The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In the Primer, Princess Nell spends most of her time researching King Magpie’s power, which resides in books that hold the keys. Nell and Princess Nell read these books. Peter Rabbit, whose strengths are trickery and oral games, disappears. Duck assumes a maternal role. Nell also begins formal education at Miss Matheson’s School of the Three Graces. The initial journey there is tense because Nell’s sharp questioning highlights the contradiction of Dovetail—the community’s values focus on artisanal crafts and are anti-capitalist, but it is economically dependent on arch-capitalist neo-Victorians. Nell also demands that Rita define unfamiliar terms—a habit she got from interacting with the Primer. Rita warns Nell that she lacks discretion and knowledge of how to interact with people.

At the school interview, Miss Matheson explains that Nell will be a scholarship girl. Scholarships help the school fulfill its mission to propagate New Atlantean values—“memes”—especially “rational faculties” (220). These values make the neo-Victorians more powerful and outperform sex and high birth rates as means of expanding. Nell goes to live in the garden house of Constable Moore, who has no New Atlantis contracts to lose. Nell injures herself as she moves through the constable’s house but doesn’t complain, a choice that impresses the constable.

Miranda talks with Carl Hollywood one day about what it would take to trace the “payer” funding Nell (225). He tells her it is hopeless. The ractives rely on a network built decades ago to allow for secure, geographically distributed, and anonymous financial transactions. Miranda realizes she won’t be able to find the little girl on the other side of the Primer, but maybe the girl will grow up to be someone important, since only a rich, important person could afford to fund the Primer. Miranda commits to guiding the girl through the Primer and looking for clues that will help her locate the girl.

Nell learns that the constable is a veteran of the terrible wars that occurred between the collapse of China and when the remaining Chinese states joined the Common Economic Protocol. She goes to him one night after she overhears him playing bagpipes and wailing. She sees a graphic image of a headless soldier on one of his mediatronic displays and becomes hysterical. To calm her, he explains that Nell is a “veteran” like him (232) and will be “psychologically unwell” until she grasps that she’s not like her school friends as result (237). She tells him everything about her early childhood, including how angry she was that the Primer didn’t help her after she failed to defeat Burt.

The constable says the Primer can educate Nell. She uses it to examine plants, the stars, and many other important objects. However, it can’t make her intelligent—capable of “understanding subtlety” and nuance (237). He beats her at martial arts to prove this point. He explains that Nell’s life experiences have given her everything she “needs to be intelligent, but [Nell] must think about those experiences” to heal and become truly intelligent (237).

Carl Hollywood returns from a trip to London. Miranda is now working only evenings so she can be with Nell. She tells Carl what she has deduced. The male members of Princess Nell’s company are gone now that Nell’s life is no longer about survival. Nell must be living with a male figure who isn’t emotionally available to her, given the amount of time Princess Nell spends being mothered by Duck. Harv is gone, and Nell must be in school with affluent people. She is learning what the Primer can’t teach her—socialization and sophistication. Carl grows worried because he realizes Miranda means to stick with this gig for years: She has become emotionally invested.

Finkle-McGraw and Gwen Hackworth meet at Finkle-McGraw’s estate to discuss John Hackworth’s unexpectedly long journey (10 years at this point) and the strange letters he sends to Gwen. The two observe Elizabeth (Finkle-McGraw’s granddaughter), Fiona, and Nell—classmates at Miss Matheson’s school—exploring the walled landscape as they talk. Despite all having Primers, the girls are radically different. Elizabeth, accustomed to affluence as a cushion, ranges ahead of the other girls without thinking ahead. Fiona, who loves fantasy and always imagines that something marvelous—even the return of her father—is just about to happen, barrels through to find what is ahead. Nell is cautious, always thinks about the next step, and is intrigued by puzzles. She is the first to discover a way through a stone wall. Later, Gwen worries about the impact of the Primers on the three girls as she writes a letter to her long-absent husband.

Carl Hollywood gets Miranda to take a meeting with Mr. Beck—a hacker—and Mr. Oda, an investor (they are likely CryptNet members). The two men claim to have found a new medium for interfacing with technology; they might be able to help Miranda locate Nell. She agrees to work with them and joins a crowd of amateurs making professional-grade music using their new network.

By now, Nell has spent many years adventuring as Princess Nell in the Primer. She has collected 11 of the keys she needs to best the final Faerie king, King Coyote, and free Harv from the Dark Castle. She has lost her Night Friends. In the Primer, Princess Nell goes on a long desert journey. Nell is surprised when, for the first time ever, the Primer refuses to advance the narrative automatically and requires Nell to make decisions to move ahead. Nell is disheartened when, just before she closes the book, she sees that a crow steals all 11 keys. Underneath the picture of the thieving crow in the Primer is a poem warning that only fools are content with physical objects like keys, while the wise “compile their power bit by bit / And hide it places no one knows” (258).

Nell, Elizabeth, and Fiona near the end of their time at school. Nell mostly excels at physical education, which gives her the ideal neo-Victorian shape, and in the project-based learning the girls do, but she despises the part of the curriculum devoted to religious education and explicitly Eurocentric education. Miss Matheson makes life unbearable when she spies on Nell and targets her for even minor infractions; she beats Nell’s hands as punishment. Nell loses her cool one day and disarms Miss Matheson, much to her shame, given all the lessons she learned from Dojo about humility and discipline. Nell is assigned to detention—“Supplementary Instruction”—on Saturdays. Elizabeth and Fiona rebel and also get assigned to detention, but they break under the pressure. Elizabeth curses all books (including the Primer) and leaves to join CryptNet. Fiona grows severely depressed and disappears after Miss Matheson ridicules her creative writing in response to what her father writes in her Primer.

Miss Matheson eventually explains that the hazing and curriculum are designed to teach them neo-Victorian values—discipline, respect for authority, and humility. All the dominant phyles—New Atlantis, Han, and Nippon—have these values, which make them better than the other phyles. Nell believes she has now learned the secret of succeeding with the neo-Victorians and sails through the remainder of her studies. She also thinks Miss Matheson’s methods are authoritarian, a thought she keeps to herself

Hackworth wakes up inside the Drummer clave. He realizes that he has had multiple sex partners, including, to his horror, other men. It takes a long time to emerge. Each time he intentionally tries to escape, he gets lost. Allowing his mind to wander eventually allows him to escape. When he emerges, the changes in his body and the moss growing on Kidnapper (his chevaline) and his bowler suggest that much time has passed.

Nell, now free of school and having formally debuted into New Atlantis society, continues living in Dovetail. She has grown into a neo-Victorian beauty, but something about her eyes leaves her constantly fending off men who think they can harass her. In the Primer, the princess comes across the Mouse Army, which she first encountered when she caught a mouse rummaging through her papers. The mouse claimed to be an adherent of Princess Nell, a figure from the Enchanted Castle, and long lost to the Mouse Army. In Shanghai, Nell visits Harv, near death by end-stage lung disease in a charity hospital, one last time. 

Hackworth connects with Napier remotely from Atlantis/Vancouver. Napier tells him New Atlantis is aware of Hackworth’s sexual activities among the Drummers. The Drummers use sex to exchange information and specialized particles that allow for complex computing for some unknown purpose. These particles are spreading rapidly through the world via the Drummers’ low-cost sex workers. Hackworth’s sexual activities weren’t his fault since nanosites made him do it, says Napier, but Gwen filed for divorce anyway once Napier told her about it. Ten years of orgies seem a waste of Hackworth’s engineering skills by Dr. X, though. Hackworth tells Napier that he was working on something he vaguely remembers as a “fat brown seed” (281). Hackworth tells Napier that Dr. X’s mediatronic card included instructions to find the Alchemist, a figure Napier says is a “wizardly Artifex” (282) who works with Dr. X.

Nell spends most of her free time in the Primer, which offers problems with no easy solutions and little storytelling. She gets the first of the keys back by figuring out the castle where it is kept—Castle Turing, which is effectively a primitive computer that uses chains that toggle on or off (the equivalent of ones and zeros). She wrecks the castle by damaging the chains used to program it and claims it for her own.

Back in real time, Miss Matheson summons Nell for one last talk. Although Nell can choose a neo-Victorian life, Miss Matheson reminds her that she can achieve greatness if she chooses an unconventional life. Nell returns home to the constable and tells him she wants to be neither neo-Victorian nor rebel because she is comfortable with “contradiction and ambiguity” (297). Nell says goodbye to the last link to her childhood, puts on thete-style clothes, and disappears into the Pudong district of Shanghai.

Hackworth locates his wife and daughter in a small neo-Victorian clave in Seattle that he reaches with Kidnapper. After an argument with Gwen about the custody agreement in their divorce, which grant him no visitation rights, Fiona jumps on Kidnapper’s back to run away. Fiona, like Nell, is off on a quest.