Review by New York Times Review
TO paraphrase an old Greek guy: I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Neal Stephenson, which even now makes the words falter on my lips. But a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out. In the acknowledgments of ANATHEM (Morrow/HarperCollins, $29.95), Stephenson, the author of such meticulous historical novels as "Cryptonomicon" and "The Baroque Cycle," gives inspirational credit for his latest work of fiction to a long line of distinguished thinkers, from Thales and Plato to Husserl and Gödel. But it is the spirits of the Greeks that exert the greatest influence on "Anathem": at its best, the book is a thought experiment in narrative form, a meditation on how far a society can go on pure reason and arguments from first principles. It is an intricate Socratic puzzle, yet - though you may wish to banish me or pour hemlock down my throat for saying this - I'm not entirely sure it's a novel. Set in a world that is similar but not identical to our own, "Anathem" imagines a modern-day monastic order whose members have pledged to live their lives without computers or electronic technology. Having long ago set aside such unanswerable questions as "Does God exist?" these alternative Augustines are free to contemplate issues of math, physics and philosophy; depending on the order they belong to, they are allowed to visit the outside world as much as once a year or as little as once a millennium. (Needless to say, only those members of the latter group with good timing and health care will get to enjoy this benefit.) Of course, Stephenson does not simply hand over this information to his reader on a platter. Seen through the eyes of a young ascetic named Erasmas, the universe of "Anathem" and its properties are revealed methodically over hundreds of pages, and at first, there is much joy to be found in watching this plausible other reality assemble itself and in observing how it parallels our own. This world has its own Socrates and Plato (a pair of classical philosophers named Thelenes and Protas, who challenged a troupe of freelance rhetoricians similar to the sophists) and equivalents of basic principles like Occam's razor, the Pythagorean theorem and the parable of the cave presented in Plato's "Republic," as if to show that such ideas are so fundamental to intellectual development they must arise in any thinking society, regardless of its history. Stephenson, too, delights in the language and etymology he has designed for his fictional world (where revered scholars are given the title Saunt, derived from the word "savant") and in the 7,000 years of detailed history he has given it: before Erasmas has set foot outside his cloister, he has introduced the reader to numerous disputes and schisms that his "mathic" tradition has spawned over the centuries - philosophical (and sometimes physical) battles that have arisen between rival groups of Deolaters and Physiologers, Bazians and counter-Bazians, Procians and Halikaarnians. Whether you are able to keep track of the differences between these factions (there's a helpful glossary at the back of the book for dopes like me), it doesn't obscure Stephenson's larger point, perhaps the most resonant and consequential in all of "Anathem": the absence of religion does not prevent passionate and violent disagreements over theoretical matters; such conflagrations can occur even in societies that hold rational thought as their highest virtue. So far, so good, but here comes the heresy. Eventually, Erasmas spies what he thinks is an alien ship in the sky, leading to his dismissed from his monastery and finally setting the plot of "Anathem" in motion. While his narrator is engaged in his wanderings, Stephenson amuses himself with other interpretations of worship: a faith based on an ancient craftsman and his vision of a triangle in the heavens, and another structured around the unlikely trinity of a condemned man, a magistrate and an innocent girl. But there is still another triad the author should have heeded more carefully. Back in "The Republic," a work Stephenson has evidently spent some time with, Socrates delineates three categories of art: "one which uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them." The last of these three Socrates holds in the lowest regard, because it is a copy of a copy of the truth - "an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring." And my reluctant conclusion is that "Anathem" spends so much time engaged in copying, in conjuring up alternative formulations of our real-world science and religion, that it forgets to come up with much that is new or true. Too much of the book is dominated by lengthy dialectical debates, whose conclusions are hardly earth-shattering (if you are reading this review, I suspect you already know how to divide a rectangular cake into eight equal servings) and which do little to promote a reader's engagement with the characters of "Anathem," any more than one cares about the interior lives of Pausanias or Eryximachus while reading "The Symposium." What's worse, the book's fixation on dialogue leads Erasmas (and Stephenson) to simply tell us what is happening or has happened in pivotal scenes, instead of allowing us to see the events for ourselves through descriptive action. And when Erasmas and his confederates at last make their way onto that alien ship, you may wonder what all of this has to do with the larger themes Stephenson spends the first 300 pages of his 900-page novel laying out. But you don't have to know Plato from Play-Doh to sense that "Anathem" doesn't completely work on its own terms. Throughout the book, we see Erasmas tinkering with a tool called a sphere: a flexible, amorphous blob that he can variously fashion into a bushel basket, a stool, a toboggan and a life buoy. Likewise, it is immensely entertaining to watch Stephenson play with an admixture of science, history and language, and stretch it into as many different forms as he can imagine. I'd also like to believe that he had a more ambitious and rewarding intention in mind than playing around with sophisticated toys.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Stephenson has quickly established himself as an A-list writer of epic-length fantasy. His mammoth novel Cryptonomicon (1999) was as long as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then there's the multivolume Baroque Cycle, which offers a world of another time and place that is so tangible that reality seems flat and dull by comparison. He does the same thing here in this astonishing novel, taking us to a world similar to Earth, where society is divided between the avout, who live in a sealed-off monastery and devote themselves to science and philosophy, and the saecular, whose daily lives are taken up with more mundane concerns, such as reproduction, recreation, and business. Every so often, residents of the monastery venture out into the saecular world but never for very long. Then Erasmus, the novel's narrator, and his fellow avout are shocked to learn that they are being sent out into the other world to save it from certain disaster. Stephenson's novels have always contained more than one level, and Anathem continues that practice, its surface story serving as a launching pad for multiple meanings, both metaphorical and allegorical. The novel is beautifully written (fans of Adam Roberts' ornately written science fiction will see some similarities), and, even though it runs to nearly 1,000 pages, it feels somehow too short, as though we're made to leave this carefully constructed world and return to our own before we're quite ready. A magnificent achievement.--Pitt, David Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This audiobook goes the extra mile, giving listeners something the printed page-turner can not. Fans of the cult author will enjoy his vocal cameo appearances when he calmly reads definitions from a non-Earth dictionary at the start of many chapters. Another added bonus is the music between chapters that was composed specifically for this production; working with Stephenson and early drafts of the novel, David Stutz beautifully captures the complex traditional, coded choral music described therein. Moreover, the extras do not obscure the remarkable performance by William Dufris, who reads as if he knows the 900+-page text by heart. The story is told by a monastic scholar, and Dufris--with a twinkle in his proverbial eye and a sense of awe in his voice--is the perfect match. His intelligent rendering of the cast of characters is a delight for the ears. A Morrow hardcover (Reviews, July 28). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
On the world called Arbre, time runs in counterpoint: the ponderous flow of ritual and study behind the doors of the great "maths," or monasteries, against the constant flux of cultural change in the world outside. Devoted to scientific rather than religious practice, these sanctuaries maintain an austere and ceremonial cloistered existence for decades, even centuries, before opening briefly to see what has changed. Every so often, major outside events break the great cycle and force the maths to change. Fraa Erasmas, a not especially distinguished member of one of these cloisters, finds himself at the center of one of these events and, as so often happens, ends up trying to save the world. Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) is not afraid to spend as much time as it takes to explore everything that interests him, whether it's the geometry of cake cutting or the particulars of a 1000-year-old collection of assorted garden furniture. In less skilled hands this might be tedious, but here the layers of world building are the foundation for an enthralling tale that, even at over 900 pages, is over almost too soon. For some fans, this may be a welcome return to sf after his epic historical trilogy, "The Baroque Cycle," but readers with an interest in science and philosophy will also enjoy it--there are dozens of famous ideas and theorems half-hidden throughout the novel. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/08; includes a bonus CD with music composed for Anathem.]--Jenne Bergstrom, San Diego Cty. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sprawling disquisition on "the higher harmonics of the sloshing" and other "polycosmic theories" that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own. Stephenson (The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune--and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the "anathem," a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. It's a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed "the Terrible Events" of a thousand-odd years past. Our hero is set to an epic task, but it's no Tolkienesque battle against orcs and sorcerers; more of the battling is done with words than with swords or their moral equivalents. The hero's quest affords Stephenson the opportunity to engage in some pleasing wordplay à la Riddley Walker, with talk of "late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt" and "Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies," and the like, and to level barrel on barrel of scattershot against our own time: "In some families, it's not entirely clear how people are related"; "Quasi-literate Saeculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures"; and much more. Light on adventure, but a logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
