Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
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Book Reviews of Cryptonomicon
Book Review: WWII Epic Meets Modern Techno-Thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
Publshed in 1999, Stephenson's military/suspense epic of codes and codebreaking tells two parallel stories, one set during World War II, and the other in the present (when the book was written, which was at the height of the dot-com boom). The title refers to a manual of codebreaking assembled over the years by the US military, and eventually declassified and released on the internet, where it has become a tool of programmers, hackers, and amateur cryptographers.
One of the central characters is Lawrence Waterhouse, a quirky genius who studied mathematics at Princeton before being stationed at Pearl Harbor by the US Navy in time for the Japanese attack and the start of the War. Waterhouse is recruited to work on secret intelligence projects when his talent for breaking codes is discovered. His path intercepts those of a US Marine named Bobby Shaftoe and a chaplain named Enoch Root, and eventually he becomes involved with a conspiracy locate hidden treasure buried in the Philippines by retreating Japanese forces.
In the modern story arc, Lawrence Waterhouse's grandson and Bobby Shaftoe's granddaughter are brought together in the midst of the establishment of a telecommunications startup business in the Philippines. But that venture is merely a front for a much more ambitious operation that could change the way in which business is conducted on the internet.
Stephenson combines a vivid command of detail with a tongue-in-cheek sense of the surreal. He captures the everyday horrors of war along with the everyday absurdities that the fighting men are dealing with.
The book also contains a nice array of geeky references to everything from the invention of the digital computer to Tolkien, Dungeon & Dragons, and collectible card games. In between, Stephenson waxes eloquent on economics, politics, Greek mythology, and of course codes and codebreaking.
Interestingly, the biggest challenge for Waterhouse and his secret task group is not the breaking of the enemy's codes. The biggest challenge is how to use the information gained without tipping the enemy off that the code has been broken. The necessary black-ops dominate the first half of the WWII-era storyline.
In general, I found that the WWII-era storyline held up better than the modern one. The modern plot relies a bit too heavily on dazzling the reader with technology, and ten years after the writing of this book, it is not always as impressive as it might have seemed in 1999.
Still, Stephenson's characters are vivid and larger-than-life (his portrayal of General Douglas MacArthur is completely over-the-top, but it fits right in with the rest of the surreal cast and situations). His settings are lavishly described, and he does a nice job of talking the reader through the necessary mathematics for understanding the number-theory that underlies cryptography. It's a thick book, but it has very fast pacing, although the ending does come off as a bit rushed.
This is also one of the most quotable books I've run across in a long time. There are some great one-liners in here.
Overall, Cryptonomicon was a very entertaining read and should be fun for computer nerds and history buffs alike.
Book Review: Find Your Inner Indiana Jones
Summary: 5 Stars
Those of us in the supposedly nerdly professions - you know, professor, computer specialist, etc. - are at risk of living isolated lives devoid of adventure. I mean, you trained for YEARS for the right to sit in a room with the door closed and THINK for a living, but you sometimes suspect that "Out There," outside your little carrel, battles are being fought, treasures lost and re-discovered, and girls won over by the strange alchemy of your combined intellect and derring-do. Well, dudes and dudettes, Neal Stephenson is the guy for us.
Stephenson tells the WWII-era story of Lawrence Waterhouse, an American of modest origins who has a gift for mathematics and thus cryptography (you know, the making and breaking of codes). Lawrence is the sort of guy who, when walking about London, is occupied by the notion that a map of the city could be reconstructed by a mere set of hatchmarks indicating the length of his steps as he goes up and down the curbs (i.e., |_____|-|____||| could be Marylebone High Street or some such). He's the sort of guy whose passion for a girl takes the mental form of a graph (one axis "how long since he's xxx'd her" and one "personal work productivity"). Lawrence gets recruited by the war effort to break German codes, and ends up entangled in a scheme that involves a mountain full of German gold that has been shipped to the Pacific.
In an intertwined story - distinct but eventually related - Waterhouse's grandson Randy, a modern-era computer geek who has inherited his grandfather's cryptanalytical skills, gets involved with a plan to create a virtual electronic currency backed (perhaps) by the sultan of a remote South Pacific island kingdom.
Although Randy doesn't know his grandfather's story, these stories eventually come together in a way that makes Indiana Jones look very pale in comparison. A partial list of the events, places, and people that crop up along the 900-page way to the book's resolution would include: a nest of spycatchers holed up in a lighthouse in the Orkneys; not one but MANY submarine disasters; more double-agents than I can count; capture, escape, surviving a shipwreck, an air battle, and a shark attack, recapture, enslavement by cannibals, and more escape; hundreds of workers creating an underground mountain hideaway for the loot, elaborate as a pharoah's tomb, only to be buried alive; more escapes, this time involving a complicated mission-impossible-style deception and a detailed knowledge of deep-sea diving; discovery of long-wrecked submarines containing secret documents; earthquakes; and enemies ranging from Goldfinger-class villains to more sympathetic German evil geniuses.
To say that Stephenson makes this entertaining would be to understate the case radically; it's thrilling, intellectually stimulating, and funny as hell. I've concluded that Stephenson is a real master of his craft, to be able to pull all this together with a result absolutely unrivalled in any other novel of my experience.
This has got to be one of my top-10 novels of all time, but hey that's just me. If you crave adventure, humor, and mathematics, perhaps you'll feel that way too.
Book Review: Enjoyable but Not As Good As It Could Have Been.
Summary: 4 Stars
First, I never would have read this book if it had not been for my Kindle. For a good number of years I have avoided lengthy books because of their weight which makes them tiresome to handle and typically the print is small which also makes them tiresome and hard to read, so the Kindle is a great tool for reading a long and heavy book like Cryptonomicon.
As regards the book itself, overall I found it quite enjoyable as it blends history, technology, geography, important historical personalities, excellent writing, mathematics, computers, and many other subjects of interest to me into a package that at times reads like a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel. At times I really could not figure out how Neal Stephenson was able to come up with such original phrasing combined with a vocabulary that I must admit is well above my own. On almost every page I found it necessary to refer to the dictionary for words that I had not seen before or could not remember their meaning. In every case the word Neal used was the perfect one for the circumstance. As he is relatively young and did not get a Harvard or M.I.T. education, I can only attribute it to him growing up in a family of highly educated professionals who did a lot of his education at the dinner table.
Another thing I liked about the book were the main characters Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Randy Waterhouse, Avi, Alan Turing, the Dentist, and many others who were well developed and given real personality by the author. This and the overall plot were the things that made this book quite enjoyable.
On the somewhat less enjoyable side and the reason I did not give this book five stars were the following. First the ending, after asking the reader to slog with him throughout the world and all the way through World War II, I thought the ending was really weak and almost like an afterthought. It seemed like Neal ran out of writing energy at this point. It also seemed like he got kind of goofy at the end by bringing Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, and General Douglas Macarthur together in the middle of a baseball diamond during the final battle for Manila. This is fantasy that loses its entertainment value. Also I did not like the forty or fifty pages devoted to the relationships between various Greek and Roman Gods, a good editor would have gotten rid of this entire segment.
Another thing I hated in the Kindle edition of this book is the two hundred page article about worldwide undersea laying of communication cables. This article is dated, more than ten years old, uninteresting, old technology, most of the companies talked about have gone out of business, and has no place at all being in this book. Maybe this tourist trip was of interest to Neal ten years ago but it really turned me off by being inserted in this book. Amazon and Neal should do us all a favor and permanently delete it as irrelevant.
In spite of my complaints on these few issues, I would still highly recommend that you read Cryptonomicon. When I recuperate from reading it, I will probably read Quicksilver but it will be a few more months before I am ready for it.
Book Review: A Masterwork
Summary: 5 Stars
Last year I read and enjoyed Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, but was left dissatisfied by the abrupt ending. It was clear to me that Stephenson was something of a genius, with an exceptional grasp not only of science and technology, but also history, politics, anthropology and sociology. I was also struck by his sheer literary talent--mind-boggling creativity and a wicked sense of humor coupled with an ability to create memorable and engaging characters. Diamond Age failed, however, to provide a conclusion that properly brought together all the threads of the complex plot and to tell the reader what happened to all the main characters. Cryptonomicon is a better book because Stephenson manages to match or even improve upon the strengths of Diamond Age while providing a more satisfying conclusion. It is difficult to summarize a book of this scope, which comes close to a thousand pages and follows a large cast of characters through two pivotal periods of modern history: World War II and the information revolution of the 1990s. Stephenson's book makes most of Charles Dickens' works look spare by comparison.
As indicated by the title, the book's central focus is cryptography and the role of computers in both processing and concealing information. Stephenson describes a fascinating crew of fictional characters, from hackers and nerds to Navy SEALS and leathernecks, who interact with the likes of Douglas MacArthur and Alan Turing to show the importance not only of military and economic might, but also the use and control of information, in determining the destiny of nations and the course of world history.
No book is perfect, however. Stephenson has a unique authorial voice: breezy, conversational, and definitely never dull, whether he is describing the intricacies of cryptography or a bloody marine landing on a Pacific island. Yet the blunt, colloquial style of writing may not appeal to readers who prefer more elegant, refined prose. (Stephenson's characters don't make love, they f*ck, for example, and Stephenson pulls no punches when describing bodily functions that some people would rather just be left to imagine themselves--or not think aobut at all). I didn't mind it, but I'm sure many others will. What did irk me was that many of the characters (particularly the American hackers of the 1990s) speak and write in almost exactly the same tone, use exactly the same vocabulary, and ruminate on exactly the same subjects as Stephenson himself. In some cases, even characters like Enoch Root, an enigmatic and apparently ageless ex-Catholic priest, also fall into an identical style of speech. While this does lend the book a certain stylistic unity, it also sometimes makes it difficult for the reader to suspend disbelief and to distinguish the characters' viewpoints from those of the author himself.
Ultimately, though, any criticism of this book pales in comparison with its immense achievements. No review can do justice to the genius of the Cryptonomicon--it transcends genres and is one of the few books that really deserves the overused adjectives "unique" and "original". Read it!
Book Review: Expansive, thought-provoking, absurd, and very fulfilling
Summary: 5 Stars
The scope of this book is something to behold. There's so much going on, you could easily re-read several times just to get it all.
Stephenson has a real gift for bringing different periods alive. His introductory chapter on pre-WW2 Shanghai is already strangely surreal and engaging; a US Marine unit is trying to make its way through the chaos of a typical Friday afternoon, with thousands of coolies marching and chanting from bank to bank to demand silver for currency. Stephenson weaves in an explanation of why this is necessary -- with the economic circumstances at the time, the world was starting to fall apart, and the chaotic scene was entirely necessary.
From this, Stephenson goes straight off on another tangent, about how every creature alive today is, by birthright, a stupendous badass. Just by having survived to this point in evolutionary time. Of course this is just an elaborate introduction to the Waterhouses, the family of one of the main characters. The tie-in is, "Now, as far as stupendous badasses go, these are some of the nicest you'll ever meet."
The introductory chapters embody Stephenson's style for me: thoughtful, absurd, whimsical, enchanting. There are thousands of similar threads and tangents to entertain the reader along the way. It's all a question of: Do you want to get straight to the end, or do you enjoy taking your time along the way? I would call them detours, but they always tie back into the story in interesting and sometimes crazy ways.
The story is driven by cryptanalysis, both in WW2 and the present day. There are several plotlines going at any one time. There is the work being done by allied analysts to decrypt German and Japanese communications during WW2. There are the crazy adventures of Detachment 2702, tasked with giving the Germans false impressions that their codes haven't been broken, but rather the allies have guessed their plans in more conventional ways. There's Goto Dengo and the burying of the Japanses gold in the Philippines. And finally, the present-day high-tech start-up Epiphyte Corp. trying to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia; this haven is to provide digital anonymity for its clients and their dealings. Stephenson ties this anonymity in with broader social causes -- if the Jews had had a data haven of their own to protect themselves from an over-reaching government, could they have protected themselves against the Holocaust?
And finally, the characters are compelling. There's a scene near the end, where 2 of the main characters get to meet an important Japansese businessman to discuss joint ventures, and their reasons for building the data haven. This scene gives, for me, the emotional punchline of the book in a truly satisfying way. All the storylines, all the implications come together at once; it seems like the whole sprawling structure of the book is revealed with a single stroke. Great stuff.
A very satisfying read. One of my very favorite books.