NEAL Stephenson's gargantuan novel about parallel worlds holds up a distorting mirror to our own culture, so perhaps it's inevitable that we should glimpse a funhouse reflection of Anathem itself within its 935 pages.
A volume known as The Book i
s used as a punishment among the 'avout', the monastic scholars central to the story. Deliberately incorporating subtle incoherencies, the chapters of this nightmarish text become exponentially more complicated as it goes on – and errant novices must copy out sections before passing an oral examination to end their ordeal. At times, reading Anathem feels like undergoing the same torture.
The planet of Arbre has segregated its mathematicians, scientists and philosophers in isolated monastic communities resembling hybrids of Gormenghast and Hogwarts. The secular world outside goes through cycles of barbarism and renaissance, but the avout in these so-called concents have endured for thousands of years, preserving and advancing the learning of the ages. Stephenson has chosen to tell his story using a blizzard of neologisms that are distorted echoes of familiar words. The novel is broken up with fictional dictionary definitions and a glossary is provided at the end, but the invented language lacks plausibility and potency.
The novice heroes of the novel have to contend with the world outside the walls of their sanctuary but their greatest struggle is to become more than stereotypes. Anathem is crammed with incident but there is a crippling imbalance between verbose description and genuinely engaging imagery.
As the characters struggle to make sense of their world and how it will be changed by events, battles are fought, volcanoes erupt and the fate of more than one civilisation hangs in the balance, but it's all uninvolving. Worse still, these episodes are interspersed with philosophical debates that will leave readers either well ahead of the characters and vainly urging them to get on with it, or simply tempted to give up.
I'm tempted to suggest that Anathem would be twice as good at half its length, but truthfully, it should have been cut by two-thirds. There simply isn't enough original material here to justify its size.
