After putting Diamond Age down for more than two years I have finally read the last 80 pages. The conclusion to this story felt very sudden but fitting to the rest of the book. I couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed when the bells of St. Mark’s cathedral began to ring I know that my time with Nell, Hackworth, Miranda, and the others was over.
Doctor X’s quest to create the seed is one element I felt did not have a full conclusion. It is true that Nell succeeded in stopping the drummers from completing their action and killing Miranda. However, the drummers would stay in there den waiting to complete their process for years. It would be easy for Doctor X to just replace Miranda with someone else. The seed has obviously been crucial to the plot of Diamond Age, so why is there no conclusion for it.
The chain of events in The Diamond Age was mostly caused by the actions of John Percival Hackworth. Through out the story I felt sympathy for this character as he when through several humiliating and difficult times. Yet this character largely brought about his problems. His attempt to make an illegal copy of the primer for his daughter was selfish and didn’t really matter in the end as Fiona Hackworth gained her own copy of the primer regardless. If only John Hackworth could have been patient he would have avoided so much trouble. When we last see John he is trying to pass the mouse army which of course was something of his own creation. It is hard to say what lies in his future but perhaps Dr. X is correct and Hackworth cannot go against his instinct to fulfill clever methods.
I feel that the mouse army is among the most ingenious ideas Stephenson created in this book. To think that twelve-year-old girls could pose such a threat to other powerful organizations was unheard of. However as Nell demonstrated in her escape from the Fist, the primer clearly makes young ladies a force to be reckoned with. At first I thought that was the wrong thing to teach girls, but in a dystopian future where rape is occurring often self defense is a invaluable skill to have.
Nell has been searching for Miranda and Miranda the same for most of the book. Finally they meet but like the seed the events that follow are not fully worked out. In my experience there are two types of novelist. The novelist who does not tell the reader the future of the characters after the main story is over. It is up to the reader to come up with their own interpretation of what the characters will do. The other type of novelist is the one who will give the readers an epilogue explaining the aftermath of the major events of the book.
J. R. Tolkein is without a doubt the later as he presents his readers with an epilogue several pages in length about the after math of The Lord of the Rings. This not only tells what happens to most of the characters after the event, but even details their lives up until death. Neal Stephenson on the other prefers to not set the future events of Diamond Age in stone. He leaves the ending open so readers are free to come up with their own ideas of what happens next. Personally I imagine Miranda and Nell seeing other face to face for the first time and embracing one another as if they were mother and daughter since the beginning.
1 comment:
In response to your assumption that hackworths patience would have gotten Fiona a coppy of the primer. I highly doubt it as if he had not made the attempt the Design itself would have been lost entirely. Thanks to Dr.X it was saved and allowed Hackworth to make a third true copy, as well as design the Mouse copies.
I cant say your sentence structure is easy to understand "Nell has been searching for Miranda and Miranda the same for most of the book" is certainly unclear. I did like your analysis of the Mouse army and agree it is a quite unique idea to have an army of 12 year olds.
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