It's difficult to evaluate the middle novel in a trilogy, especially when you like the author but pretty much hated the first book in the series (Quicksilver). That said, I liked The Confusion. It focuses on the most interesting characters from the first book, Jack and Eliza, and it has a much more consistent level of action than its predecessor. Although the prose is still full of baroque detail, there's a lot more momentum here, and the plot is more self-contained. The Confusion changes my rating of the overall series from two stars (pretty much don't bother) to nearly three stars (worth it if you like the genre).

If The Baroque Cycle can be viewed as a massive, nearly 3,000 page story arc, perhaps the problem with Quicksilver is that the curvature at the beginning of the arc is too small to be detectable — it's all setup with very little development and no payoff. Continuing this line of thought, The Confusion contains the peak of the arc, and things develop at a pace that mostly fits inside the reader's head. This would suggest that the third installment, The System of the World will consist mostly of resolution. There are plenty of threads remaining to tie up, so this could be the case, but I'm a bit concerned that the remaining loose threads aren't so much the interesting ones (except, perhaps for the mystery that is Enoch Root).

I've got two new massive books (Dan Simmon's Olympos and the new Harry Potter) to read before I consider picking up the conclusion of this series, but I doubt I'll wait the 18 months I took between books one and two.