Category: Culture

Quicksilver is so damned big. My god, it’s big. It’s 900 pages, and it’s really really big, and it’s the first volume of three.

And it’s Neal Stephenson, so you know it’s going to be even more wordy than that.

I’m about halfway through, thanks to an early shipment to a bookstore which will remain nameless. The book’s divided into thirds, more or less. The first third is Daniel Waterhouse’s story, which can in no way be considered to have a plot. Halfway through the second third, one character mentions the picaresque genre, in which a random character wanders through an interesting landscape without direction. That would be the first third of the book. Just to put a cherry on top of it, the story opens quite late in Waterhouse’s life, and then proceeds to tell us all about his earlier history in flashback. So no tension, unless you count the pirates.

Fortunately, the second third has characters who are actually going somewhere and experiencing difficulties getting there. I have hopes for the third portion. I note with some interest that all the characters mentioned on the bookflap are from the first two sections. I’m wondering if anyone has actually gotten to the third bit.

I’m also enjoying the hell out of the monster, of course. Stephenson is nothing if not informative, and the book is a prime example of what transfictionalism might have been if it had been invented centuries ago; it’s geek SF, just like Cryptonomicon, except that the geeks are seventeenth century mathematicians and alchemists. It’s utterly delightful. I love it.

Just it’s a good thing that I’ve already come to terms with the knowledge that Stephenson is not wedded to traditional narrative structures.

Bravo finished showing the first season of The West Wing, which seems like as good a time as any to talk about it.

I’m gonna keep watching, and I might even buy the DVD set. When you get right down to it, Aaron Sorkin knows how to write really good dialogue, and he knows how to pluck the heartstrings. The closing moments of "In Excelsis Deo" are really drop dead beautiful and touching. I care about the characters, too.

On the other hand, in some ways I almost feel like Sorkin cares too much about these guys. The staffers have their flaws, so that’s OK, but Bartlet is just too perfect for my tastes. He always knows what’s going on in everyone’s life, he’s fatherly, he cares, and he’s incredibly smart. The one big flaw Bartlet has during the first season is letting politics get in the way of his ideals, and he conquers that before the season’s done.

Sorkin knows Bartlet needs problems, so he gives him one, but it’s an external issue — an affliction that is in no way Barlet’s fault. Thus, he gets his dramatic tension and eats it too, as it were.

Fortunately, I’ve got House of Cards to sate my desire for a little more cynicism in my political theater. It’s a nasty, nasty piece of satire starring Ian Richardson as Tory MP Francis Urquhart, Chief Whip of the House of Commons. (Random BBC connection of the week: Susannah Harker, who played Dr. March in Ultraviolet, co-stars as a young political reporter.)

I started out being amused by Urquhart’s nasty little intrigues and his asides to the camera, but by the last episode of the first miniseries, I was horrified. Excellent management of mood.