“Mr. Foot!” Jack called out to a fiery blob hurtling to and fro in pursuit of demoralized foe-men, “turn thee around and let’s to the river. Nothing but dust now lies between us and the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad; and he had damn well better be grateful, lest we boil up some urine in his town.”
The reality about this massive book is that it is actually two different volumes in one: Bonanza and The Juncto. The above quotation is the paragraph which seems to bring Bonanza to a close. Except that it doesn’t. Why? Because, and here is where the book really gets tricky, Bonanza and The Juncto are given their own separate sections, but they are not separated into two different novels in their entirety. The result is that this paragraph brings a chapter of Bonanza to a close and the next page of text begins a new chapter of The Juncto. It is not as if there are two separate and completely unrelated narratives to follow, but just the very structural design can put up a big shiny red STOP sign to some readers. The best advice is to not let it, and dig in with ambition and purpose. After all, stopping before even giving it a chance would result in missing opportunities for more sentences as imaginative as the one about boiling urine. That's something you don't read every day.
“When you go to the next world, tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!”
How many pages long is The Confessions, anyway? It will depend upon the version, of course, but expect somewhere in the neighborhood of nine-hundred. That is such an enormous neighborhood that it really doesn’t matter whether your copy comes in around eight-hundred or more than a thousand pages. The point is the same: that’s a lot of book to handle. Which is why it is really quite amazing that an awful lot of information is packed into this one single quote extracted from a page just a little more than one-third of the way through. Three significant elements are contained here: an essential character who typically is almost never referred to as Lord Upnor, only a handful of times Anglesey and usually simply as Upnor. The “cabal” is of even greater significance than Upnor. And as for Solomon and his legendary gold, it is integral to the plot, if such a word can truly be engaged to describe the storytelling approach going on here.
“Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value—seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does—it is a shared phant’sy.”
Ultimately, what is The Confession about? That is a question that could very well return a thousand different responses from a thousand different responders, but forget that noise: it is about economics. Money and the love of money and the quest for money and how money is manipulated, exploited and twisted into the currency of society by government. “Fungible” is a term to describe how the value of a commodity can be traded for the value of currency. “Seigneurage” denotes the difference between the value of money on a minted coin and the actual value of the metal used in the minting process. The origin of this term can be traced back to that those “Kings” picture on the coin actually made a profit from the very process of creating the coin and thus it was only the portrait of the King imprinted upon it which gave it additional value beyond the actual cost. This quote is central to the story in part because it reveals the obsession with money that so many of the characters possess as well as the crucial awareness that all value attributed to actual money—currency—is exactly what the Count here describes: pure fantasy agreed upon by everyone.
