Review:
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
| Publisher: |
William Morrow |
| Copyright: |
2008 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-147409-6 |
| Format: |
Hardcover |
| Pages: |
935 |
Fraa Erasmas is a little less than twenty years old and is an avout of the
decade math of the Concent of Saunt Edhar. As
Anathem opens, he's
approaching his first apert. All of those words are left for the reader
to puzzle out for themselves, unless you cheat and read the glossary
(which I would recommend doing only with caution, but more on that in a
moment), since Erasmas, the first-person narrator of this story, writes
(mostly) as if the reader is familiar with the mathic world and its
concepts.
Translated into English, it means that Erasmas was brought into something
akin to a scientific monastery (the "math") at around the age of nine and
has been there for ten years, since his math is a decade math and
therefore remains closed to all outside (s cular) ideas and contact for
periods of ten years at a time. He is still a student there, not yet
declaring allegiance to one of the chapters. That's something that he
will be expected to do after the first apert. Every ten years, the decade
math opens its doors to the outside world for a period of ten days
(apert), and the fraas and suurs can leave the math and travel through the
outside world as they wish.
The start of
Anathem is an exercise in alienation and
reorientation. Stephenson has constructed a complex society with a long
history and its own specific technical jargon and throws the reader into
it with a minimum of orientation. Despite being familiar with SF novels
that use this technique, I did read the preface and recommend that other
readers do as well unless they particularly love piecing together a world
from hints and clues. The timeline, in particular, was invaluable and
something I referred to throughout the story. But even with the preface,
you should expect to read the first part of
Anathem interpolating
meanings from context or just letting things slip past until you later
come to understand them.
A lot of people bounce off of
Anathem here, and it's one of the
reasons why I'd been postponing reading it (the other being that it's a
substantial doorstop and I wanted to give it my undivided attention). But
it's really not as bad as I feared. One gets a feel for the terms fairly
quickly, and the more difficult ones Stephenson defines as he goes with
excerpts from a dictionary of the mathic world. I found it slightly
disorienting for a chapter or two, and then it started growing on me. The
terminology is sometimes different just for the sake of being different
(jeejahs are indistinguishable from smartphones for all practical
purposes), but usually the invented words provide either important links
to the past of the constructed world of Arbre or are technical terms that
add precision and clarity once you know their meanings. It can be a
little bit frustrating to remember the mapping of famous theories and
theorems to the Orth names, but only mildly. (And Diax's Rake is so
useful of a name for something that English doesn't name that I may start
using it myself.)
This is also why I recommend against reading the glossary. The
definitions of terms are linked to important parts of history, which are,
in turn, linked to important parts of the plot, and the glossary therefore
risks spoilers. I liked having the term introduced by the frequent
dictionary excerpts scattered through the chapters, and enjoyed the
feeling of the terminology unfolding with the plot. The glossary is there
if you really get lost, but I think the experienced SF reader
(particularly if you have enough history background to pick up on the
obvious parallels and start mapping bits to Greece, Rome, the Catholic
Church, etc.) will be able to navigate the language without that much
difficulty.
I also stopped caring about the terminology because the story is so
engrossing that it pulled me right into the book, closed over me, and
made Erasmas's world feel real, precious, and fascinating. Whether that's
going to be true of other people is a surprisingly difficult question, and
one that I'll try to tackle as part of this review. But I will say
up-front that I think this is the best book that Stephenson has ever
written, even better than
Snow Crash,
despite some undeniable flab and one extremely irritating choice.
Anathem is, at its heart, a novel about the scientific method. I
think it's the first book by Stephenson that elegantly mingles his
tendencies (and obsessions) as a writer with the interests (and
obsessions) of the characters and makes the whole novel feel coherent.
All of Stephenson's books are prone to discursive infodumps, but they've
usually had to be shoehorned in around the characters. Even with the
Baroque Cycle, a series full of natural philosophers, the
digressions are jammed in around the plot like the filling of an
over-packed box and frequently stick out at odd angles or dribble out on
the floor. With
Anathem, Stephenson has populated a book full of
characters who have completely believable and engrossing reasons to
digress into scientific debate and analysis, can put them into dialogue
and thereby avoid some of the strain of the infodump, and (most
importantly) largely restrains himself from narrative digressions via
first-person narration and careful attention to when the characters
themselves would follow the same digression.
In short, this is a book full of very smart and very well-educated people
who figure things out from first principles using agreed-upon theory,
thrown into an unknown and dangerous situation that requires a great deal
of deep thinking, science, engineering, and philosophy. All of
Stephenson's quirks are still here, on prominent display, but rarely have
I ever seen a better match of writer, characters, plot, and world
background than this book. I would go so far as to say that, if you don't
like this book, you're unlikely to like any long Stephenson.
I haven't said a lot about the plot. Erasmas's apert is only the first
part, and barely touches on any significant plot elements. It's mostly
there to set some groundwork, introduce characters, and get the reader
oriented. I'm not going to say much more, since the way the novel
transitions from routine to unusual to emergency, and the resulting
scramble to understand the emergency, is the heart and soul of this book
and should not be spoiled. (I spoiled myself slightly by reading some
analysis that I shouldn't have and regretted it, although it wasn't too
much of a problem.) This is one of Stephenson's best-plotted novels. It
develops slowly enough for the reader (and the characters) to think hard
about it and make some good and bad guesses, but fast enough to stay
engrossing. Most of it is very well-paced provided that you find the
background of science and philosophy of science interesting. (If you
don't, this is probably not a book you're going to enjoy.)
I say "most of it" because, as mentioned earlier, this book is a bit
flabby. There are a couple of sections where the theory and analysis are
pushed aside by exigent circumstances and more action-oriented plot
elements, both of which reminded me that Stephenson is very bad at writing
action sequences and both of which I wished were shorter. And there are a
couple of sections where Erasmas is getting oriented to a new situation or
working up the courage to do something where I wished he'd get on with it
already. But for a novel of nearly 1,000 pages, the amount of tension and
reader interest Stephenson maintained for me was quite impressive.
But as good as the plot is, the best part of this book is its full-bore,
no-apologies embrace of
understanding things. This is a book about
making sense of the world, and about what it means to make sense of the
world, and how you go about it, and what preconditions are required to do
so. It is not, contrary to so much science fiction, a book about knowing
things. The people who are already experts appear in this book, but
generally only in the context of figuring out new things they've not
previously been exposed to. Rather, it's a book about learning things,
the thrill that comes from applying theory to understand something new,
and the satisfaction of working through something from first principles or
previously-established theory, arriving at testable predictions, and then
testing them. It's the first novel I've read that captures some of the
joy and delight that I got from reading George Gamow's
One Two Three... Infinity as a child.
Stephenson novels have always been about showing the reader neat things he
learned, but I think previous books relied on the reader to bring their
own enthusiasm.
Anathem, at least for me, goes a step farther and
uses the passion and approach of its characters to
create that
enthusiasm. It's one of those books that I not only enjoyed but went away
from feeling like it made me a better person in some subtle but detectable
way.
Sadly, this is also where the irritating part comes in.
I'm going to be very careful and indirect here, since the details are all
extremely significant spoilers. You may want to skip to the last
paragraph of this review if you want to avoid any knowledge about the end
of
Anathem.
Stephenson pulls several rabbits out of the hat in this book, but most of
them are well-defended and nicely handled bits of misdirection. There are
a few where I thought the science or engineering was dubious, but even
those are usually backed with enough hand-waving about Arbre technology
that I could swallow it enough for the purposes of this book. (The
timeline here is very helpful in allowing one to write off a few things as
unknown technology.) But he puts, at the core of the plot, one of the
most scientifically dubious bits of the whole book, and there's simply no
avoiding that by the end of the story.
Now, this doesn't mean that he just expects the reader to swallow it.
Much of
Anathem is a carefully-constructed defense of the bits he
uses for the plot, and the defense is not half-bad within his fictional
world. There are substantial in-book justifications for believing these
techniques will work on Arbre even if they wouldn't in our scientific
domain. So it's not so much the plausibility that bothered me; the idea
is at least as plausible as some of the FTL drive concepts that I've
swallowed without complaint. I do hold
Anathem to a higher
standard because the book is about science in a way that most science
fiction isn't, but even with that, I think Stephenson mostly managed to
dance across the thin ice he built.
The problem is more subtle but more serious: if taken seriously on its own
terms, the approach Stephenson takes to the plot destroys science in his
universe.
I can't really say more than that, since all of the details are huge
spoilers, but the more I thought about it, the more irritated and annoyed
I got.
Anathem is otherwise a brilliant defense of the scientific
method, and it felt like Stephenson injected a poison pill in the center
of it, leading necessarily to a world where the scientific method no
longer works. This does not happen on camera, or even between the pages
of the book; you have to think about the implications for a while before
you realize that's what happened. But once you do, it's a bitter pill to
swallow, and it's hard to escape the feeling that it fundamentally
undermines Stephenson's whole project here. And, to make it worse
(although also oddly better in a way), I think it was unnecessary. He
would have had to reconstruct the ending, but I can't shake the feeling
that there were ways to write the ending, even maintaining the same
character strengths, without having to pull that particular rabbit out of
the hat.
Because I think it's, in the end, unnecessary, I was still able to enjoy
the whole book, including the ending, despite this, but while the rest of
Anathem is a wholehearted 10, that choice knocked a full point off
my impression of the book. It's profoundly irritating precisely because
Stephenson did such an excellent job with the rest of it.
But, that said, this book is still exceptional. I think it's the book
that Stephenson was meant to write. Not only did he get the overall
construction nearly perfect, he gets so many of the details right, from
the history (which for a while I thought was merely clever, once I started
seeing the correspondences that moved it out of the realm of pure
invention, but which transitioned back to profound with later revelations
in the book) to the language to the way that he excerpted some theoretic
digressions into very well-done appendices. If you've ever thought of a
theory as beautiful, or like reading about smart people debating the
nature of understanding and knowledge, I cannot recommend this book too
highly. Despite the highly irritating flaw at its center, and despite a
few sections that show Stephenson is not a well-rounded writer, I think
it's brilliant.
Rating: 9 out of 10
What happened about the reproducible
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