Virgil sings of arms and of a man; over two thousand years later, Le Guin offers the princess of that song her own words. Lavinia, the prize of battle in Virgil’s Aeneid, speaks under the guidance of this award-winning author, revealing details of the struggle between cultures from a perspective unseen in the national epic of the Roman Empire. In this first person account of a woman caught by fate and held by love, Le Guin imagines this minor historical figure as a princess with a mind of her own as well as respect for traditions that may not always serve her best interests.


Lavinia shares her story as a storyteller tells tales around a campfire; the conversational tone is inclusive, welcoming readers to stop and listen. She explains her circumstance as a valued daughter of King Latinus and of his queen, Amata, who is twisted with rage and grief over the death of her young sons, taken by a fever that left Lavinia alive to suffer her mother’s wrath.


Lavinia is genuinely loved by the people of Latinium as she grows into adolescence among a vibrant countryside, where she roams without fear or restraint. Her fifteenth birthday brings her self-absorbed cousin Turnus to light as a suitor for her hand in marriage, a suit he presses for the next three years, but she does not trust him: “Turnus flattered my mother and laughed with my father and looked at me as the butcher looks at the cow.”
To avoid social events that honor Turnus, she finds solace in a sacred place where spirit communications have been revealed to her and her father, which further alienates her mother because she is not similarly blessed. Lavinia waits in the dusky woods alone until the figure of a man appears. Virgil is dying, his body somewhere in the future, consumed with a fever that will take away his chance to finish his great poem. This poem, he explains to her, reveres her husband, Aeneas, but speaks little of her. He is ashamed by this slight and offers a glimpse of her future so that she might be prepared for the best and the worst.


It is easy to forget that Lavinia herself has not written this story; Le Guin adopts a believable and intimate tone with which Lavinia weaves back and forth from the distant past to her present, from her adolescence to marriage and motherhood, and back again, carried between times by common feelings brought about during pivotal events in her life. Lavinia may be a princess, but she does not put on airs. She questions her ability to write at all, for if the great spirit poet of the future did not find her worthy of note, perhaps she is, after all, not. How will she choose to act during the remainder of her life to justify remembrance?


Le Guin’s preparation for Lavinia involved reading the Aeneid in Latin, a time and effort consuming task for any scholar. The incomplete epic, which Virgil hoped would burn at his death, was a ten year project ending with the battle for the princess between Aeneas and Turnus. Le Guin succeeds where no author has before, in an imagining of Lavinia’s perspective on the events of the Aeneid as well as what she calls an “unfolding of a hint,” as close and rich as if she herself had experienced it. It comes as no surprise that this tale of magical realism is a work of art in Le Guin’s hands.

“The Confusion” constitutes Part II of Neal Stephenson’s gargantuan “Baroque Cycle”, an SF saga of “history, adventure, science, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death and alchemy” set in a late, mildly alternate 17th century. And it is a BIG book in more ways than one. First: being composed of 816 pages of small print and weighing in at half a kilogram it might well, in the right hands, make a dangerous projectile. Second: its metaphysical content – the political and economic affairs of the known world c. 1689 – 1702 – would, no doubt, make an equally effective mental bludgeon. Finally: it is hugely and unabashedly ambitious (as might be obvious from the above-listed subject material). I’d even venture to pronounce it a combination of scholarship and storytelling almost without equal in the SF litero-sphere. Which is to say that it has all the same qualities as its predecessor, “Quicksilver”.

(Before I continue into the review, however, I must add a caveat. This is not science fiction or fantasy as you, or I, know it. Stephenson’s SF touches are subtle and barely gleaned: there *is* the mysterious longevity of Enoch Root (who also features in “Cryptonomicon”), there *is* the suggestion that alchemy may yield more than fool’s gold and there *is* the ever-present theme of Artificial Intelligence and the progression of scientific understanding. But, as yet, there is nothing obviously “genre”, and certainly nothing “generic”, about this series. Nevertheless, I think it has sprung from a “genre” mentality – the attention to world-building, the massiveness of the scale, a tendency towards self-deprecating humour and the make-believe whimsy of the setting all convince me that “speculative fiction” is at the heart of Stephenson’s writing.)

“The Confusion” then is really two novel-strands interwoven (as Stephenson so wittily notes in his acknowledgements, they are con-“fused”) and both begin a few years after the events of “Quicksilver”. The first strand is “Bonanza” wherein we rejoin “Quicksilver’s” loveable rogue, Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, on an around-the-world pirate adventure (replete with stolen gold, long-held vendettas and evil, scheming Jesuits). We last saw Jack mentally incapacitated by the French Pox and physically pinned to his ship (by a harpoon through his left shoulder) as he sailed from Amsterdam harbour for the West Indies. Times, inevitably, have changed since then (it is now 1689) and Jack is in an even more difficult position vis-à-vis his freedom of movement. Namely, he is chained to a bench and an oar, and reduced from the respectable rank of Vagabond to that of Barbary slave on a pirate ship. Happily however his fellow slaves are an innovative bunch, amongst them the Spanish legend “Jeronimo”, a crypto-Jew (“more crypto than Jew”), a handy Armenian, a Dutch ship’s captain and Jack’s old business partners: Mr. Foot (lately of the Bomb and Grapnel, Dunkirk) and Yevgeny the Raskolnik. In no time at all a Plan has been hatched to buy them their freedom and make them all incredibly rich: just steal some Spanish silver. Unfortunately, this being Jack Shaftoe, nothing is ever simple – the silver turns out to be gold, the gold turns out to be some kind of alchemical treasure prized by some of the Europe’s most powerful men and the simple Plan quickly turns into a global shenanigan to end all shenanigans.

The second book-thread is “Juncto”, which follows the political and economic machinations of Eliza, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwglym (who was once seen planting a harpoon into the above Jack Shaftoe and who has latterly been involved in all the trading conspiracies of Europe). Thus, while Jack careens through various oceans, enlightening us as to events in Africa, India, Japan and the Americas, Eliza stalks around Europe, occasionally have children, and always keeping us up to the date with the monarchs of England, France and Germany. The story of the stolen gold eventually combines with the lives of “Quicksilver’s” other main characters – Issac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz and Dr. Daniel Waterhouse – and leads to startling and occult plot revelations.

Throughout all this Stephenson continues to display his peculiar gift for imparting historical facts – real or spurious; economic, scientific or political - in a scintillating fashion. At no point during “The Confusion” was I bored…however, there were numerous times when I was wholly and merrily *confused*. And that’s because “The Baroque Cycle” demands your full attention and, if you don’t give it, you’re liable to find yourself stranded in the ever-shifting sands of Stephenson’s plotting. As Jack’s, Eliza’s and Europe’s stories part and intertwine and part again, it is best to remember that the novel’s period is the so-called Golden Age of European society…and anything could, will and does happen. The ever-growing cast of characters - whimsical, hilarious, conniving and downright evil by turns - only adds layers of complexity.

Unlike “Quicksilver”, however, Book II is relatively self-contained. It begins with the theft of the all-important gold and the ends with a resolution of sorts. (Of course, beneath lies the bigger theme, begun in “Quicksilver” and hopefully resolved in “The System of the World”: the development of a “scientific” philosophy of the world’s systems and the morals and mechanics of Artificial Intelligence.)

Certainly, “The Confusion” has flaws, as any novel of this scope and magnitude would. Personally I would have liked to have seen more of the delightful Dr Daniel Waterhouse and his circle of friends (amongst them Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren and the irascible Robert Comstock)…but I imagine he will come to the fore again in “The System of the World” and I shall just have to be patient. It is also worth mentioning that some readers might find Stephenson’s discursive sections tedious - for example, a significant 70 pages is devoted to the Anglo-French war in Ireland. While the plot is somewhat advanced in these sections, much is given over to blow-by-blow accounts and expositions. For me this is a strength of the work, showing impeccable research and authorial integrity, but it won’t be to everyone’s taste. I imagine Stephenson, like me, is a bit of an anecdote and detail hound.

In short, “The Confusion” is as labyrinthine and glorious as I expected, and doesn’t show any signs of that “around-the-middle” sag that some trilogies suffer from. The coherence of the three books as a single magnum opus is evident and I avidly await the paperback release of Book 3, expected in the UK on October 6th. If I could choose any work to represent a near-perfect marriage of history/reality and fantasy/science fiction then it would be these novels…you really do have to read it to appreciate it’s scope, scale and magnificence.