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David reads Cryptonomicon
Jun. 26th, 2005 09:22 pmCryptonomicon, like Fight Club, is one of these books that a lot of my chums have raved about to me and so eventually I thought I’d get around to reading it to see if it lived up to the hype. Unfortunately, like Fight Club, having read it I really can’t see what all the fuss was about. It’s a pretty solid tome, and so based upon my usual ‘by the kilo’ method of choosing reading matter a good buy. Certainly if exhaustive research, mathematic obsession, and plenty of spare time were enough to write a book, then Neal Stephenson would have written one of the great books of the last century. However he hasn’t, because writing a great book requires more than that. I’m not saying that it’s a bad book; in fact it has moments of brilliance – but it also had some catastrophic weaknesses, at least for this reader. The four primary ones I’ll list here:
1) The book relies almost on entirely on massive coincidence to advance the plot. So-and-so is a blood relative of so-and-so who knows so-and-so’s grandfather by chance and who just happened to find a over a ton of Nazi gold sitting in the jungle (like you do)…and so on. It doesn’t so much require suspension of disbelief as it requires that disbelief be trundled to the nearest gibbet and put out of its misery in order to let some of the plot-essential coincidences fly.
2) Characterisation, or lack thereof. The overriding theme of the novel is that everything, from human interactions to patterns of waves on the beach, is a vector for the transfer of information and the characters are simply active vectors of one form or another: they collect, collate, interpret, skew, obfuscate and act upon information and as a part of that process none of them require a personality. In fact, a personality would positively inhibit their ability to advance the plot.
The female characters are the least convincing. They are uniformly ciphers (pun intended) who are not only all improbably beautiful, but also they’re all wildly sexually attracted to men who are strong on mathematical ability but weak on social skills.
I don’t know about you, but my life has been remarkably short of encounters with real women like that.
3) It is a truism that nothing dates faster than the cutting edge. We now live in a world where even a fat luddite like me can not only create a web-based data system but also make money out of it, and so to have lead characters talking impressive-sounding techno-wank at each other in lengthy info dumps about doing just that – and make it sound is if they’re doing something exciting and impressive by doing so – simply dates the book as being charmingly quaint and twentieth century.
4) Inconsistency of tone. We lurch from serious digressions about the mathematical structure of crypto-analysis to astonishingly inept ‘comedic’ scenes (example: a parody of the Hebridean Islands, where all the locals speak a humourously incomprehensible dialect comprised entirely of consonants. Oh, how my sides ached).
Of course, it isn’t all weaknesses. It’s just that the weaknesses - for me anyway - are impossible to ignore. The amount of creative energy and obsessive research which has gone into the book mark it out as a remarkable achievement. However, I learned nothing about information transfer, cryptography and the history of computational development which I hadn’t already picked up from other, far more interesting and readable sources (Douglas Hofstadter is a great place to start, and even Dorothy L Sayers gives an interesting primer into codebreaking in ‘Have his Carcase’).
I’d like to like this book. Really I would. It’s impressive, well researched, intricately plotted, and jolly thick to boot. It’s just a shame that the flaws are too great to ignore and let the book wash over me.
Let’s face it, calling a major character ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ for no apparent reason other than as a crap joke (even if he does go to sea and then come back intending to marry me) is a sure-fire way of yanking the reader out of the narrative, slapping them about the chops and reminding them that it’s all just made up.
Conclusion: remarkably strong research, intricate plotting, but characterisation and dialogue of a standard so low George Lucas would blush to have written it.
1) The book relies almost on entirely on massive coincidence to advance the plot. So-and-so is a blood relative of so-and-so who knows so-and-so’s grandfather by chance and who just happened to find a over a ton of Nazi gold sitting in the jungle (like you do)…and so on. It doesn’t so much require suspension of disbelief as it requires that disbelief be trundled to the nearest gibbet and put out of its misery in order to let some of the plot-essential coincidences fly.
2) Characterisation, or lack thereof. The overriding theme of the novel is that everything, from human interactions to patterns of waves on the beach, is a vector for the transfer of information and the characters are simply active vectors of one form or another: they collect, collate, interpret, skew, obfuscate and act upon information and as a part of that process none of them require a personality. In fact, a personality would positively inhibit their ability to advance the plot.
The female characters are the least convincing. They are uniformly ciphers (pun intended) who are not only all improbably beautiful, but also they’re all wildly sexually attracted to men who are strong on mathematical ability but weak on social skills.
I don’t know about you, but my life has been remarkably short of encounters with real women like that.
3) It is a truism that nothing dates faster than the cutting edge. We now live in a world where even a fat luddite like me can not only create a web-based data system but also make money out of it, and so to have lead characters talking impressive-sounding techno-wank at each other in lengthy info dumps about doing just that – and make it sound is if they’re doing something exciting and impressive by doing so – simply dates the book as being charmingly quaint and twentieth century.
4) Inconsistency of tone. We lurch from serious digressions about the mathematical structure of crypto-analysis to astonishingly inept ‘comedic’ scenes (example: a parody of the Hebridean Islands, where all the locals speak a humourously incomprehensible dialect comprised entirely of consonants. Oh, how my sides ached).
Of course, it isn’t all weaknesses. It’s just that the weaknesses - for me anyway - are impossible to ignore. The amount of creative energy and obsessive research which has gone into the book mark it out as a remarkable achievement. However, I learned nothing about information transfer, cryptography and the history of computational development which I hadn’t already picked up from other, far more interesting and readable sources (Douglas Hofstadter is a great place to start, and even Dorothy L Sayers gives an interesting primer into codebreaking in ‘Have his Carcase’).
I’d like to like this book. Really I would. It’s impressive, well researched, intricately plotted, and jolly thick to boot. It’s just a shame that the flaws are too great to ignore and let the book wash over me.
Let’s face it, calling a major character ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ for no apparent reason other than as a crap joke (even if he does go to sea and then come back intending to marry me) is a sure-fire way of yanking the reader out of the narrative, slapping them about the chops and reminding them that it’s all just made up.
Conclusion: remarkably strong research, intricate plotting, but characterisation and dialogue of a standard so low George Lucas would blush to have written it.
