Loved the book, finished it today. I skipped parts 2 and 3 of the Baroque cycle so it’s a fair while since I’ve read NS – awesome reminder of what a talent he is. As an ivory tower denizen myself, it really resonated in places. Some random thoughts, no real spoilers:
I was well impressed with the style he put into handling the distopian elements of the story, ie Saecular society is dumber than owlshit, fed a metaphoric diet of explosions on the speely and a real diet of a euphoric (bit heavy –handed that) just to function. I’ve read other writers, Le Guin comes to mind, who would make a moralising pig’s arse of this type of story. NS has such wit and panache that he can pull it off.
It was also a great reminder of what a reader’s writer NS is. He falls over himself to explain things, cannot stop himself spelling stuff out. I usually prefer the opposite type of writer, the obfuscators and unreliable narrators, but his pedagogical style allows him to write really exceptional stories for the reader. A drawback to this IMO is that the style can lead to some really juvenile devices – the short descriptions of words that break up chapters is completely unnecessary. He’s a good enough writer that these terms can live and breathe in the story on their own.
I thought he backed away a lot from his initial rendering of the concents and their isolation. The first few chapters painted a picture of a complete and total dichotomy between the avout and the extramuros, when Raz is acting as an amenuensis with Orolo and Artisan Flec for example (Raz can barely speak Fluccish here). He’s happy to use this for comedic effect, like when Raz buys the protractor for Fraa Jad, but it falls to pieces as the book progresses, and people are sort of the same. I don’t think this is a failure of consistency of anything, he probably just thought that this was the best mechanism for moving the story along.
Speaking of the story, is NS getting his shit together of something? Pretty tight structure, decent ending. I preferred the first half of the book rather than the more action-packed second half, but thought he did a fine job on keeping things moving. Extremely skilful account of the attack on the orb-stack for example. That had potential to be a real yawner, but it wasn’t at all.
I was really let down by Quicksilver after Cryptonomicon, thought it was a highly retrograde step. Almost a cowardly one, as if he didn’t quite have the stones to join the big boys of the literary word so scurried back to his home turf of writing nerd-encyclopedias. Anathem won’t gain him any mainstream literary recognition, mores the pity, but it should. A great novel.
