What I said then:
[One of] the last few books I haven’t read by the genius author of The Baroque Cycle.
What I say now:
Though The Diamond Age has a hell of a lot to like about it, it still contains the first vague hints of trouble brewing in my torrid affair with Neal Stephenson. I've unconditionally loved everything else of his that I've read, whereas the love here is very much conditional, and is occasionally absent entirely ... like a snarky girlfriend who gets home at midnight and won't say where she's been, but you let it slide because the sex is still great. Did I take that metaphor far too far? Yes, I did.
It's not an easy book to summarize, but I'll have a crack: nanotechnology has enabled the invention of Matter Compilers, which can create anything you want, atom by atom, by plucking molecules out of the air. This has led to the complete breakdown of current political systems, with nation-states being replaced by global affiliations of people with similar attitudes to morality. An elderly neo-Victorian Lord wants his granddaughter to grow up to question the morality of the tribe she's been born in, so he hires a nano-engineer to design for her 'The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer,' a teacher, friend, counsellor and subversive influence, all in the form of a book. But the engineer makes illicit copies of his invention, and one finds its way into the hands of Nell, a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. How the Primer (through the telling of a single, infinitely complicated story) enables Nell to change her circumstances, taking her from an illiterate runaway to a head of state, forms the main substance of the novel.
I had two major problems with The Diamond Age. The first was its (seeming) aimlessness. Nell has no purpose; her only aim is to learn from the Primer and live her life. She doesn't have anything she wants or aspires to, and so much of the book is lacking in drama. Don't get me wrong, lots of things happen, but they just kind of ... happen, with no guiding principle moving the story in any one direction. As entertaining and cool as the world Stephenson creates is, a lot of the book feels like we're just hanging around, checking out how darn cool it is. Coolness is nice as an added bonus, but it's a bit thin when it feels like the be-all and end-all.
Then, more than three-quarters of the way through the book a tremendous switch takes place, and suddenly we're thrust into the middle of a futuristic Boxer Rebellion as Chinese peasants take back their country from interlopers both foreign and technological (much of the book is set in China). The deteriorating political situation is part of the backdrop through the first part of the novel, but it feels like cheap sleight-of-hand when Stephenson drags it to the foreground. My thought process as his intentions became clear went like this: "What? Of all the myriad minute detail that you've included, I'm supposed to have been paying attention to that? That, of all things? Why not the cool robot-horses?" It really left me perplexed and disoriented which, generally speaking, is not what you want to be as a reader.
So ultimately, I thought the setting was brilliant, and the story much less so. Which was disappointing, because I was hoping for more.
Cheers, JC
about to read: Darkness Visible by William Golding
books to go: 114
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