Along the way, there are disguises and secret societies and martial arts. There is a near-lynching in a frontier town and a spectacular, massive train made of sledges that ferries people and cargo over the North Pole.
Erasmas and company go on to exploits even more thrilling, but I will leave them aside here because part of the pleasure of "Anathem" is that it begins so quietly, in Erasmas' alluringly tranquil monastic community, and winds up traveling so far. Whenever you feel you have a handle on the story, at the moment you settle in, thinking, "Now I see what this book is about," the novel is liable to pivot on some previously unnoticed axis and head in another direction entirely.
"Anathem" is also a campus novel, a counterpoint to Stephenson's little-known debut, "The Big U." Despite their "bolts" (habits) and quasi-liturgical chanting, the avouts are in essence graduate students, and the maths resemble nothing so much as idealized universities, in which knowledge is doggedly pursued for its own sake in defiance of a hedonistic, utilitarian society with a vanishingly small attention span.
The book even features its own version of postmodernism and the culture wars; "Anathem" gleefully exacts the physics majors' revenge on the slippery relativists who often run circles around them in faculty lounges and coffee shops. If the good guys believe in something called the Hylaean Theoric World (the equivalent of Plato's forms), their opponents are treacherous, media-savvy sophists who say things like, "language, communication, indeed thought itself, are the manipulation of symbols to which meaning are assigned by culture -- and only by culture."
This makes a refreshing change from the usual literary depictions of scientists and mathematicians as inflexible rationalists unable to apprehend that emotional nuance is what really matters in life.
True, Erasmas is a bit callow (his cluelessness in romantic matters is one of the novel's running jokes), and his workmanlike first-person voice strips the customary brio out of Stephenson's prose. But what could be more literary than the metaphysical conclusions the novel wends its way to, which are that human imagination is a quantum device and the cosmos itself a kind of story?
By metaphorical extension, that makes a novelist if not quite a god (never that!), then at the very least, the next best thing.
