"Baroque" is an apt subtitle for this book. Stephenson's novel is densely packed with minute detail that, if one were forgiving, one might describe as ornament. I'm not feeling so generous, so I'm going to call it pedantic. It appears that Stephenson spent several years doing exhaustive research on the late 17th century, and then felt obliged to include everything he learned. So the slick, flowing images that are brought up by the title Quicksilver are exactly not embodied by this doorstop of a book.

That said, there is a lot of genuinely interesting information in Quicksilver. Stephenson has done an admirable job of making the setting very rich, and in giving his characters detailed backstories. However, in the midst of all this, he forgot to include a plot. There are a handful of excellent — but very short — plot-driven segments (the attack by pirate ships in Plymouth Bay; the siege of Vienna; Jack's pursuit into the mines), yet there's absolutely no sense of larger story, and these vignettes could have been done as short stories, saving about 800 pages of meandering. I understand that this is a three volume work, and I've only read the first third, but you'd think Stephenson would want to give his readers a compelling reason to read the followup works. Even the "cliffhanger" at the very end is anything but — we knew 900 pages earlier that the character in peril will live for quite some time longer. And we even know that he'll procreate, so there's no need to worry about his plumbing.

A lot of readers have pointed out the character parallels between Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon: there are Waterhouses, Shaftoes, and Roots in both novels. In fact, we're led to believe that Enoch Root is the same character in both. If so, it would appear that his lifespan is more than 300 years. It's hard to imagine an explanation that doesn't turn these "historical" fiction books into "science" fiction. Maybe Root's a time-traveller, or perhaps he's found an alchemical fountain-of-youth, or better yet, maybe he's the Wandering Jew. Or it may just be that Enoch Root is a name taken on by a sequence of people who have belonged to the same secret society through the ages. So far, any clues to his true nature have been obscured by Stephenson's dense thicket of prose.

It could be that Quicksilver is an extremely elaborate setup for a payoff that will come in the other two books of the "cycle" (Stephenson eschews the word "trilogy"). I will probably read book two, but I won't be in line at the bookstore the day it's released the way I was with this one. And Stephenson is going to have to work hard to get back into my good graces.

As a final note, I point you to The Metaweb , a collaborative hypertext exploration of the contents of The Baroque Cycle. Some of the answers may rest there.