Man I can not for the life of me finish this series... The first book was very interesting with Leibniz and Newton, but it just started to drag with these other swash buckling comedic characters and love affair... ( )

The final volume of this series manages to wrap up all the loose ends and come to a satisfactory outcome all round. Stephenson continues to have believable characters set in their period, while having the occasional anachronistic moment as a counterpoint. His grasp of the period and the detail of his knowledge is overwhelming – I found only one obvious error (there are no humming birds in India). After about 2,700 pages, I was sad to put this series down. Read November 2008 ( )

This is the third book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - well, the last three books, since Stephenson actually wrote eight books that made up the cycle which were then published to form a trilogy. Here the majority of the action takes place in London, where virtually all of the protagonists we have been following end up bringing the story to a mighty conclusion.

The basic plot is that of a murder mystery, but comprises many other components. Daniel Waterhouse has completed his epic trip back across the Atlantic at the urging of Princess Caroline. She wished him to bring about the reconciliation of those two mighty Philosophers Leibniz and Newton. In the process of which he ends up stumbling across Jack's scheme to debase English currency (which he is being blackmailed into by the King of France and the dastardly Edouard de Gex). Trying to summarise the plot - the many strands and the different events - is difficult without having to repeat what happened in earlier books or flick through many pages trying to remind myself of exactly who Saturn was and why the Tsar of Russia made an appearance.

The cast of characters is enormous and it can be difficult to keep them separate at times, although our main characters have become extremely three dimensional. Daniel, Eliza (although she makes a small appearance in this volume), Jack, Isaac Newton, Dappa, Bob Shaftoe, Ravenscar, Princess Caroline, Leibniz - all these characters become beloved and it is of interest to see what happens to all of them.

The three volumes as a whole - the Baroque Cycle - are a truly amazing achievement. It is nigh on 3000 pages dense with facts, with ideas, with characters, with exciting escapes and political machinations. We are shown the beginnings of the world system that we know today - with law enforcement, political parties (Whigs and Tories), real estate and, of course, currency. Either this was written as a fact or Stephenson came up with an extremely clever idea in that currency is called such because of the current of money flowing into London, in this case. There are many such moments during all three books, where you marvel at the level of research and detail that has gone into every element of the story.

It is interesting that these books are almost always shelved in the fantasy/sci fi section but, barring the presence of Enoch Root and his little procedure (I shall not say more, for fear of spoiling certain things!) they are more historical in nature.

One of my disappointments in this and the previous books is the pacing - we can go from thrilling page-turning events into a deep philosophical discourse and this can make the reader grind to a halt. Despite the exciting nature of the plot in general, there were times when I felt as though it was a struggle to read any further, and this is a sad fact when considering that this should be a series read by everyone. It is a classic in the making - or would be, barring the slow and turgid prose at times. Having said that, it didn't do Tolkien any harm and some people may, in fact, find this one of the charming aspects of Stephenson's writing.

I am extremely glad that I read this series, but I shall not be embarking on a re-read for many, many years - if at all. However, I do have the notion that the characters and events will niggle and stay with me - the mark of a book that has had a big effect on me. This should have been a five star experience, but I keep it to four stars purely because of the difficulty of the reading. Recommended (with reservations!) ( )

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Would I recommend it? Hmmm.... I don’’t regret reading it, but I really doubt I’ll ever re-read it. It’s 3,000 pages long. Nine novels long! Stephenson could have dropped 500 of those 3,000 pages without losing anything crucial in terms of the basic plot or the ideas (e.g., monetary systems, the Newton-Liebniz precedence dispute over calculus, etc).
Stephenson is such a lively, intelligent, and funny writer that even when he’s digressing, it’s entertaining. Still, one can’’t help think of the opportunity cost of reading this work. Nine novels!
It also seems as though some of the threads are dropped and never taken up again, although with so many threads and so many characters it’s hard to be sure. For example, that obnoxious French diplomat: Did he ever get his comeuppance, or did Stephenson just forget about him? And what about William of Orange? There should be some resolution regarding him. Or do we get it on page 2,000 and I simply forgot it by the time I got to page 3,000?
Annoyance: Eliza harpoons Jack to the mast of a ship and he’s still in love with her? And for the next 20 years? Come on! ( )

The System of the World, the third and final entry in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, is happily the best of the lot. This is a significant point, in that reading the entire cycle requires the reader to work through 2,668 pages of always-interesting – but often surprisingly dense – prose.

In this volume, the focus is back on early 18th-century London, and on Daniel Waterhouse, the most well-rounded of Stephenson’s three main fictional protagonists. The King of the Vagabonds, Jack Shaftoe, also plays a highly visible role, but the Eliza the Duchess of Various Parts fades almost entirely into the background.

After the second volume’s largely picaresque adventures, the plotting here is tighter, with the role of money and the genesis of machine technology emerging as the most salient of the era’s many innovations and advances.

As is the case throughout the series, Stephenson brilliantly balances vivid, slightly fantastic characterizations and plotting with an astonishing number of erudite asides on almost every imaginable topic. This sounds like a formula for literary disaster, but that is not the case here. I can’t recall ever reading an author that combined these elements with such skill; Michener is perhaps a rough analogue, but Stephenson is a better writer of fiction, and much more sophisticated in the way he works in the abundant fruits of his research.

The System of the World, and hence the whole Cycle, ends on a highly satisfactory note. Stephenson avoids the wrapping-up problems that weakened a couple of his earlier books, e.g. The Diamond Age and even Cryptonomicon, to some degree. The first 90% of the Cycle isn’t exactly a page-turner, no matter how interesting the material, but the last 200-300 pages are, and that’s just the ticket for a reader who’s devoted many, many hours to getting so far.

And just one last word on that. I highly recommend reading this series: there is nothing quite like it; you will learn a great deal; and it’s consistently enjoyable. But do not embark on it lightly. Why not? Here's a fun little factoid: when I posted this LibraryThing review, there were 64 reviews for Quicksilver, the first book in the cycle; 30 for The Confusion, i.e. Book II, and just 15 for The System of the World. That should tell you something about the potential for attrition in reading this series.

In fact, I don’t know how readers who have had to take a break between volumes quite manage it; the sheer amount of effort required (for re-learning characters and crucial plot lines, and for simply getting back ‘in the zone’ for reading this kind of material) must be daunting. I found that plowing through the whole Cycle worked best. The one ‘reading break’ I took in the middle of Volume I was a big mistake, as I barely got myself going again, and would likely never have come back to the Cycle again. And that, in comfortable retrospect, would have been a great loss. ( )