Book information

Author: Dan Brown

Plot Synopsis: Susan Fletcher is the head cryptographer for the NSA and is involved in a relationship with the foreign-language specialist professor David Becker. Susan's boss and surrogate father Commander Strathmore (head of the NSA's cryptography division) sends David off on a mission overseas, to track down the key to Digital Fortress, a cipher that seems nigh-unbreakable even by the NSA's brute-force code-breaking supercomputer, TRANSLTR. But Susan has a mystery of her own to deal with back at home, and the two threads ultimately tie together into a single conundrum for everyone to deal with.

Commentary: Digital Fortress is an early book from the author of The Da Vinci Code (which I mention here in part because it means I'll have dozens of Googlers searching on the string Da Vinci Code), and unfortunately this book has all the faults I've heard are associated with that one, only all the more pronounced. Let's break it down to the good and bad points...

• The Soul of Wit - I can't help but imagine that as a young lad, Brown was savagely beaten by nuns for using sentences that contained more than five words at a time, and this has affected him so profoundly in later life that any attempt to write a longer passage fills him with a sick sense of dread. The best way to describe his narrative prose is as 'staccato', which is sadly not a very pleasant style for some to read. There's something off-putting (to me at least) about constantly having each complete thought start and stop several times before reaching its conclusion.
• Normalization - There are two types of characters in Digital Fortress: The main characters, and people who are wrong. Susan and David are normal, well-adjusted young people with strong views and the amazing ability to be correct about whatsoever they do. Every other character in the book is hopelessly flawed; they are figuratively branded with their faults so that these stand out like scars upon their faces and we know better than to trust anything they say or propose. Some of them are allowed to use their flaws to advance the plot a few paces closer to the conclusion, or to bring two strands together, but in the end we know that they have chosen the path of eccentricity and are not to be trusted.
• Point of View - Tying in with the above point, there are two points of view in this book: the right one and the wrong one. Now I'm not going to claim that Dan Brown's opinion of how the world should work matches that of the book; I know next to nothing about the man, and don't much care to find out as it doesn't affect my life one way or another. But he's certainly left very little room for discourse in the book. This works for the format of the book (see below), but is overall an unfortunate choice because it adds to the frustration of having characters be lined up and standing in boxes marked either 'right' or 'wrong'. A little bit of dissenting opinion might have gone a long way towards mitigating this.
• Ideas - This is a good point for the book. There are some good ideas in it, and they get explored to a degree, though they're nowhere near exhaustively examined. Which is a shame, because the book might have been stronger for this exploration (but it also would have clashed with POV, above...).
• Format - Digital Fortress is, in the end, a thriller rather than a deduction game (which is what I had been led to believe I would get when I picked up the book). If you enjoy this sort of thing, then it's likely a good book for you. For my money, though, it's really not a terribly engaging book. Action matters more than piecing things together. Twists come without any sort of foreshadowing, merely to throw another wooden sabot into the wurks. This book would translate very easily into an action movie (though if we can turn I Robot into an action movie and propose turning Neuromancer into the same, then I suppose that last doesn't mean too much...). Remember folks, good writing means people running away from one another!
• The Solution - I don't want to give away too much. But in vague terms, the solution to the book's Complication involves taking a discovery and making sure no one finds out about it. This is another point that just turned me right off the book. Any solution that involves sticking one's fingers in one's ears and chanting 'la la la', no matter how volubly, strikes me as no solution at all. But then again, I'm horribly biased against this by the belief that once a genie is let out of a technological bottle, it won't soon go back in.

Moments to Watch For

• I'm pretty sure pro assassins don't normally employ packet radio rigs to be blithering idiots. But I could be wrong.
• Jabba - Okay, I get it already, Dan. Hackers who aren't young and beautiful are disgusting slobs. Sheesh.
• There's a lot of unintentional humour in this book. It might almost be worth seeking out and reading just for that. I'd love to see an MSTed transcript, but I imagine this would cause considerable problems with copyright.

Recommended: Not terribly.

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