This reviews the second volume of the Baroque Cycle. To begin reviewing, go to the review of the first volume, Quicksilver.

Neal Stephenson. The Confusion. Morrow, 2004. The Baroque Cycle.

The Confusion is the second volume of The Baroque Cycle, and it continues the story begun in Volume 1, Quicksilver. Stephenson has this volume divided into two stories “Bonanza” and “Juncto.” Unlike the first volume, in this volume the books go back and forth in alternating chapters to keep the chronological order more or less intact.

When we left Jack Shaftoe in Quicksilver, he had been taken captive on the seas. When we see him again in The Confusion, he is a galley slave for an Algerian businessman. Of course, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from the Barbary Coast were basically pirates. This businessman and his crew are planning their biggest heist yet.

Shaftoe and some of his colleagues, all slaves, figure out a scheme to outsmart their master. The scheme succeeds, sort of. They do get liberated but end up in all kinds of more serious scrapes, too. The plot gets quite involved, but it is not too much of a spoiler to say that the Cabal, as they call themselves, of ten men pledged to each other captures a Spanish Galleon off the coast of Spain. The vessel reportedly is filled with silver from Mexico and Peru. However, it turns out that the vessel is filled with gold instead.

While Shaftoe and company initially make off with the gold, rumors abound. Basically, it seems that as the story develops, its not that the vessel they thought contained silver really contained gold, but that the gold that was captured had been changed from silver to gold through alchemy. This was not just any gold, but gold associated with the wisest man in history—and a favorite of alchemists and secret lodges—King Solomon. This gets some of the characters we met in Quicksilver involved including Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac Newton.

Shaftoe’s adventures will take him around the world with significant stops in Malta, Egypt, India, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, and finally back to Europe in Qwghlm and France. His adventures are sometimes swashbuckling and sometimes oppressive. If Quicksilver included a picaresque tale, The Confusion is more like an Odyssey or an Argosy. Shaftoe survives torture, betrayal, slavery, illness, shipwreck, just to name a few. He also spends time as a king in India under an Emperor and as a prisoner of the Inquisition in Mexico.

Some of his companions include Nyazi, a Nubian slave; Varj Esphanhian, a member of the Armenian family that befriended him in Paris; Goto, a Japanese priest from Manila; Moseh de la Cruz, a Spanish Jew with a Christian surname; Yevgeny the Raskolnik from Russia. Jack’s sons, now adult Vagabonds themselves, show up. And among other things, Jack has the opportunity to avenge his friend Eliza. It is complicated. One would have thought that the person responsible for her enslavement was a Barbary corsair or merchant. But there were Europeans who successfully traded with North Africa and the Levant without encountering difficulties because of business arrangements they made.

The chapters titled “Bonanza” cover Shaftoe’s adventures. They do overlap some with events in “Juncto” which focus on Europe, especially the machinations or business arrangements of Eliza, who becomes a duchess in a couple of different ways as she socially climbs in the French court and in the German city states. Because they marry among each other so much, the royal houses often overlap, so her friendship with the dispossessed widow of a minor Elector turns into a friendship with a woman who will become Queen of England (though that eventuality is beyond the scope of these tales).

Eliza develops a scheme that today we would call derivative trading that bankrupts an enemy. However, the famous French privateer Jean Bart temporarily bankrupts her when he attacks the ship she is traveling on. There is, of course, a little word play since derivative is also a term from calculus, and both Newton and Leibniz are significant characters in this tale.

We note that even back then kings and politicians tried to cover their debts by inflating the currency. Both Eliza and Daniel Waterhouse, a main character from Volume I, witness the establishment of the Bank of England, the first insurance brokers, and the origins of Lloyd’s. I recall reading that in the nineteenth century some Christian groups taught against insurance because they said it was a kind of gambling. Stephenson may make a case for that as well—perhaps one could argue that the risk is spread so that the gamble becomes manageable.

Still, both Eliza and Jack Shaftoe take many risks. Their paths do not cross, but they are aware of one another. Even from different continents, word eventually travels as Eliza rises in status and the tales of L’Emmerdeur continue to spread.

Leibniz takes a larger role in the “Juncto.” He and Newton form a kind of mutual admiration society—tough at arm’s length. He has his own philosophical theories. And he continues to speculate on free will and atoms. Heady and entertaining! And Stephenson presents an observation on light from Newton that sounds almost poetic. Indeed, Stephenson is very clever in his use of simile and metaphor throughout the Cycle. Here Newton is speaking to Daniel Waterhouse who is holding a prismatic piece of broken glass in his hand:

Now consider the light you are catching in your hands. It has traveled a hundred million miles from the Sun without being affected in any wise by the Cœlestial Æther. In its passage through the atmosphere it has been subjected to only slight distortions. And yet in traversing a quarter of an inch of window-glass, its course is bent, and it is riven into several colors. It is such an everyday thing that we do not mark it; yet pray consider for a moment how remarkable it is! During its hundred-million-mile passage, is it not acted upon by the gravity of the sun, which is powerful enough to hold mighty Jupiter in its grasp, though at a much greater remove? And is it not acted upon as well by the gravity of the Earth and Moon, and all the other planets? And it seems perfectly insensible to these mighty forces. Yet there is embedded within this shard of glass some hidden Force that bends it and splits it with no effort. It’s as if a cannonball hurled at infinite speed from some gun of inconceivable might, and passing through ramparts and bulwarks as if they were shadows, were deflected and shivered into bits by a child holding up a feather. What could be concealed within an ordinary piece of window-glass that harbors such potency, and yet affects you and me not at all? (423, Stephenson occasionally affects archaic spelling.)

The novel at one point quotes an actual letter written by Liselotte (daughter of the Elector and wife of the Duke of Orleans, hence sister-in-law to Louis XIV) to Sophie (Princess of Hanover, mother of King George I and the first Queen of Prussia) in 1706 which summarizes much of the story:

The upheavals of the last twenty years have been unbelievable: the kingdoms of England, Holland, and Spain have been transformed as fast as scenery in a theatre. When later generations come to read about our history, they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it. (811)

Romance in 1706 meant “a work of prose fiction” or what we today call a novel. Many things happened in those years. Those events really solidified the economic and scientific systems that still work today—though both are now heavily challenged. The politics also set the scene for a relatively peaceful Western World that would only be disrupted by Napoleon and the two World Wars. Yes, the Baroque Cycle is fiction, but it reveals a lot of history and gives us much food for thought.

And the tale does not end. Both Eliza and Jack encounter obstacles at the very end of the book. Clearly there is more to come. That is our next assignment, the third volume of the Cycle.

P.S. Samuel Pepys’ Diary also tells us of a businessman, who may also have been something of a crank, try to tell people that he had discovered some of King Solomon’s gold. In other words, such a belief was circulating in those days. We see this played out more thoroughly in Volume III, The System of the World.