Smart Energy

The System of the World

review by Brian Charles Clark

The System of the World: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3
by Neal Stephenson
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2005

We’ve been around the world with Jack Shaftoe, the King of the Vagabonds, and his Solomonic-gold pirating crew. We’ve sat on the edge of our seats while Daniel Waterhouse, friend of Isaac Newton and Godfreid Libniz, made his way back to London from pirate-infested Boston Bay. Dark conspiracies have unfolded before our scarce-believing eyes. Oh! The early seventeenth century never looked like so much fun!

Neal Stephenson is a brainiac monster, and it is futile to resist the tentacles of his imagination. Although some are better than others, he’s never written a dull book. Few, however, have written a more exciting piece of historical fiction. At roughly 2,500 pages, and spanning three fat volumes, few have written longer ones, but the pages flow like a fast moving river along the entire course of The Baroque Cycle. It is intimidating to speculate about the IQ of a writer who can hold so much historical detail in mind, but that figure must been in the low zillions. For not only is there a tremendous amount of detail, but Stephenson messes with history as well, rerouting the river for the sake of a wondrous tale. Read the rest of this entry »

No god but God

review by Brian Charles Clark

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
by Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House, 2006

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive? Read the rest of this entry »

Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

review by Brian Charles Clark

Mason & Dixon
Thomas Pynchon
Picador, 2004

“Snow-Balls have… their Arcs,” Thomas Pynchon’s fifth novel begins. Trying to calculate the arc of the narrative of Mason & Dixon is as difficult as the calculus involved in calculating the arc of a thrown snowball. It’s a huge book, not just in number of pages, but in ideas, both comic and profound, and in erudition.

The story involves the lives, travels and adventures of two globe-trotting Brits, an astronomer and a surveyor, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, as they travel south to the Cape of Good Hope and then west, into North America. Mason and Dixon survive, of course, into the present as the name of the line that separates North from South (the southern boundary of Pennsylvania). But Pynchon, as ever, is never only writing biography or history; indeed, he writes that “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base.” Read the rest of this entry »

Vancouver by Cruise and Griffiths

review by Brian Charles Clark

Vancouver
David Cruise and Alison Griffiths
HarperCollins, 2003

Cruise and Griffiths had plenty of models for their thick novel, Vancouver, and all by one writer: James Mitchner. Mitchner was the pioneer of the “sweeping saga” sub-sub-genre of historical fiction, and Cruise and Griffiths have followed closely in his steps. The model is simple: step forward in time, starting at some suitably dim point in the ancient past, to the present day.

Vancouver starts, not in the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia, but somewhere farther north 15,000 years before the present. Like Mitchner (and, incidentally, like Ayn Rand), Cruise and Griffiths subscribe to the “great man” theory of history: progress, advance and change are made by unique individuals who rise above circumstance to do great things. The great man who first came south to the present location of the beautiful city on the coast of British Columbia, they imagine, was a fellow named Manto. Manto traveled through an ice-free corridor. Never mind that the existence of an ice-free corridor probably never existed, and that the most likely route to the peopling of North America was by coastal island-hoppers: Manto’s story, like all the stories in this novel, is exciting. Read the rest of this entry »

The Confusion: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Confusion: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2
by Neal Stephenson
HarperCollins, 2004

Neal Stephenson has, from his first novel, displayed a couple of highly sought-after writerly talents: a yarn-spinning ability that is almost divinely Irish, as if his mother had given birth to him atop the Blarney Stone; and a knack for language that makes his books tower above those of other science fiction and adventure-thriller writers. Zodiac (usually listed as his first novel, but in fact his second, after The Big U) told the story of a group of all-but-in-name Earth First! direct-activists. This was followed by his break-out novel, the mind-boggling Snow Crash, which revealed a fascination that has held Stephenson’s gaze ever since: cryptography. From the peak of Snow Crash there was a bit of a downhill slide, to The Diamond Age, and then Cryptonomicon. The latter of these two was a disappointment: Stephenson’s prose had dipped into the merely workmanlike (though still head-and-shoulders above the other “cyberpunks” his was classed with after Snow Crash), and the story was, while full of twists and turns and surprises, that of a fairly straightforward thriller. Read the rest of this entry »

The King, the Crook, and the Gambler

review by Brian Charles Clark

The King, the Crook, and the Gambler: The True Story of the South Sea Bubble and the Greatest Financial Scandal in History
by Malcolm Balen
Harper Perennial, 2004

Nearly 300 years ago, a group of financial speculators dreamed up a plan to make money from England’s national debt. In an age when someone making £100 a year was considered wealthy, the national debt was huge: about £9 million. The idea behind the South Sea Company was that British merchants would trade English goods in South America, then controlled by Spain and Portugal. The problem was that Spain and Portugal wouldn’t allow any such thing to happen: they had a strictly controlled monopoly. What actually happened was that John Blunt, the director of the South Sea Company, ended up convincing the British government to sell its debt to the public through the Company in the form of shares. From the profits of the share sales, the Company would then repay the debt. Moreover, “in the persuasive but intrinsically nonsensical analysis” put forward by the South Sea Company, “as surely as night follows day, the bigger the debt, the greater the profit.” Read the rest of this entry »