an animal hospital in Hindoostan, hung in mid-air so that all the blood-sucking patients, from mosquitoes to ticks to giant centipedes, can feed. As he is displacing native workers I can only assume this is an elaborate pun on the word "scab." (His jokes, when they misfire, are horrendous. Example: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.") We find his companions have been scattered by a pirate ship (filled exclusively with female pirates) and Jack has been waiting patiently three years for the narrative to return to him. This was the point I nearly put the book away.

I can accept the cyclic reversals of fortune; I can accept the method of storytelling that begins in the middle and fills in back-story as it moves forward; I can accept a very long middle volume of a trilogy, which by nature has no real beginning or end. Together though, these do exhaust my patience and at times my attention. The Confusion would be a much better novel written completely at 1000 pages than it is part-summarized at 800.

Now I fear I'm being too negative. The novel dips at the center, but it shines in every chapter concerning Eliza, and toward the end it even shines for Jack. Eliza's talent lies mainly in manipulation, and so much of her story involves cryptic political moves, hints being dropped, and relationships being exploited. As the novel begins she is still young, and her motivation is mainly revenge. She is a the Stephenson heroine: Sharply intelligent, beautiful in a fierce sort of way, sexually uninhibited, and though morally centered, vicious when wronged. (He understands his audience--geeks, male, young--and he has a pretty good idea of what they want.) As she grows older, she softens, or at the very least she becomes to some degree satisfied.

There is maturity here, for Stephenson's characters and for Stephenson himself. Moreso than anything he's so far written. He allows his characters the room, the experience, the years it takes to fundamentally grow. There is more to it than that, though: there is the classical resonance, Jack's journey with The Odyssey, the reluctant Esphahnian revenge play with Hamlet, the general Shakespearean method of History, melding the reality of Kings and Dukes with the artistic truth of fiction. Stephenson has in The Baroque Cycle given himself a canvas broad enough that he can truly develop.

About the ending: though Stephenson need not really bother to end this book, as it is incomplete until the third volume is published, he does make an effort. What it suggests about the further story is intriguing, but it suffers from the same deficiencies, as an ending, as plagues his other novels: It is tied together clumsily and it doesn't really make all that much sense. It is painfully abrupt. I think, though, that I have come to understand why Stephenson ends his books this way: his characters are so vivid, so capricious, that they drive his stories anywhere but the ending he had in mind. He closes a book not in completion so much as surrender.

Disregarding Snow Crash, which is of another class completely, this is the best book Stephenson has so far written. I score it an eight, but I do so on a scale broader than the nine Slashdot previously gave Quicksilver: The Confusion is the superior novel.

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Comments

Wheel of Time

[AtariAmarok]

This reminds of "Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan, a seemingly endless series of 700+ page books with many characters who do sometimes have "two or three names or titles".

The earlier books in the series were full of events, but that is a thing of the past: an inordinant amount of pages in the recent books are devoted finding a magic cereal bowl that stops global warming.

Less Newton, more Leibniz

[apsmith]

I liked Confusion too - at least better than Quicksilver. But I missed the Waterhouse/Newton business - very little of that in the new book. Stephenson seems to be trying for a pretty tightly woven trilogy - a bit like LOTR - hard to know how to judge it before we've really seen the whole thing. Both Quicksilver and Confusion ended somewhat strangely...

New Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

GAHHHHHHH MY EYES! Why is there no:

-1 Spoiler mod?

Re:Enoch Root

[GileadGreene]

Speaking of mysteries from the Baroque cycle: what's the story with the elder Duc d'Arcachon's peculiar dietary habits? I haven't seen an explanation, or even a rationale, anywhere.

What is money? - two takes

[lopati]

Kieth Hart:

The idea of money as a source of social memory was also crucial for John Locke who figures prominently in our story as the philosopher who inaugurated the modern age of democratic revolutions. Locke was obsessed with money's role both in establishing a progressive social order and in subverting it as its criminal antithesis. Indeed he believed that money launched humanity from the state of nature onto the road to civil government. As long as men's possessions were limited to perishable products, the scope for property was restricted. Money, by offering a durable store of value convertible against all useful things, unleashed the potential for property accumulation and for the intergenerational transmission of inequality. For Locke then, money was indispensable to that development of cultural memory on which civilisation depends.

Bernard Lietaer:

First, let's define what a currency is, because most textbooks don't teach what money is. They only explain its functions, that is, what money does. I define money, or currency, as an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. It's therefore not a thing, it's only an agreement--like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal. And most of the time, it's done unconsciously. Nobody's polled about whether you want to use dollars. We're living in this money world like fish in water, taking it completely for granted.

Typically, it's both those things; a store of value and a medium of exchange. While economists often include 'a unit of account'.

Currently reading Quicksilver...

[cr0sh]

...and getting to the point of its "end" - maybe 100 pages left to go or so.

Anyhow - since reading Cryptonomicon, and now Quicksilver - and what I am hearing about Confusion - I steadfastly believe that Neal is trying to tell us (geeks? maybe) something, that he is trying to impart on us some form of wisdom that most men have lost.

Now, I know that is a grand bit of hubris to suppose this - who knows what Neal is really thinking or trying to do, and to surmise that this is what he is doing seems to be rather arrogant (and I am someone thinking this!)...

I think he is showing us not only what and how "money" came into being - but how it can be done again - but this time in a fashion that is free from government meddling (ie, taxes, tariffs, fees, etc), among other ills which affects current monetary systems. He started delving into this with Cryptonomicon - but it dealt more with the "bank", less with money - how to store your "money", in other words, so that governments have no say about it. The Baroque Cycle is showing how to "make" money - that is, create a currency of exchange, because that is all that money is - a substitution for barter, because it is hard to carry around pigs and chickens for trade with you everwhere. It is showing it in a quasi-historical account. We, as geeks, should be following up the leads, where they are "true", and finding out the historical truth behind them - to learn how money works, where it came from, and most importantly, how governments function with (and without) it. I think that is the direction Neal is attempting to lead us, if only we would look and follow.

We need to wake up - fully - and recognize that we live in a corrupt world society, and that we have the power to change it, because we control the means of communication of this planet. We can either sit back, and wait for the chains of enslavement to be shackled upon us (if we don't get killed or worse by our fellow "civilized" men), or stand up and make the difference to free the world from this corruption.

Cryptonomicon References (Spoilers!?)

[attercoppe]

Those readers who are still paying close attention towards the end of the book, and enjoyed Cryptonomicon, may catch the "foreshadowing" for some people and place names in Cryptonomicon. (The Cabal's Mr. Foot, Queen Kottakkal, etc.) If you need more help, check out the section in Cryptonomicon where Randy flies to the island the crypt will be on, and note names of the island, the hotel, the sultan, the grand wazir, etc. Allow for spelling changes over the years.

Re:Snow Crash

[jmweeks]

I'm not saying Snow Crash is "really good or something," though I do think it is a decent novel. I'm saying that it's hard to compare it to any of Stephenson's others, the same way it is hard to compare Vonnegut's other novels to Slaughterhouse Five: there's something about it--its place in sci. fi., its place in regard to the explosion of the internet--that makes it the one book that's always going to be mentioned in Stepehenson's "From the author of..." intros.

Baroque Cycle/Crypto* as Economic History Textbook

[corprew]

One of the things that I've always found curious about this current cycle of books, is that it seems to be a series of books written with a purpose -- to give people a firm understanding of the fundamental principles underlying economics, value, and money

Cryptonomicon covers in excruciating detail, but with a story interested enough to keep you reading, the principles behind cryptography, which would be needed for a cryptographically sound currency, but it also covers modern ideas of value in corporations (various incarnations of Epiphyte) as well as the changing economic nature of gold.

Hg and Confusion also cover in detail what the ideas of money and value in their respective periods, and the level of detail can only be described as exacting.

So, I think that irrespective of what you might think of them as novels -- I happen to quite like them but opinion seems to vary -- they're definitely the most fascinating economic history textbooks in the history of the world.

As economics history textbooks, they're extremely well written as they keep you engaged as a textbook might not. A lot of people just assume that Stephenson is just an unspeakable pedant, but I assume he's a man with a mission. I also assume that this mission is that he thinks it is important that a lot of people understand the actual basis behind the modern economy and the modern economy's development.

Therefore instead of viewing it simply as a book, view it as a 'A Citizen's Illustrated Primer'[1] that will entertain and inform in equal measure about the things that NS thinks are important. Personally, I can't wait.

--Corprew
[1] a reference to the instructional book in NS's book 'The Diamond Age.'

Somebody help me out here. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

I read Snowcrash because somebody told me I had to. I did. "The World of the Future as Envisioned by Somebody Who Uses a Mac."

Snowcrash was unbelievably immature and completely implausible on an endless number of counts. The Ultra-Cool central idea, (a programming virus for Humans transmissible simply by looking), was half-baked and under-developed. What a shame. The only thing which kept that book floating was Neal's fun and punchy style of prose. (Sounds like the charismatic wise-ass in the class who knows more raw facts than the teacher, knows how to deliver them, but who still flounders like a dying fish when asked about the Meaning of Life.) Still, when read with the understanding that the whole book was (meant?) to be a pulp joke on the same level as, Kill Bill, I found it to be almost entertaining. Until the ending. Neal needs a good smacking for that ending. And his editors need to be fired.

Whatever.

More interesting was his internet-distributed essay he wrote after discovering Linux and ditching his Mac. Though the ending was also ill-focused and confusing. Pattern?

So the long and short is this. . .

NO WAY am I going to torture myself with 1200 pages of his latest series just to know what the buzz is. And since the review doesn't cover what I want to know, I'll ask it here. . .

Does Stephenson's expose of economic 'reality' take into account forces like the Masons, Knights-Templar, Rothschildes, the Jews and all that good stuff, or is it just another attempt to fill people with a self-satisfied belief that they know more than they really do?

Is Neal Serving or Harming?

Thank you.

-FL