primeideal

This book, man, this fricking book.

Important: this is a reread. I'm pretty sure the first time I read it was over a decade ago and I was an undergrad at the time. I think it is, on some levels, amazing and mind-blowing and very well-done. I have a lot of high praise for it. Again, this post is going to probably be disproportionately focused on things that didn't work for me, then and/or now, but that's more about my emotions and less a fair assessment of its literary merits.

The concept: Erasmas is a young "fraa" or "avout" in a "concent" on the planet of "Arbre." The concent is where all the intellectual sorts in Arbre hang out. They go in and take vows that separate them from the "Sæcular" world, so they can focus their attentions on philosophy, math, science, that kind of thing. They spend a lot of time talking about eponymous concepts like Plato's Cave or Ockham's Razor or the Pythagorean Theorem, except Arbre isn't Earth, so they don't have a Plato or an Ockham or a Pythagoras, everything has different names. Depending on how deeply they're embedded within the concent, avout can only emerge for a period of ten days every year, decade, century, or millennium. As our story begins, Erasmas ("Raz") is eighteen, and it's the end of the year 3689; when the (enormous, brilliantly complex, work of art) clock strikes 3690, it will be a new decade, and he'll get to go outside and see his family and the world for the first time in ten years. Which he does. Then things get weird.

Okay, so. Some of the words, you will recognize as being familiar to but not exactly words in our world. "Fraa" ~ "friar," "avout" ~ "devout" or "avowed," "concent" ~ "convent" or "concentric." Even the title: "anathem" ~ "anthem," "anathema." This is all on purpose. People who don't like neologisms in their books probably won't like this book, and that's okay. This is not a criticism I have.

The first chunk of this book is, from a worldbuilding perspective, very fun and cool because MATH MONKS. The concept of the centenarian and millenarian communities remaining in seclusion and pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge is fascinating. The elaborate descriptions of the gothic architecture, the bells, the clockwork, the rituals, the music...it's the kind of place I want to visit, even if I wouldn't necessarily want to live there. A little like Ender's Game, sometimes the jargon can throw you into the world a little abruptly, but once I'm in, I like it, and sometimes resent when the plot moves on and drags me away from the cool concent stuff.

A couple subtweets: if you're a math and change ringing nerd and somehow haven't read this book yet, I highly recommend at least the first chunk. Because change ringing!!! If you're a river rafting guide, I can't recommend this book just for the person of Yulassetar Crade, because it's a very long book and Yul is a very minor character. I can, however, tell you that Yul is the kind of wonderful, self-reliant, adventurous character who has an exciting job where every day is a new challenge that brings the potential for a new story. Yul is great.

So.

( Spoilers and rants about many things )

The most important thing I would have wanted to know when I read this the first time is that change ringing with mathematical patterns is real, you can do it in this universe! I didn't discover my college's tower until almost too late, but now I'm slowly picking it up again, and handbells/online ringing give the opportunity to learn the math without the coordination. :D

Interesting overlap in the "Ringing World" newsletter this week for bell nerds and/or polar exploration nerds. There was a column written by a ringer who had travelled to the Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica last month. Grytviken, the largest settlement on South Georgia, contains a church that was founded by Norwegian Lutherans in 1913, and transferred to the Church of England a hundred years later. There are two bells, which rung for the first time on Christmas Eve 1913, and they were described as "the most southerly chime of bells in the world." They are inscribed:


"Lutheran pastors were in residence intermittently until 1931, but were not impressed by the religious observance of their parishioners. Indeed, the church served many secular purposes including potato store and cinema." Bleeping Lutherans ;)

The columnist was able to ring an "extent" on the two bells, several times. An extent is a performance of every possible order of the bells, so n factorial. An extent on 7 bells is 5040 changes, which is the cutoff for "full peal" length. But on two bells, it would literally just be 1 2; 2 1. Math!

Grytviken is also Ernest Shackleton's resting place.

There's just...so much going on in this story (which is very loosely based on actual events). The cat eating all the rats at the emperor's court! The skull engraving getting turned into a cat! This is the type of story I normally find by screwing around on Wikipedia when I'm bored at work...but no, I actually heard this from my bell friends, because of course English bell nerds would try to reproduce the pattern that sounded like "turn again, Whittington." (Roughly, without getting into the bell notation, it's a rising "1-3-5" arpeggio followed by a falling one.)

Several years ago, I was introduced to "change ringing" through the a math context. There's some next-level "the Russians used a pencil" stuff here--English tower bells are too heavy to ring repetitively and melodically, so they discovered some of the concepts behind "permutation groups," the Dutch used a carillon ;)

However, I only lived in that area for a few more months before moving to another part of the country that didn't have a tower, so I paused. A couple years ago, I moved again, and there was a new tower, but I'd forgotten pretty much all I knew. It was kind of a long commute to practice, and I was basically just using some of their practice time to re-learn the very basics of manipulating the rope, couldn't play in a group yet. And they were like "every few months we have intensive beginner practice, join us then and we can get you up to speed." So I planned on that. And then...the pandemic happened...

Which actually turned out to be a surprisingly good thing for learning the patterns, because the mental memorization ability is almost completely decoupled from the physical rope manipulation. So a few months in some British people programmed a virtual platform for this, because of course. And I've been able to practice with my "neighbors" without a commute, and advancing far in the mental part, and we even have been able to meet in person for handbells!

But I haven't gone back to the tower practices because it's too long a commute for little practice when we're still sort of pandemic-limited. Except finally we got the long-delayed newbie practice, and I got to work on the ropes. Which is kind of scary because this group can be a bit intimidating with their experience and also the fact that these enormous bells are kind of dangerous, so I had to work through a lot of anxiety. But I did it! And then the next morning, I felt some arm soreness that was like...I have more side effects from bells than I did from the vaccines :D Good to be back in the habit.