Ordinarily, when you read about the great discoveries of the Enlightenment and the lives of the men who made them, you get quite a sterile view of those lives. In Wikipedia’s entry on Isaac Newton, for instance: “In June 1661, Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. His uncle Reverend William Ayscough, who had studied at Cambridge, recommended him to the university. At Cambridge, Newton started as a subsizar, paying his way by performing valet duties until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, which covered his university costs for four more years until the completion of his MA.” What you get from Neal Stephenson in Quicksilver is more like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink romp through Restoration England with Falstaff and Prince Hal, plus maybe Romeo and his boisterous band of friends. Stephenson’s London of the late 17th and early 18th centuries is ankle deep in mud and shit, full of beer and brothels, foul smells, fouler water, and men and women who are just as foul, earthy and funky, be they churchmen, philosophers, soldiers, courtiers or kings.
Fresh off the success of Cryptonomicon, Stephenson apparently couldn’t let go of the Waterhouse clan or the history of science. In Quicksilver he takes us back to what the Waterhouses were doing during the Enlightenment. Daniel Waterhouse is a Gumpian figure who’s there, either in the shadows or front and center, during many of the era’s key moments and with many of its main characters. And what a time it was! The book – and indeed the whole massive trilogy of which it is the first part – ranges far and wide through the vast political, social, religious, scientific, mathematical, technological and philosophical ferment of the era. He paints a vast, Breughelian canvas and sets loose his cast of characters, some real and some invented.
What was happening and who was making it happen? Many of the things humans had believed about the natural world and their place in it since the Classical Greek and Roman era or the Middle Ages were giving way to the more systematized investigation of the natural philosophers (today we’d call them scientists). Chief among them is Newton, slowly giving up on the ideas of alchemy as he invents new systems of math, physics, astronomy, theology and more. He’s joined by John Wilkins, the theologian and natural philosopher working on a universal language and system of measurement; the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz, who was at least as brilliant as Newton; Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Samuel Pepys, and more. Not to mention English kings Charles II, James II, and William of Orange. Daniel Waterhouse rubs elbows with them all, never as brilliant, original, noble, or brave as any of them, yet constantly playing a role as gadfly and catalyst.
Not only is Quicksilver the first of three books, it was itself originally published as three separate books, then combined into this 900-page behemoth. It remains divided into three “books,” “Quicksilver,” “The King of the Vagabonds,” and “Odalisque.” The first and third follow Waterhouse’s fortunes, and in the second we’re introduced to the soldier of fortune and vagabond Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza, the former Barbary Slave he rescues from the Turkish Sultan’s harem that’s being slaughtered by Janissaries during the seige of Vienna.
Now, I’ve not yet read Cryptonomicon, so the appearance here of Enoch Root didn’t register at first. He makes only occasional but pivotal appearances like the temporal vagabond he apparently is. (I’m reminded of Lazarus Long in Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.) When the book opens he has just arrived in Massachusetts in 1713, to summon Daniel back to England to hopefully repair the rift between Newton and Leibniz. As Daniel bows to the inevitable and boards ship, he begins to look back over his life, and thus we learn his life in flashbacks that alternate with his rather eventful trip home. The hectored youngest son of a radical preacher, he attaches himself to the sickly, bullied Newton at a young age, and sticks with him through university and beyond, mostly (he tells himself) to make sure Isaac occasionally eats and sleeps. They eventually become involved with the Royal Society, taking part in horrendous and dangerous experiments and rubbing elbows with some of the highest and lowest elements of society.
As an interlude of sorts, in the second book we meet Jack Shaftoe and his brother Robert, urchins who begin their careers as gallows boys who, for a few coins, hang onto the legs of hanged men to hasten their deaths. They, too, encounter some of the great men of the age including the military commander Sir Winston Churchill and his son John in battles throughout the continent. Robert opts for a military career but Jack lacks the discipline and strikes out on his own. After he rescues Eliza, the two work their way across an embattled Europe, encountering Leibniz and other characters and landing in Amsterdam, where Eliza turns her financial acumen to the just emerging stock market, eventually becoming a minor courtier in the Court of the Sun King and a spy there for William of Orange.
It’s all a huge picaresque, set against the political turmoil of the age as England struggles to decide whether it will remain a Protestant land or return to the Roman Church, and of course all of those various scientific and philosophical discoveries. It’s written with Stephenson’s customary verbosity, packed with horror and hilarity, raunchy sex and numbing philosophical discourses. Acres of prose are interspersed with chapters in the form of epic poetry, Baroque stage drama, diary entries and epistolaries. And I haven’t even touched on the role played by cryptography, mostly involving Eliza and her communications with Leibniz. Or the way Stephenson weaves the thematic imagery of quicksilver in its many meanings throughout the story as a multi-faceted symbol of all the ways the world, once thought immutable, is shifting under its characters feet.
I was unsure that I would like Quicksilver, but it quickly won me over. If you’ve enjoyed any of Stephenson’s other works, even if you prefer science fiction to historical fiction, it’s pretty likely that this first installment of The Baroque Cycle will appeal to you. Now I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and read Cryptonomicon, then go on and finish this trilogy, which includes The Confusion and The System of the World.
(William Morrow, 2003)
