The summer’s blockbuster

THE RISE AND FALL OF D.O.D.O. IS A HELL OF A LOT OF FUN.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. By Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland William Morrow 768 pp; $43.50 The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. — both the new novel by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, and the situation described by the novel’s title — begins with the chance meeting of Melisande (Mel) Stokes, a frustrated linguistics expert toiling unhappily in the Ancient and Classical Linguistics department at Harvard, and Tristan Lyons, a military intelligence operative in search of, well, a frustrated linguistics expert. After a non-disclosure agreement and a significant job offer, Lyons gives Stokes a selection of materials pertaining to a hidden history of magic. According to Lyons, his shadowy government agency has long been collecting documents of this sort.

As Stokes writes, “at the start of the Scientific Revolution (Copernicus in the 1540s, etc.) magic was a ubiquitous and powerful force in human affairs, and witches were both revered and feared members of most societies.” Curiously, however, “once the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, magic became less omnipresent and less powerful ... and then it vanished altogether in the 19th century. The latest text was dated from July 1851.”

This theory, that the loss of magic was tied somehow to the rise of science (culminating in a singular event in 1851), sets the ground-rules for their mission, and for the development of the Department of Diachronic Operations, which seeks to return magic to the modern world — with, naturally, potential military uses.

Their work involves (among other things) time travel across multiple strands, the rarest book in the new world, quantum entanglement and collapse of wave function, a disgraced theoretical physicist from MIT, and a witch who has been waiting more than a hundred years to contact Stokes via Facebook, a rapidly developing bureaucracy and a mysterious banking family, an Elizabethan prostitute/Irish spy, a 12th-century mercenary and a horde of Viking marauders.

Oh, and Schrodinger’s Cat has a significant role. Or it doesn’t.

Laid out like that, there’s something faintly ridiculous about The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. This is a feature, however, and not a bug: the novel’s refusal to take itself seriously is high among its many strengths. The blurring of science and magic, for example, releases Stephenson and Galland from the strictures of even speculative science and its need for credibility: the novel, like the work itself, has all the trappings of hard science while concealing the actual mechanics.

As a result, it is free to constantly reinvent itself, incorporating not just the tropes of time travel but a hearty wit, a wicked satire of bureaucratic stagnation (the gradual swell of acronyms and Human Resources mandates is particularly effective) and of conspiracy theories, a ticking-clock thriller and, at its heart, a crucial mystery.

Rather than a traditional narrative, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is presented as a collation of documents, everything from interview transcripts to email threads, the aforementioned HR memos and operational reports, letters and texts. At its core, though, is the Diachronicle, Stokes’s personal account of her involvement with D.O.D.O. in the first half of the 21st century. The document, however, is written in July 1851, “in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time,” Stokes writes, in the novel’s opening paragraph. “In fact, I am quite f---ing desperate to get out of here.”

How Stokes got to London in 1851 and what will happen to her is the key through-line of a novel that has, if anything, an overabundance of narrative threads. By keeping Stokes at the centre of action which, at times, spans millennia with a verve akin to an English comedy (picture faux dramatic entrances and slamming doors and you’re on the right track. Oh, but add Vikings.), Stephenson and Galland critically root the riotous tale in the intricacies of emotional and psychological development. This might be a novel about how an organization changes history (and there are hints, some subtle, some blatant, that this has already happened around us. Or is happening around us. Or will be happening around us. I’m not sure — it’s a bit hard to keep track of these things), but at its core, it is the story of how history changes a single person, how we are not only shaped by the most dramatic of forces around us, but how those forces themselves are changed by our development.

Just as important, though: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is a hell of a lot of fun — a smart, thrilling, frequently hilarious pageturner with twists one suspects even the authors may not have entirely seen coming. With The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., Stephenson and Galland have delivered the summer blockbuster you didn’t know you had been waiting for. It’s got too much going on under the surface to be Big Dumb Fun, but it has the refreshing zeal of a popcorn movie — one, however, you’ll still be thinking about after the credits roll.