Note to self: do not leave gigantic doorstopper Neal Stephenson novels for last in my Hugo reading when I'm under severe time pressure. Anathem
(HarperCollins 2008; no editor listed) is a solid 900-plus pages, not a single one of which could be described as easy reading, and took me three mornings, lunch hours, and sleep-deprived nights to make my way through, which is about twice as long as I'd expected. This book just about killed me, and something more different from Little Brother
would be hard to imagine. This year's Hugo list is giving me some sort of literary whiplash.
Anathem is not for the intellectually timid or for anyone afraid of math, science, and philosophy. I'm not well-versed in any of those three disciplines, and this book left me gasping for air much of the time. Stephenson cuts his readers minimal slack.
The story starts fairly slowly, with the young "fraa" (monk) Erasmas moving through the daily routine of his "concent" (monastery): ritual observances with bells and song interspersed with manual labor and intellectual debate. But this is not A Case of Conscience; the concent is not particularly religious in nature. This is a community of scientist/philosopher-scholars with an entire descriptive hierarchy of terms for romantic/sexual liaisons between its denizens. What appears at first to be a primitive, post-apocalyptic future Earth
with familiar terms twisted by time rapidly turns out to be something
else entirely.
Needless to say, Erasmas does not spend the entire story in his concent, and the world outside its doors -- and even within the concent itself -- is considerably less technologically backward than it appears. Even the primitive garb ("bolt and chord" = fabric wrap and tie) of the fraas and suurs is not nearly as simple as the loincloth/toga combination it initially sounds like. So when a crisis starts to call various monastics out of their cloisters to address it, including an elderly "Millenarian" whose order is supposed to leave their cloister only at thousand-year intervals, they are surprisingly equal to the task. I don't really want to be any more specific than that, since the slow unfolding of the nature of the crisis is integral to the plot. I will say that many of the scientific and philosophical debates are not the detours they appear to be.
There is a huge vocabulary to sort through, not all of it as obvious as the terms above, which I found an interesting challenge. There's a glossary, but I didn't actually realize this until I turned the last page and found it. I didn't need it for the terms, but I would have been glad to use it for the various concepts that operate at the junction of philosophy and quantum physics. A lot of that material whizzed over my head, but I understood enough of it to make sense of the plot.
Anathem is an incredible achievement, but it does have its flaws. Character development is minimal; even at the end of the book, most of the major actors were distinguishable only by name. Erasmas' initial journey drags on at interminable length. "Glacial" does not begin to describe the pace of plot development, though towards the end a major conflict resolves a little too easily. And there is never any moment so plot-critical that Stephenson can resist inserting a lengthy philosophical discussion.
Anathem is in no way a page-turner. I had to put it down repeatedly out of sheer mental exhaustion. Don't pick it up for light reading; it's as demanding as a high-level textbook. But I felt quite a sense of achievement at the end and suspect that a second reading will be much easier going. There's no way I have time to do that before the voting deadline, however.
As happened last year when I tried to decide where to place Brasyl, it comes down to a book which perfectly achieves a smaller goal versus one that is considerably more ambitious and yet imperfect as a story. This time, I'm coming down on the side of Anathem, since that description would better be phrased "exponentially more ambitious" and the magnitude of the achievement and degree to which it stretched me intellectually outweighs the ponderous storyline and shallow characterization.
My final Best Novel ballot:
1. Anathem
2. Little Brother
3. Zoe's Tale
4. The Graveyard Book
5. No Award
6. Saturn's Children
Read for yourself, but allow LOTS of time:
I'm not reading it because Stephenson never bothers finishing all the stories he starts. My best novel ballot was:
Best Novel
( ) Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
(3) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
(2) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK)
(1) Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
( ) Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)
( ) No Award
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | July 02, 2009 at 05:47 PM
Well, this one is finished, though it's a bit abrupt after that much novel.
I really did not like Saturn's Children (see a few posts back).
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | July 02, 2009 at 06:39 PM
I did. I liked all the references to other books.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | July 02, 2009 at 06:49 PM
My husband and I (both scientists) just finished reading Anathem aloud to each other over a period of 3-4 months. I would argue that it's much better done that way: having someone to discuss interesting/difficult points with is really useful - also, the speed of reading aloud means that your brain has more time to process the challenging material. Trying to read it solo in three days is very definitely NOT recommended as the best way to read this book.
The other interesting difference between our experience and yours is that, about halfway through the book, Stephenson puts in a couple of back-to-back sequences that feel like they were part of an action film script. We found the first of these particularly tiresome and unnecessary; the second, not so much so because it introduced characters focal to later plot stuff). But we were really quite glad when things calmed down and Stephenson got back to the math/science/philosophy stuff!
Definitely a book for which the mileage for different readers will vary.
Posted by: Catharine | July 07, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Catharine,
It was definitely not the ideal way to do it, but I didn't know that when I started. I'm normally a very fast reader, and I didn't realize quite how dense a book it was.
Midway through, I actually considered voting without finishing it, so I called up a friend who'd read it to see if she could swear to me that it maintained that level of quality throughout. She said it did, but I decided to finish it anyway. Also, it was due at the library before I left for vacation!
I think I'd like to reread it at a more leisurely pace sometime, with plenty of referencing the glossary and researching the philosophy as I go. It might be a neat group-reading project, actually.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | July 08, 2009 at 04:55 PM