First a quick note: Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle is not the same book as Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle #1. The latter is a third of a novel, the former is a fantastically vast and amazing tome of almost 1000 pages. Harper decided to play this bit of publishing chicanery upon us to sell more books to people who were afraid of books that weigh more than chihuahuas. It is a mistake I made, which necessitated the purchase of two books where only one was required, and about which I am a little bitter now.
Publishing peccadilloes now aside: There are novels in the world that you read because you like them, and there are novels in the world that you read because they make you smarter readers. The last book I read in the latter category was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which was, I think, good, but was too smart for me. I trudged through it because reading things that are too smart is a pretty good way to become smarter, I think. That doesn't make the process enjoyable, though. It's more than a bit like taking medicine, and, honestly, the strongest emotion I felt about Foucault's Pendulum was relief that I had finally finished it.
Quicksilver, on the other hand, was somehow both a joy to read and far too smart for me to actually be able to follow. Don't kid yourself, Quicksilver is a very challenging read. There are a lot of characters, and most of the characters have two or three titles that they are often referred to by. I spent just as much time reading back (or forward to the Dramatis Personae in the appendix) to remind myself who a person or a place or a thing was as I did actually reading. Stevenson doesn't patronize you by taking it easy on you, either. People, and their positions in society and their relationships are never explained in awkward "device" conversations (which is a problem especially regarding ridiculously inbred royals). Same is true with places, and historical events. Nobody ever says, "remember how Oliver Cromwell violently deposed the Crown, killed as many Irish Catholics as he could, and then he died, and then they exhumed him and chopped off his head and reinstated the Regency?" No, instead, when they happen to come up in conversation, people talk about these events and people and places as though you already know what they're talking about. In this way, Stephenson requires, but also somehow also engenders, an in-depth knowledge of Early-Enlightenment Era Continental history. Wikipedia is your friend.
And while this story contains, teaches, and uses, history, economics, geography, cryptography, physics, anatomy, astronomy, biology, mathematics, alchemy, politics, courtly intrigue and protocol, and any number of interesting "topics," that's not what it's about, and that's not what makes it compelling. It's the characters that really make this story so tremendously readable, in spite of it's almost complete state of unreadability. All the characters, fictional and historical, have real life breathed into them. All are interesting and complicated, and very few are broadly drawn caricatures, which is the temptation too many writers of historical fiction give into. While the book is undoubtedly an unabashed celebration of Science!, Stepehenson recognizes that scientists, even ludicrously world-changingly famous ones, are complicated and disturbed, and very often not fully functional humans.
In a few places, Stephenson gets "cute" by introducing some technology or word or cleverly uses some bit of information we have, in the 21st century, that the characters themselves do not have. Unfortunately, this is executed often with such a "wink" to the reader that it almost appears as an anachronism, and takes the reader out of the period. On the other hand, there is no real attempt to use 17th century speech or cadence or spelling in anything, which is the best kind of anachronism, the kind that allows the contemporary reader to actually understand the dialogue, so I forgive him these few small clever trespasses.
In Quicksilver, Stephenson brings life to an absolutely amazing period in the world's history, and also manages to tell a compelling story with a very intriguing set of characters and historical figures. Yeah, I was more than a little relieved when I had finally finished, but somehow I don't think it'll be too long before I pick up the second volume.
Bonus: On the day after I finished, I went to the Huntington Library and took a gander at this. I was like a little boy on this first day of school.
