Even Neal Stephenson’s grocery lists are epic and huge. Their scope reaches beyond naming potential purchases, to examining the august fabric of food, the meaning behind grocery stores, the deep chemistry of our greasy gut juices. I doubt the man has ever written a piece of fiction less than a million words long in his life. I am not complaining. But I think I grew a muscle in my arms from carrying this book around.
At its simplest, Anathem is a book about rationalist monks saving the world with their huge brains. These monks are fiends for categorizing things and forming taxonomies for ideas and objects. They have names for all the ideas they can think of, in the same way every punch and foot flutter has a name and a history in kung fu movies. Much of Anathem is a bunch of nerds arguing with each other about the ideas they’ve named. It’s like the internet, but in person.
The monks have formed orders centered around those ideas. For instance, a Lorite (a member of the order started by Saunt Lora) believes someone, somewhere, has thought all the ideas the human mind is capable of thinking. Or, put more simply: there is nothing new under the sun. And the purpose of the Lorite order is to go around testing other monks’ ideas, trying to prove that somebody already invented what they think they invented. This is an important idea. Anathem is built on the foundation that human history is an endlessly repeating pattern, with past systems and ideas resurfacing in various formations.
Stephenson introduces new vocabulary in the usual way, through context. However, the new and unknown, but vaguely familiar words are so dense that it feels similar to A Clockwork Orange at points. For clarity’s sake, every few pages, and at the start of each new section, he also inserts definitions from The Dictionary, 4th edition AD 3000.
To me the most interesting facet of Anathem is Stephenson’s perspective on changing language. He uses words with a probable trail of etymology. Sometimes he traces words back with links to familiar, existing English words, sometimes not. Certainly many of the links are tenuous and assumed, which gives the landscape of the novel great depth. The best mind warp is when Stephenson traces the words back to a false start, one that makes sense if you’re reverse engineering it, but isn’t actually true, if this is a world descended from ours. Which it may or may not have. I’m leaning toward not, though I’m not going to say why so I can avoid spoilers.
If I were better at math, I’d enjoy this book even more, but as it is, despite the sad state of math decay in my brain, I liked it. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t win some major awards. Eventually I’d like to read his Baroque Cycle, too, but that’s about two feet thick, so I’ll wait on that until I’ve whittled the list down some.
Post a Comment