Two Trilogies
Between lunches in Retail Hell and evenings at home, I’ve had time to finish one trilogy and start another, and in a kind of pleasant symmetry they represent Past and Future.
Representing the past in my little monologue here is Neil Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I started book one, “Quicksilver,” a long time ago—perhaps over a year, as it was snatched from an Osaka bookstore. I read the second book, “The Confusion,” over a long period starting in Japan and ending in Montana, and at its end it was both satisfying and irritating, as I was immediately compelled to find and purchase volume three, “The System of the World.”
While lacking some of the swashbuckling chutzpah of the middle volume, “System” makes up for it with some brilliant feats of narrative knot-tying. I know I’m one of many who has found Stephenson’s endings to be unsatisfying. We endured them, did we not?—because the trip along the way was so much fun. But in the end, we wished to have our cake and eat it, too. People who tackle this trilogy do in fact enjoy both cake-having and -eating, but it is a very big cake.
Perhaps the Baroque Cycle’s extreme length allowed Stephenson to wrap everything up just the way he wanted to, devoting a full novel to plot-resolution, without the excessive abruptness that characterized (for example) “Cryptonomicon,” whose ending was essentially ”…and they got what they were looking for, the end.”
…which is fine, really, as far as it goes, but I was so invested in the characters of the Baroque Cycle that I deeply wanted each of them to receive their narrative due. And they did. It was fabulous. My only regret is that my hardcover American edition of “System” doesn’t match my trade paperbacks of “Confusion” and “Quicksilver,” but that’s just the idiot geek completist in me whining.
Jumping from the 1600s to the 2060s, I started and finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red Mars” in the course of about a week. I had tried it before, but got bogged down in the politics. This time around, having honed (perhaps bludgeoned) my political-narrative sense with the Baroque books, I found the intrigue much easier to parse. The science of going to Mars gives me a big… thrill, you see, and Robinson explores and explains this science very thoroughly. Too thoroughly for many, I imagine, but at this precise moment of my life, going to Mars sounds pretty good, and anybody who can make it sound more plausible is going to have my attention.