Anathem by Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, 2008
Category: Books bought new and never read
Time owned without reading: 850 days

See that number there? 850 days where I owned Anathem but didn’t read it? I actually tried to start it twice before forcing myself to read it for this challenge. Both times I got about six or seven pages in before setting it aside. The book opens right in the middle of a conversation between unknown people on an unfamiliar world using weird and undefined terminology. It’s about as welcoming as Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves. When I started reading it, I thought Neal Stephenson had finally become the M. Night Shyamalan of the literary world—overly impressed with his own genius, inconsiderate of his readers, using the popularity and quality of his previous books to publish something no one would ever read.

I am really, really sorry I ever thought that, Mr. Stephenson.

It’s true, Anathem is very difficult to get into. And it’s on purpose. Although Stephenson provides a helpful introduction for readers who don’t like having to figure everything out, the intent is to immerse the reader in the created world of Arbre and the avout, like learning to speak French by moving to Paris and surrounding yourself with only native speakers. It’s also true that this gambit is risky and occasionally means the author is showing off, or believes that impenetrability equals literary excellence. (There are whole university departments devoted to this principle, so maybe it’s not such a stretch.)  But the reader who sticks it out and successfully enters the world of Anathem soon realizes that Stephenson’s strategy isn’t for show; it’s essential to understanding and appreciating the vast, beautiful story he has created.

Unfortunately, it also means it’s hard to give a good synopsis of the story. Arbre is a world similar to Earth, and Stephenson uses words derived from Earth cognates that imply the same meanings while sounding just alien enough for SF: fraa or suur for the members of the quasi-monastic society, for example. The main character and narrator, Fraa Erasmus, is a young man who for the last ten years of his life has been isolated in a community of mathematicians and philosphers, given an excellent scientific education, and trained to look at the world in a certain way. We gradually learn that these communities, called maths, were organized both to allow their members to stay free from the changes of the wider world, but also to keep these brilliant minds from coming up with technologies that in the past have nearly destroyed civilization. The book opens on the eve of Avent, when the math is opened to the public and its members are allowed to leave, visit family if they have any, and basically decide if they want to sign up for another tour of one, ten, or even one hundred years. Erasmus isn’t much more than an average student, and he’s not sure if his future lies within the math, but there isn’t much outside it for him either.

Complicating matters is a mystery surrounding one of the other members of the math, Fraa Orolo, who seems to have discovered something really big—big enough that the community anathemizes him and kicks him out into the world before he can use the information. Erasmus and his close friends don’t understand why someone as brilliant and well-loved as Orolo can just be removed like that, so they begin to follow up on his research. What they discover—and here I’m going to break all the rules of good synopsizing and give the secret away, because it might help some readers want to stick with the book longer—is nothing less than an alien invasion that threatens the whole world, and suddenly the world really, really needs these strange geniuses to find a technology that will save them.

But I’m lying. No, not about what happens in the book; I’m lying that knowing any of this will be the deciding factor in whether a reader likes it or not. There are maybe three groups of readers who will enjoy this book:

1. People who are already interested in abstract discussions of philosophy, mathematical theory, alternate realities, what consciousness and thinking are really about, and the meaning of life. There is an entire section devoted to a series of dinners in which great thinkers discuss all of these things. It is at least 100 pages long.

2. People who enjoy the challenge of decoding complex literature with minimal assistance from the author—puzzle solvers, readers of Gene Wolfe, etc.

3. People who are capable of absorbing and bypassing the abstract philosophical discussions to enjoy the story behind it all—because the story, divorced from the philosophical sections, is exciting, tense, and hard to step away from.

If you know you’ll be put off by what appear to be irrelevant, boring passages in which nothing much happens, you are not the audience for this book. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “must-read” book; that’s just a way of telling someone that you think they ought to think exactly the way you do. I loved Anathem and consider it one of the best books I’ve read this year, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who dislikes it is wrong. I would love for everyone to experience it the way I did, but that’s not possible.

One last note: if you’ve read Stephenson’s earlier books and were put off by the extremely graphic descriptions of sex and violence, particularly in the Baroque Cycle, don’t let that be what keeps you from reading Anathem. The book is so tame that if it wasn’t chock-full of philosophical theorizing, I wouldn’t have believed Stephenson had written it. It also has one of the sweetest romances in all of science fiction. Anathem is an extraordinary achievement, and if you are the right kind of reader, it will blow you away.