Behind Concent Walls aka 900 Pages of Mathic Fun

Well if I achieved one thing this week, it is that I managed to finally complete reading Neal Stephenson‘s Anathem. Having just typed that statement though I realise that I’ve made it sound that a) reading the book was a chore and b) that I spent the last decade toiling through the thing rather than devouring it over the Christmas period.

So what did I think of it then? Well I won’t hide the fact that I like Neal Stephenson’s work. His early cyberpunk novels although enjoyable occasionally frustrated me,  especially in the abruptly manner they tended to end. The Baroque Cycle on the other hand was the single most enjoyable series of books I have read. It’s lively mix of history, action and science kept me gripped from the opening sentence of Quicksilver to the last page of The System of the World.

With Anathem, Stephenson jumps back from the historic novel to science fiction by setting his latest story on an fictional Earth-type planet called Arbre. The story involves a young Fraa Erasmus caught up world-changing events. Erasmus lives in what appears at first to be a religious cloister, but as the story reveals itself you soon discover this is a closed scientific and philosophical sanctuary (or Concent) rather than a religious ones we had on this Earth; religion does exist on Arbre, but is something that people who live outside the world of Concents believe in. Not wishing to spoil the story for anyone out there that still hasn’t read the book I’ll skip over the details of the plot. Suffice to say that the idyllic days of tending plants, learning about planetary geometry, singing and taking part in philosophical debates are quickly and quite traumatically wrenched away casting Erasmus and his friends out of their comfortable existence into some very dangerous adventures.

One of Neal Stephenson’s strengths is world building. I totally bought into the strange way of life that goes on in the Concents and also in the wider world of Arbre.  The book contains many invented words to describe the peculiar quasi-religious existence that Erasmus inhabits, and although this made the first thirty-odd pages hard going I was soon in the right headspace to read the novel and had completely forgotten the need to consult with the back of the book glossary.

As in The Baroque Cycle Stephenson taps into one of my favourite topics – the history and development of science. I studied this for a while in my second year at university and enjoyed it the most of all the subjects that made up my Degree. I suspect I am to pre-disposed to liking the sort of fiction that Neal Stephenson writes to be too critical (the idea of devoting your life to science living in a closed environment was highly attractive to me and somehow I felt oddly jealous of the main characters for being able to do so). The only two minor quibbles I can think of are that occasionally the book slowed down as characters debated differences in scientific thought and that the book was too short; I could have happily read on for another 500 pages not been bored.