The Washington Post finally gets around to reviewing Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, but makes a blunder. The reviewer, Gregory Feeley, commends Stephenson for his anachronisms.
Stephenson’s tongue-in-cheek verbal anachronisms can be witty, as when he manages circumstances so that a character can speak plausibly of a “Routine Upgrade” or name a private tavern the “Kit-Kat Clubb.”
But the Kit-Kat Club isn’t an anachronism; it was a real institution, and the epicenter of Whig debate in the early eighteenth century. That said, Feeley shouldn’t be chastized too harshly for his mistake. It’s exactly this collision between present and past, so that you really can’t tell the one from the other, that makes for the fun in “System of the World.” And indeed, Stephenson’s depiction of the Kit-Kat as a sort of elevated girly-bar may not be entirely true to history. To repeat myself
Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In Quicksilver, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility.
The plot creaks, the characters are a little thin, and (as always) Stephenson isn’t very good at endings, but there’s still a zip and verve to the book. It’s ambitious, chaotic, and sometimes falls flat on its face but picks itself up again by virtue of its sheer exuberance. The combination of geek sensibility and economic history is difficult to resist.
Addendum: since I’m linking to the Amazon page for SotW in this review, I should say that I’ve earned approx $100 through the Amazon link in the last several days, which I have sent on to the Red Cross. Not as much as John (no terabyte drives alas, although I’m grateful to the person who bought several classic movies) . I’ve decided to make this into a permanent feature - all earnings from links from my posts will be donated to charity from here on in.
Hmmm… there’s something else in this review which may not be quite right, which I’ll mention here because I’ve seen it a lot. Many reviews say that the story is about old systems falling into disuse and oblivion as their successors are created and emerge: experiment-based science succeeding alchemy, regulation of society by markets succeeding regulation by titled nobility. But Stephenson puts a somewhat different view in the mouth of one of his characters:
It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any old Systems. But things I have seen recently … have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microsope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive. … And so I say that Alchemy shall not vanish, as I always hoped. Rather, it shall be encapsulated within the new System of the World, and become a familar and even comforting presence there, though its name may change and its practitioners speak no more about the Philospher’s Stone.
It’s always risky to take a character as speaking for the author, but this dovetails well with a number of incidents in the book where aspects and artifacts of Systems far older than any of the characters, unknown and partially hidden, are found to be serviceable and put to use.
I’ve got some more thoughts on this on my own blog here. (Mild spoiler warning: I also talk there about the fantasy elements in the book that have me puzzled, as I mentioned in earlier comments on CT; I’ve tried to avoid giving away plot points in doing that, but in order to comment, I do have to say what they are.)
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