I have just finished reading Neil Stephenson's Anathem. It's a hard novel to digest, but it is indeed a disappointment. I would rank it even below the political potboiler Interface, Stephenson's worst in my humble opinion (I never read his earlier novels Zodiac and The Big U, but I guess it's fair to assume Snow Crash as the effective start of N. S.'s career as a singular writer). I think the word that best defines Anathem is sparse. It's quite a heavy tome, as are every of Stephenson's novels since Cryptonomicon, but while that and three-part Baroque Cycle had plots so dense the books felt as made of lead, Anathem's narrative felt like the stuff of one hundred pages at most. As a consequence, it's quite a dull read sometimes, and a narrow contest between that dullness and Stephenson's trademark brilliant observations and set pieces - far less than the usual dose here.

I'll proceed my review, now with Major Spoilers! So you better skip reading if you intend to read Anathem, although I would advise you to read something else. If Neal Stephenson's work is five star on average, why should you read the three star book?

The things that annoy me about Anathem can be summarized in simple words: Aliens. Multiple Universes. Fucking multiple endings! The novel takes place in a planet called Arbre, which is actually Earth, but existing in Universe 1.2. It's set roughly 3700 years after the Terrible Events, a kind of World War III, and a decision was made to segregate Science from the rest of the 'Saecular' society. Therefore, scholars (the 'Avout') live in seculsion in 'Maths', which are monestaries/university campuses whose gates only open for a few days every 1/10/100/1000 years, depending on the math's rank, and for those scholars the use of a number of scientific instruments - including computers - is forbidden. Scientific and technological progress has therefore slowed down to a crawl, and the Arbran landscape is very much like Earth's nowadays, sustainability achieved by genetic engineering that allows far better agriculture - Stephenson nods at agroforestry -, allows fuel and paper (!) to literally grow on trees, and dopamine to be part of the common Saecular diet.

As usual in Stephenson's novels, it might take you a couple of hundred pages to get to understand the worldview. There's a special vocabulary with delightful words like 'bullshytt', but you get the hang of that pretty quickly (and there's a glossary at the end as well as scattered about). The story then, is the account of one Fraa Erasmas, a young scholar at a Decenarian (which opens once every ten years) math, who finds himself travelling across the world in a quest to understand what is that Giant Spaceship hovering over Arbre. The problem is: by the time you get to the end of the classical first act (Giant Spaceship appears, attacks us!), you read more than half the novel. I still don't understand what was in those pages. There are long, long descriptions of the life inside the Maths, and some hints at the Saecular world as well, but no insights, nothing remarkable.

The rest feels rushed. Anathem is quite different from every other Stephenson novel - not just the whole thing with 'aliens' and spacecraft, but a very important style shift: Anathem follows just one character - Fraa Erasmas -, who is pretty much clueless about everything, in opposition with the other Stephensonian worlds, in which multiple characters and multiple agendas weave storylines that collide in spectacular fashion. Anathem lacks that colliding, so we're stuck with a bunch of uncharismatic characters - Neil Stephenson wrote far better reluctant hero characters than Erasmas in the past, and the rest feel like a medley of characters from Stephenson's other books. Thankfully, my mid-book fears that this would bog down to a messianic tale were unfounded.

But, unfortunately, not my other mid-book prediction - the 'aliens' come from Earth! Moneyafeek! Not. The whole Messal chapter, which had the potential for high spy drama, instead had that reek of Star Trek episodes: "Kirk, Spock and Lieutenant Sanchez go somewhere, who dies?" Thankfully, the whole story is more subtle than just having a spaceship full of Frenchmen, but then... a transdimensional (was that on the latest Indiana Jones?) craft that picks up people from different iterations of Earth - or kills them with surface impactors and X-ray lasers (Stephenson seemed to have borrowed the weaponary from Peter F. Hamilton)? Anyway, that turns out to be the reason behind all the neverending dialogue about multiple cosmii and the Arbran equivalent of Schröedinger's Cat. I'm not sold on that. In the final pages, the novel descends into chaos - it turns out Arbre's Universe splits whenever anything at all happens, and we get to read the mutiple possible endings to Fraa Erasmas account - ranging from the utter anihilation of everything to a Fucking Wedding!

Perhaps it isn't as terrible as I made it sound. But the thing is, writing a novel about Platonic philosophy is perhaps too ambitious, and the whole thing about treating the Platonic Ideal to the fullest extent - as a actual Universe that exists, where you may go with a spaceship but then won't be able to breathe its oxigen... it's way out there, on par with Philip K. Dick's level of fucked-upness, and I guess that's a compliment. But I guess that while reading Anathem I became a 'Procian' myself.

Three out of five.

Update: there's something else that annoyed me to no end, which I had forgot to expose - so another spoiler follows: the whole thing about 'Newmatter' and matter from 'foreign' cosmii made me think of that very nasty word in sci-fi circles: midichlorians. That everything is justified by the fact that the whole Narrative (the novel's own choice of words) skips universes discarding bad outcomes and somehow everything works so all's well in the best of the possible worlds is utterly unsatisfying. It might be indeed a lecture about the Anthropic Principle. ¶