Book Review: Quicksilver by Neil Stephenson

I am not totally thrilled. Maybe my expectations of this book were too high, but it’s not my problem he wrote Cryptonomicon ;). Don’t take it wrong, I really like the book, but at over 900 pages, it is far too long and only the first installment of three books. Actually, it is three books, and it is volume I of the baroque cycle, which will have three volumes, each likely being 3 books again, bounding to become one. I already have volume II and make no mistake, I will read it.

But I will just read it in steps and not try to read it in one go, and will not try to keep everything in my head. The thing is that the general story is good, the main characters are wonderful, the settings are interesting, but … there are far too many characters in general to even remotely come to grips with in a leisurely way and sometimes he goes too far in describing the surroundings or other things.

I am torn between thinking that he goes into too much detail in the book and that this level of detail is needed to go this deep into the story. Reflecting a bit on this I feel that the depth is needed indeed and he does well in doing that, but maybe I took it for too much of a leasurely book, which it really isn’t. The amount of characters would really have warranted a piece of paper where one could write down a short who’s who and who knows whom to be able to fall back on it from time to time. There were tables of the royal families of the times in there but they do not really help with all the non-noble, not-yet-noble, soon-to-be-noble, or maybe-noble people and to get them into perspective. On top of that they have too many different names and titles that keep changing and keep being added on.

Another thing that I don’t like is that while he says that it is a historical book, it is also a novel, so some things didn’t really happen as they did, meaning that you are often not sure if this is now really how things happened in history or of it isn’t. I mean he talks about Newton and other scientiest. He talks about different royals. So it’s a mixture of half-truths, that isn’t too wonderful. I likely have to do a further read into that before continuing with volume II. Somebody can gladly enlighten me as to how much is real in the book. Who really founded the MIT for example?

I can’t really give a final verdict yet, and I will likely have to get a different mind set for reading the next book. I will also take a pen and paper next to me to keep all the characters untangled. If I then can settle how much of the books is real and how much isn’t, then I will be a happy camper. For now, it’s merely a good book but this might change once I got through all the volumes.