Anathem at Half-Time

Well, I reached the half-way mark in Neal Stephenson’s 932-page 9.32-pound novel Anathem. Fifteen days in, reading while leisurely listening to the book on CD, averaging 30-35 pages per day.

What do I think?

It’s good, so far, not great.

What do I mean?

Well, it moves at a glacial pace. And by glacial, I mean full axial-tilt ice age glacial. Now, I understand he’s building a world here, setting a mood, developing themes. But there is a lot of extraneous data shoveled on top of the hapless reader. Maybe it won’t be extraneous as the plot unfolds, but at the halfway point, it certainly seems that way.

Still, though, I’m enjoying the trip, now that I got most of the lingo down. And, yes, like I stated in an earlier post about the novel, I must confirm the reviews I read that caution that one won’t really get in the swing with the vocabulary and history until page 200 or so.

The McGuffin is shady and slowly being revealed to me. I’ve heard that it is something apocalyptic and catastrophic, but that’s not been established yet. Just the vaguest of vague hints. Our main character is on a quest, though to what end he – and I – don’t know. Most of the characters are appealing, some a lot more than others. There is no one here that I despise as a literary creation.

Two points against –

I’m not sure I’m a fan of the guy who’s speaking the story on the CD. His voice, that is. He’s been talking to me for a dozen hours now, doing his vocalizations for the different characters and whatnot, and my gut reaction to him just isn’t glowingly enrapturous. But we’ll see. The voice may grow on me.

Second, my spidey sense is tingling like crazy. There’s a phenomenon in conservative circles known as the “Liberal Sucker Punch.” That’s where you’re watching a Hollywood movie – it can be on any subject, in any genre – when out of the blue you’ll get hit with a leftist diatribe on some cause of the day. Global warming, homelessness, gay rights, you name it, even if it’s an a completely different movie topically, say, like a baseball movie, where such lecturing would be absurd and audience-killing.

Anyway, I’m dreading something similar, in a whole Science vs. Religion vein. One of the main premises of the book is that Science has retreated behind monastic walls. Now that our “monks” are out and about, ostensibly to save the world from something or other, they are encountering the religions and religious of this world. So far the sparring has been light and probing, but the judges are decidedly in Science’s corner.

We’ll see.

Expect to finish it in two weeks.