Eliza is a native of Qwghlm who as a young girl is abducted into slavery by Barbary pirates. Years later she is sold off to the Grand Turk to be a part of his harem. She is kept in a virginal state, so that the Grand Turk might have a virgin slave girl with whom to celebrate the fall of Vienna. When the Turkish armies fail to take Vienna, the harem virgins are ordered put to death, but at the last moment Eliza is rescued by Jack Shaftoe, with whom she has many adventures across Europe.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
Eliza's shrewdness and financial acumen combine with her sexual attractiveness to earn her entry into the highest ranks of European society. She is made an unwilling spy for Louis XIV, who makes her a Countess, and a much more willing spy for William of Orange, who promises to make her a Duchess. Meanwhile she connives with Gottfried Leibniz to undermine the French war against the German states, and with Bob Shaftoe, the brother of Jack.
All the while, Eliza seeks to find the identity of the man who is responsible for her enslavement. This, the reader learns early on, is the Duc d'Arcachon. Eliza discovers this much later, only after she has become embedded in the d'Arcachon household.
Stephenson mixes historical and contemporary settings, handling both with great skill, as he presents a large cast of vividly imagined characters, notably including the original code breaker's granddaughter, and makes both the tale's technology and its conspiracies highly believable.
Eliza, raised in a Turkish harem from which she escapes, lives fairly successfully by her wits, which encompass the know-how for supplying the ingredients of gunpowder.
Stephenson, enjoying cult status for his 1999 novel Cryptonomicon as well as the first two installments in a trilogy he calls the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver [BKL S 1 03] and The Confusion [BKL F 15 04]), brings the long-winded but compulsively readable series to its conclusion.
Stephenson is not the first writer to appreciate that the late 17th century's striking advances in optics, steam power, timekeeping and cosmology -- along with the founding of the Royal Academy and the final guttering of alchemy -- constituted a scientific revolution in its own right.
Stephenson never uses the word "capitalism," just as he doesn't quite use another term apposite to his work: "swashbuckler." His massive enterprise -- full of astoundingly implausible adventures and assertions of historical inevitability -- can be seen as an amalgam of Alexandre Dumas and Fernand Braudel, a mix that tends to separate unless shaken forcefully.
Stephenson'scharacters are invariably presented as good or bad according to whether they espouse beliefs that hold up today, and 18th-century London seems to interest him only insofar as it presages the modern era.
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