Wow, where to begin. This is the second Dan Brown book I've read and I'm guessing it'll likely be...
more Wow, where to begin. This is the second Dan Brown book I've read and I'm guessing it'll likely be the last. To begin, if you plan on reading this book, forget suspending your disbelief, rather tie up your disbelief, take it out back and shoot it lest it resurface while you're reading the book.
Yes, this book contains an impressive amount of plot holes, factual errors, non-existent technology, etc. The NSA (which is in fact bigger than the CIA and the FBI) is portrayed as an organization that has no more than perhaps 20 employees, none of which come in on weekends. 170 IQ employees that act as if they had a 70 IQ. 12 gauge printer cable? The NSA has full-time employees that work as translators -- they don't get temp college professors to read Chinese/Japanese. Programmers/Mathematicians DO NOT MAKE an exorbitant amount of money working for the NSA. They are still subject to the federal payscale. X-eleven, not 'X11'? Brute force code-breaking as the primary decryption method????? VSLI, not VLSI??? Tracer programs that don't have to be executed, but act on their own? Ugh.
I can overlook these things if it were well written around a taut storyline. Dan Brown doesn't include a preface to the book that espoused the accuracy of the facts as he does in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. So you have to take it as FICTION and not non-fiction. He does say that he corresponded with former NSA employees in writing this book. Having a bit of experience in the industry, I'd say that either Dan Brown had no such correspondences with former employees, they fed him misinformation deliberately, or Dan Brown was told the basis of his entire book made no sense by these former employees, so he decided to throw all their suggestions in the trash so he could write this book.
Regardless, the ultimate downfall of this book is BAD WRITING. The characters are flat and annoying. Their actions are contradictory to their personalities -- just to move the 'plot' along. I think Dan Brown has a Word-a-Day calendar and he uses that new vocabulary word several times in the 10-15 pages of writing he produces that day. Words like 'torrent', 'andalusian', etc are used several times in a 3 'chapter' span and then never again throughout the book.
Most annoying, Dan Brown apparently never learned that similes are well and good and get the point across, but should not be used often as they are extremely annoying. Towards the end of the book all these sentences are used in 2 pages -- no joke. "The commander rose through the trap door LIKE Lazarus back from the dead." "Freon was flowing downward through the smoldering TRANSLTR LIKE oxygenated blood." "Susan was standing before him, damp and tousled, in his blazer. She looked LIKE a freshman coed who'd been caught in the rain. He felt LIKE the senior who'd lent her his varsity sweater." [nice double simile, huh? :)] "Her gaze was LIKE ice -- the softness was gone. Susan Fletcher stood rigid LIKE an immovable statue." [another one] "The puddle of blood beneath Hale's body had spread across the carpet LIKE an oil spill."
Yes, the writing is THAT groan-inducingly bad. These two classics in the book make me laugh every time I think of them --"Like in a cheap hollywood movie, the lights went out in the bathroom just as she heard the scream." and "Any more interesting than last night and I'll never walk again."
Ultimately, I did finish the book -- one reason I gave it 2 stars instead of one. Partly because I hate leaving a book half read, but more so to see how much more amusing it would become to me. There's a good premise in the book, but a better writer was needed to coax it out. Dan Brown is not that writer.
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