Neal Stephenson is known for enormous, sprawling, infodumpy mega-novels: all-encompassing works that extrapolate technological and social change into the near future or trace them through the past. His breakthrough book, 1992’s Snow Crash, is a cyberpunk technothriller set in part in the “metaverse” – Stephenson coined this term for immersive virtual reality long before Zuckerberg’s Facebook appropriated it. He followed it up in 1999 with the 918-page Cryptonomicon, about Alan Turing, code breaking, maths, finance, gaming and many other things. The 18th century-set The Baroque Cycle (2003-04) is the best part of 3,000 pages long, stuffed with data historical, scientific, speculative, digressive. Reamde (2011), another stonking technothriller more than 1,000 pages long, was extended further with the near-900 pages of 2019’s sequel, Fall or, Dodge in Hell. For Stephenson, more is more.
Polostan looks like a change of direction: a brisk 320 pages of sharply plotted, quick-moving historical adventure, set in the 1920s and 30s. The story follows Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in the United States to a communist Russian father and American mother, who spends her upbringing between the two nations: she is Dawn in the US, Aurora in the USSR. She travels with the Reds in the US, tangles with the FBI, runs machine guns. Returning to the Soviet Union, she works on the construction of the gigantic industrial city of Magnitogorsk, until she is locked in a psychiatric hospital – because the authorities assume her various stories, of playing polo with a young George Patton, her talk of Bonnie and Clyde, of giving birth to a monstrous baby, are delusions. When they discover it’s all true they assume she is a spy sent by the Americans and interrogate her. A sequence where she is tied, naked, to a metal bed frame and dipped repeatedly into the freezing Ural river is brilliantly horrible, like a scene from an early James Bond novel. Eventually she is released. She meets Beria and agrees to spy for the Soviets, or seems to.
Throughout there’s a focus on character and incident, instead of the usual Stephensonian digressions into technology, science and social history. Or, more precisely, there’s only a small amount of the latter. Dawn conceives a child on top of an early X-ray machine, whereupon her boyfriend mansplains the nature and effects of radiation. But mostly Polostan keeps the story moving along: the jazz age US, hobos riding the rails, poshos playing polo, the Chicago World’s Fair, high-altitude balloon rides, massacres, flight and adventure.
Polo – a joke about the creation of a female Soviet polo team gives the novel its title – is an interesting sport. On the one hand it is the very embodiment of privilege. Which ordinary working man or woman can afford to buy and stable a polo pony? On the other, as this novel understands, it was long a part of army life: horses had to be trained and maintained, prepared for battle, and polo is a way of doing this. It’s not just the super-wealthy who deal with polo ponies; squaddies do it, too. The novel is excellent on the two worlds of the rich and the poor, and on the ways they interact with one another.
And the prose is nimble too, vivid and to the point. Here Aurora observes a Russian high-altitude balloon launch:
Abruptly the hangar doors were hauled open, letting in a fanfare of bleak sunlight and a fist of cold air. A truck towed the gondola, which was mounted on a trailer, out to the field where the balloon was beginning to mound up … The whole time the balloon just kept getting bigger, peeling itself off the ground and growing to a size that would have astonished Aurora if she hadn’t seen one like it before. And then at some point physics took precedence over story and the thing just sprang into the air. What had seemed so huge became tiny over the space of a few minutes. For a while it was a white star in the northeastern sky. Then it rose up through a veil of high, icy clouds and disappeared.
Away it goes, like the narrative, scooting rapidly into the distance.
Unusually for Stephenson, Polostan is a straight historical novel, without any fantastical or SF elements. Reading this very enjoyable confection, I found myself approving Stephenson’s change in writerly direction. Only when I reached the end of my proof copy did I realise that Polostan is only part one of a projected series, the Bomb Light cycle. It’s very possible that, as subsequent instalments are added, the whole will accumulate into a more typical infosprawly meganovel after all. It doesn’t matter: this book works as a standalone and ends neatly, an excellent adventure story in itself.
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