In the second volume of his excellent Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson takes the major charactors we met in Quicksilver, Daniel Waterhouse; Eliza, Duchess of Qwghlm; and Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, on a world-wide adventure of piracy. The complexity of style in the Baroque Age, the taste for endless recursions, loops and folds, partaking a tiny portion of a thousand styles and mingling them into a single con-fused fashion, is both the theme and the apparatus of the novel.
Like Quicksilver, The Confusion is divided into books, in this case, two: Bonanza and The Juncto. Bonanza tells the tale of Vagabond Jack Shaftoe in his new life as a Barbary galley slave, gold thief, king in India, and co-conspirator. The Juncto centers around Eliza as she straddles the roles of mother, wife, political financier, King-maker and correspondent. The two books alternate in describing European (and Asian) politics and financial matters during the Baroque Age.
Solomon's gold, which pirate Jack acquires for the cabal of freed galley slaves he leads, is reputed to contain an essence not found in "baser" golds. This essence, which makes the gold marginally denser than the ordinary metal, is what the alchemists of Europe desire; Jack's theft brings him (and Eliza, by association with him) into the enmity of such as the Duc d'Arcachon—and Isaac Newton.
Jack, however, is unaware of the extraordinary quality of what he has stolen. So when he and his cabal escape the Barbary fleet by sailing south through the Red Sea, they take the golden loot into the Indian Ocean. There, it is stolen in turn from them by the warrior queen Kottokal, along with several of Jack's ex-slave cabal.
Meanwhile Eliza, and her infant son Jean-Jacques (reputed to be the son of Etienne, heir of d'Arcachon, but probably the son of Jean Bart the French privateer), fleeing to England with her wealth of gold and silver from the collapsing finances of Belgium and Amsterdam, is captured by the privateer Bart. Thinking fast, she loans her captured wealth to the King of France for use in the war against the English. As a consequence, instead of being a captive of war, she is a guarded noblewoman (Countess de la Zeur)—and eventually, as the wife of Etienne, Duchesse d'Arcachon.
Eliza is given a commission to travel to Lyon and purchase timber for the French Navy. The commission is a meant to be a learning experience for her, to teach her the byzantine ins and outs of the paper used in Lyonnaise finance. As Eliza grasps the way this new concept of money works, we learn the foundation for the alchemical lead-into-gold shift that creates wealth from commerce, that derives value from the flux and change of values, and rests on trust and knowledge.
Article comments
1 - Marco
an idea about historical use of mercury, gold and silver