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For those of you just joining me, I sort of blogged this, and the actual review is down at the bottom.



Ok, approximately 50 words into the book, discussing an executioner with a noose about to hang a woman, and I'm already completely smitten by these two sentences: "The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think."

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Apparently I'm blogging as I read this book now. Here's another bit I loved (page 175): "Daniel for his part was aware, now, that he was surrounded by the Quality, and that they were all peering at him. He had gotten himself into a Complicated Situation, and he did not like those." The use of capitals in those sentences is not only awesome, but seems to capture Daniel's way of thinking marvelously too.

(Loving the book in general so far too)

****

Here's another awesome quote (page 501):

"[Paris:] was built, so far as Jack could tell, on the principle that there was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years."


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Quicksilver is aptly named. Quicksilver, or Mercury, is a peculiar material, a sort of indefinable liqui-solid. In some ways that is what this book is. I was kind of surprised to re-discover that it lives in the "science fiction" section of Barnes and Noble, as it certainly isn't what one thinks of when one thinks of sci fi. While there is some idle chat about space and exploring it, there are no space ships, no aliens, and in fact, the action takes place entirely in the past (17th-18th century, mostly in Europe). I suppose the classification makes a certain kind of sense, considering that some of the most prominent characters in the book are natural philosophers (what we would now call scientists), and the book focuses a bit on the discovery of calculus, and also touches on various other scientific fields, including biology, astronomy, and climatology.

While his scientist characters are exploring the physical world, Stephenson explores the literary one. He pulls some crazy tricks out of his sleeves, and I loved every one of them. Some favorites: One of his characters reflects on how his life is like something from a theatre, and then the next several pages are written as a play, rather than the novel we were reading seconds ago. There is a scene from the perspective of a character who is going mad that breaks out into a musical, complete with reanimated corpses singing in chorus, and a priest directly addressing the mad man, listing all his faults in song. There are a couple chapters written entirely as volley of letters written by a character. She knows that one of her targets is having all of his mail intercepted and read, and the other one she has encrypted everything in a way that she is confident won't be broken, and the difference in content between the two sets of letters is the story.

There are a couple caveats to what would be a generally unbridled recommendation here. Caveat the first: I am a huge history, science, and philosophy nerd, and the myriad of cross pollination between the three with the fiction was a cause of joy for me, where others might find it distracting (or even painful). On the other hand, every time a new character, no matter how minor was introduced, with a name I recognized from history, it made me quite happy. Caveat the second: This book is not really complete. The baroque cycle, is really one long story, and the ending to this book is not satisfying at all, as it isn't really an ending. Caveat the third: Sometimes, some of the characters can be really huge jerks. I didn't particularly mind this, but some might.