Quicksilver by Neal StephensonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I really need to preface this with the following: This was probably not a good choice as an audiobook. So, please know that this rating might be much better if I had read the print version--I hope. Visual tedium doesn't bother me nearly as much as aural tedium, so with that out of the way...
I had heard some good things about Neal Stephenson's books, and as someone who enjoys historical fiction, and is a music historian, I thought this initial volume of The Baroque Cycle would be a "no-brainer" (of a choice). The story is immeasurably creative and inspired, taking place in both in 1713 and in flashbacks some 40 years earlier. The protagonist--not the right word--is Daniel Waterhouse, an ex-Puritan scientist ("natural philosopher"), who is living in Massachusetts Bay Colony and is on board a ship (the Minerva) headed back to England to resolve one of the many intellectual disputes which seem to have been the lifeblood of thinking men in the eighteenth century. And yes, the cronies of the Royal Society and the illustrious historical figures are names that Stephenson whisks out of the history books and into his drama: Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Hooke...just to name a few. The droll humor was the saving grace and largely what had me coming back to finish.
Where I struggled were the long passages of historical minutiae which seemed utterly superfluous to the story and very much an attempt to show Stephenson's immense research and knowledge of the time period. A discussion of coinage, for example, added very little to the story, and was one of the most tedious things I have ever listened to within the context of a piece of fiction. Encyclopedic detail has a place, and I prefer it to historical fictions that are so absurd as to be unethical, but historical fiction is still literature and I felt there were far too many moments where the "plot" came to halting stop to luxuriate (fixate) upon some historical icon of progress.
On the other hand, there are clever moments where Stephenson shines as an author: the discussion between John Wilkins and Daniel Waterhouse regarding redundancies in the philosophical language they are creating is subtly mirrored in Wilkins running to write something down and grabbing his quill, and shaking off the "redundant" ink. Ha!
About halfway through I felt perhaps I was doing this book a real disservice by listening to it instead of reading it, and it made me think about modalities. I have the privilege of choice here, and I'm wondering if I didn't, perhaps I would not have found the book so tedious. The failing may be mine, because even when I was frustrated with rabbit holes of endless details, I had a sense that there is a brilliance to what Stephenson has created here. In amongst all the self-indulgent navel gazing (of the characters), there is a coming-of-age story, a seafaring adventure story, a recasting of historical figures (Newton as a masochistic emaciated brat was essential), and the more traditional history-as-scenic-backdrop moves (the Great Fire of London, the bubonic plague) that Stephenson does more justice to than most.
Listening to the book was an experience--and while it wasn't altogether joyful or pleasurable, I came away from it wanting to pick up the next volume in print. I respected and enjoyed Stephenson's ability to enliven historical narratives with multi-dimensional perspectives and wit, to boot.
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