Despite its length, Reamde is the simplest thing Neal Stephenson has written. Photo / Supplied
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
Atlantic $39.99
The default opening for any review of a Neal Stephenson novel is the "cult author, but not really" explanation. Here's how it goes. I tell you that Stephenson is always described as a cult author, and then I list the number of Stephenson novels that have made it on to
the New York Times best-seller list - six, five of them at number one - and then I point out that under any reasonable definition of the term "cult author", Stephenson's massive mainstream success disqualifies him.
What's interesting about this argument is the way people keep on feeling they need to make it. "Cult author" seems to be an ineradicable part of Stephenson's authorial persona, even though he clearly isn't one. The reason, I think, is that Stephenson is like that uber-cool kid who sits down the back of the classroom, saying very little, getting near-perfect marks with no apparent effort while giving off a faint vibe of benign contempt.
Even though cyberpunk was essentially dead and buried by the time his breakthrough novel Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book retrospectively turned him into the movement's crown prince. Combine that information-age insider status with his deadpan ironic prose, which is constantly nudging you to see jokes where you normally wouldn't, and what you get is the sense of being invited into the intellectual penthouse suite, for a brief glimpse of a privileged worldview. It's the very essence of cult authorship: reading Stephenson feels like being part of an exclusive club, even when everyone else is reading him too.
I've been pondering the cult author question because of Reamde, which really ought not to feel like a Stephenson novel, and yet does. Another way of stating this is that I really ought not to have enjoyed it, and yet I did. Stephenson's previous book, Anathem, is a 900-page alternative universe novel about hyper-intellectual monks; it recapitulates the entire history of philosophy while quietly dropping a trail of breadcrumbs which leads you - spoiler alert - to realise, midway through the book, that you may be reading an alien invasion action story in exceptionally cunning disguise. The book would have three appendices, except that Stephenson coins a new and far cooler word to replace "appendices".
