Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
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Book Reviews of Cryptonomicon
Book Review: Typical Stephenson - just bigger
Summary: 5 Stars
Neal Stephenson tends to write for smart people, ergo, smart people tend to like his work. He writes in their language, the stuff of computers and math and physics and hackers and conspiracies and all that madness. My friends all like Neal Stephenson, because he writes about the things that they like and does it in a reasonably entertaining way. Me, I just can't get into it to any great degree. See, I've always found Stephenson to be somewhat overrated, with all the written praise about him treating him like he's the Second Coming of Something. Now I don't think this is his fault, he's only guilty of writing books that people seem to like . . . but I think the hype around him blows him way out of proportion. Critics salivate over his novels like nobody writes big books anymore and the publisher acts like he's a genius of singular talent (which, to be fair, is their job to do) . . . but I just don't get it. Cryptonomicon is the latest example of my lukewarm reaction to his work. It reads well, it's entertaining, but at the end of the day it just doesn't move me the way great literature should. In some respects, it seems like Stephenson is trying to parallel the career of semi-obscure author Thomas Pynchon, his earliest successful novel Snow Crash was repeated compared to Vineland and I've seen more than one review saying that this is his answer to Gravity's Rainbow. But other than the fact that both books are somewhat erudite, set in WWII and written in the present tense, there really is no comparison. Stephenson's novel has a relatively small cast of characters and focuses mostly on cryptology, while Pynchon's novel had a extremely large cast, tossed in everything from mathematics to pop culture and managed to maintain a palpable sense of paranoia that leaked even into the narration itself. So comparing the two is unfair and to Stephenson's credit, I don't think he himself has tried to link the two. So we should look at his novel on its own merits. How does it stand up? The biggest credit here is that he manages to write a nine hundred page novel that moves at a fairly even clip, there's no boring parts to make you want to put it down, the chapters are mostly short, the POV switches often and he does everything he can to keep you engaged. The plot shifts between the present day and WWII, in the former, computer guy Randy Waterhouse is trying to get the funding and backing to create an offshore data center, independent from all governments, while in WWII his grandfather joins a super-secret intelligence department designed not only to break Axis codes but to convince the Axis that the codes haven't been broken (the most clever part of the novel, in my opinion). In both eras the Waterhouses are joined by the Shaftoes, who run around like lunatics trying to help various goals get accomplished. In the end there's stuff about hidden gold and lots of information about cryptology and the math behind it, which is more or less interesting. The problem is, with me at least, is that Stephenson continues to be more style than substance. His prose is breezy enough, though the present tense style strikes me as somewhat pretentious and the tone for some reason comes across as rather smug, as if he knows he's being hip and modern and wants to make sure you realize it too. Occassionally he comes out with a bizarre and memorable metaphor and some passages attain some resonance (though over nine hundred pages it had to happen, even if by accident), but the prose just exists to move the story along. Even worse is when he stops the narration entirely to delve into math equations . . . it's clear that he thinks he's being deep and clever, but it really just comes across as annoying. The plot is interesting enough, though certainly not gripping and I'm not sure why it took nine hundred pages . . . it's actually fairly straightforward, certainly not the difficult, knotted novel it's proported to be. It meanders a heck of a lot though, and although the diversions are entertaining, they don't really lead anywhere. The characters are typical Stephenson constructs, for once not completely oh so painfully hip as in the past, Randy is actually interesting in spurts and the male Shaftoes are fun in a uninhibited fashion, but Amy Shaftoe really doesn't do much except act tough and act as the object of Randy's lust (there's no real strong female characters in the novel, which may or may not bother you), but for the most part the characters just serve to move the plot along. So in the end what you have is a reasonably entertaining page turner, certainly nowhere near the bonafide literary classic that someone (either the author or the publisher) is hoping for, but it has its moments and to be honest it's the best Stephenson book I've read so far. And hey, it's well researched at least. Fans will have already read this, everyone else expect a fairly good time but don't expect to have your mind blown.Book Review: WOW!
Summary: 5 Stars
I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating.
I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head.
The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor."
And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure."
Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak".
Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted.
A wonderful book!
Book Review: Inconsistent - some greatness amongst some disjointed tedium
Summary: 2 Stars
I got this for Christmas and finished it late last night.
As the tale begins, the author initiates two primary storylines, The first is set in WWII spanning both the European and Pacific theatres. The second is modern day and is centered on a California start-up (with requisite ambitious young guys) with primary business interests in the far east. One knows the stories are connected because of similar last names in both. The other connection is encryption - how crytography was central to the war and how it is central to current day business and, in the author's view, central to the future of civilization.
One of the great pluses of the book is how the author made use of these commonalities between WW2 and modern-day to create interest and anticipation. The middle of the book actually made use of these quite well and I was eager to keep reading. There is some terrific writing in middle sections and descriptions of people and places both in Europe and the Far East are very vivid.
The author does write with terrific humour at times and I was reminded in several places about a series of books written about WWI called "The Bandy Papers - the Journals of Bartholomew Bandy" by Donald Jack. Very similar in style as the author captures the points of view - dry wit - of Grandpa (WW2) and grandson (techno geek) Waterhouse.
The presentation of Gen. Douglas McArthur was (from my Canadian perpective) endearingly flag-waving-pipe-chomping-bullet- shedding-American-Super-hero and, of course, totally unbelievable.
Then I hit the final pages where I had hoped to receive a big-payoff to the build-up over the previous thousand pages. Alas, it was not to be and all the tedious verbiage that scarred the entire book turned out to be a sad bell-weather.
One of the "1 star" reviews amongst these reviews suggested that Tolkien was nothing compared to Neal Stephenson as far as filling up pages with words. There are numerous examples of page after page of "who cares" blathering which may tell us that some of the characters are in fact terribly boring individuals but do not deepen the characterizations. One of the good points is that when you hit such a section - and the reader will recognize them - you can simply skip about 5 pages or more and pick up the story without missing anything. The book could have been shortened by about 400 pages, maybe more. I'm guessing there is an encrypted message in the pages somewhere but I couldn't care less.
Some story lines, characters and inferences are left totally unresolved in the end (e.g. what happened to the dentist?). A case of author boredom and a loss of interest as the ending approached? And why the heck did Andrew Loeb make a final appearance! Talk about out-of-place and just bizarre.
I dunno what the author is thinking sometimes but several times he comes across as just a tad too clever. At least 3 times during the book (inluding the opening pages) I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. For example, one such bit of cleverness is his incorporation of the Hindenberg disaster in New Jersey - the narrative is written at that point from the perspective of a main character who stumbles literally out of the woods after seeing a brightness in the sky. It is not central or even obliquely of interest to the story line. The author never mentions Hindenberg by name and it is left to the reader (if you can pass the author's ever-so-clever test of cleverness) to figure it out. It seemed somewhat a condescending (to the reader) writing style.
There is the usual technology-dropping (like dropping names but gadgets instead of people) to presumably up the coolness factor and from my knowledge it is mostly, but not always, believable.
Ultimately, why there is some terrific writing, the overall result is a draft that needs 1 or 2 more rewrites and a worthy ending to really tell a terrific story.
Summary - go directly to Tom Clancy's books which are executed much better and have endings that offer a consistent pay-off (but with less humour). Clancy can also go on and on... but not like this guy!
The paperback story is 1130 pages of small type that is hard to read.
Book Review: magnificent work, but marred by bad ending
Summary: 4 Stars
Successful writer Neal Stephenson jumps headlong into main stream fiction with anything but main stream storytelling. At 900+ pages this book is awesome in scope if not its size. The story is about cryptography, and its use in the modern world to try and secure man's inalienable, but often tramped rights. The book is split between a cast of WWII cryptographers and service men and their modern day grandchildren. Randy Waterhouse is a network engineer and computer hacker(coder). He and his business partners are trying to set up a worldwide secure data repository, a digital vault, were a person's information (digital cash) can be safe from the prying hands of crooks, dictators, or nosy governments. Regardless if these same people are crooks themselves. The key to accomplishing this task is cryptography, encoding data in a nearly unbreakable form. Stephenson interleaves this modern day story with a great rendition of code breaking history from WWII. Lawrence Waterhouse, Randy's grandfather, and marine Sgt. Bobby Shaftoe are part of the fictitious "detachment 2702". A group that among other assignments is sent out to spread false data so that Germany will not figure out that the Allies have broken the "unbreakable" Enigma machine code. Sgt. Shaftoe is Stephenson's alter-ego. Not surprising that a self proclaimed geek would choose pure hearted (excepted for sex) man of action to offset the techno-nerd portion of the book. He is by far the best character. Besides beating back the Axis powers the story turns to a second plot involving gold transfers and the generation of even more secret codes. The past and present come together when young Randy must some how duplicate his now late Grandfather's work in order to free himself from the modern day villains that oppose the creation of the vault. The gold storyline is what is really captivating about this book. We all know how WWII ends. We keep turning the pages to find out if the modern day charaters will win the day. Sadly they do not even meet their adversaries. The one sacraficial villain offered up in the end is an off screen character mentioned on about page 100. Many good characters are dumped along the way and we never find out what happens to them.
Stephenson knows his stuff. And he manages to convert many areas of technology into a slam-bang, in-your-face, narrative style that will often leave the reader laughing. The scientific one-two punch style is enjoyable but does get old when he tries to adapt it to memories of childhood playgrounds and family heirloom squabbles. The concepts of starting, maintaining and attaching faith to a completely digtal currency are put forth in clear rudimentary form. He does not ascribe to the typically network huckster mantra that the WEB will solve everything. Currency must be backed and he gives us a smattering of what may happen should anyone realy try to pull off a real vault. More drama could have been wrung from this point if the author was as savy about politics as he is about computers. Is it well plotted? Yes. Is it traditionally plotted? not really. A young Orson Wells was criticized for showing the audience the ceiling in his movies (it was never done before), later he was called a genius. Stephenson shows us the ceiling, the plaster, the studs, and the copper plumbing, complete with scaly build-up.
There are two major criticism for this book; a very bad ending, and little actual character interaction. After 800 pages of completely engrossing story the ending appears to have been written by another author who did not even know what the rest of the book was about. Words like "lame" fail to describe it. Each character seems to act and react soley within their own head. Many interesting secondary characters are not brought fully to life because of this isolation.There is also no real male/female story. The lead male and female instantly become an item half way through the book. Bang! they are together. Amusing that this perfect woman, who is professed to be a virgin, settles for a 5 minute "quickie" in a dirtly Jeep for her first time. Historical figure cameos by, Yamamoto, MacArthur, Reagan, and Turing. I was surprised that there was no Patton, Romel, Monty or Nimitz.
Book Review: An engrossing, exciting, epic journey into a brick wall
Summary: 4 Stars
The middle-brows and genre lovers occasionally try to hoist one of the more impressive examples of their world up into the complex, literary sphere, invariably referring to whichever book it is as 'Pynchon, only funnier', 'with passages rivalling Delillo', or 'contains a vision as complete as Joyce or Shakespeare'. These twee remarks are never true. 'The Lord of the Rings' has been elevated in such a way, as has 'Dune' and 'Foundation'. Cryptonomicon, while being a brilliant novel with a plot of rare density and excitement, falls into this category. It has its cult status and biblical praise, but in truth it is little more than the sum of its parts.What Cryptonomicon has is a highly impressive, multilayered plot whose various strands move along with a laudable level of mystique, violence, and humour. You begin with three mathematicians cycling in the woods and progress into an ever-increasing and ever-engrossing plotline which takes you from modern-day computer geekdom and the legal murk of cunning business deals back and forth through the entire span of World War 2, following an army sargeant and an eccentric, code-breaking genius along their independent, but occasionally intertwined, journey into one hell of a mystery.
The main characters and the hypnotic plot are what recommend this novel. The genius code-breaker is a man of weird fascinations and his askew view of the world is consistently kept. Shaftoe, the army sargeant, is a dry and self-reliant Vonnegutesque non-hero whose inability to get too wound up by the often ferocious events surrounding him grounds the war elements in a believeable reality. Enoch Root, an officer and a cleric, is a semi-mystic who resembles the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland - another interesting character. The book's plot is colossal and, while it stays in the WW2 plotline, is never boring. New threads are added unexpectedly and Stephenson rarely lets anything dangle or become moot, though when he does it serves as a cancer on a large part of the novel. I will explain later.
The book is both aided and hindered by the writing. By and large, the book is written adequately with frequent moments of real wit. Stephenson can imbue a moment with real wonder and can create large theatres of action wherein nuances are paid attention to as well. This doesn't happen enough, though. There are sections that are written bluntly, coarsely, and without imagination. They do not belong in a book of this ambition and weaken the power which had previous being building. There are sections, most often in the contemporary plotline, which drag along blandly and add nothing to the experience but time.
The worst offence of all in this book is the ending. The World War 2 plotlines end well and set up what the reader expects to be a profound climax. No such thing occurs. A very important antagonist is done away with out of the blue in less than a page, ending a plotline which was promising to be a razor-edge, all-or-nothing climax for the computer geeks and their impossibly grand scheme. A complex antecedent plot regarding a data haven near the Philippines becomes a predicate plot about a hunt for Nazi gold. A terrible amount of anticipation fizzles out in the transition. One is led to believe this gold will finance the data haven, but it's all left unsaid in a quick and painful wrap-up.
The ending stinks and makes one believe Stephenson was either told to end it as quickly as possible for publishing reasons or he tired of the whole thing and, instead of hiding this from his readership and pushing on, thus saving the novel, he gave in and ended it all in a way not a million miles away from 'He woke up and it was all a dream'.
Nevertheless, this novel is, in the final analysis, an interesting novel with heaps of code-history and thought-provoking discussions, such as the conversation about Ares and Athena being complex metaphors for different approaches to war. Read it, enjoy it, bite your tongue when it drags, read the ending near a punching-bag, for the vast majority of the book is damn fine fare.