Digital Fortress - Dan Brown

...with his re-released first book, Digital Fortress. With no-one offloading The da Vinci Code into charity shops yet, the obvious conclusion is that it is being kept because it is good. This, then, was the nearest theediscerning would get for a while.

Like the more recent book, this 1998 debut effort concerns codes. Susan Fletcher is one of the world’s best code-breakers, even though by now her job is largely redundant. Her employers, ...
...behemoth at the heart of Digital Fortress. No-one is supposed to know it’s working, and cracking terrorist's codes with ease ~ the civil liberties people, moaning that everybody’s email was subject to shady Government scrutiny, had been told it was a failure. But working it is... until it gets stuck, with its own nemesis writhing away inside it ~ a code that changes key, impossible to crack.

Susan Fletcher, then, starts the book getting ... more

A passing trip to Wisbech wouldn't sound like a possibility for a business opportunity, but there it was on the charity shop shelves. A perfect excuse for theediscerning to delve into the world of the latest phenomenonally successful author, Dan Brown, with his re-released first book, Digital Fortress. With no-one offloading The da Vinci Code into charity shops yet, the obvious conclusion is that it is being kept because it is good. This, then, was the nearest theediscerning would get for a while.

Like the more recent book, this 1998 debut effort concerns codes. Susan Fletcher is one of the world’s best code-breakers, even though by now her job is largely redundant. Her employers, the US Government’s secret department (obviously) called the National Security Agency, have built by far the world’s most powerful parallel processor. The reason? Your everyday common criminal.

People started using the Internet for nefarious communications, and of course other people (the NSA for one) wanted to have a read as well, to prevent terrorism and so on. But then along came enciphered emails ~ the computers either end sharing a key to a code which made the message unreadable. A large computer intercepting could still break the code, given enough time, and read the email, however. But, build on the key, making it unfeasibly difficult, and enough time would never come along.

Hence the super-powerful, eight storeys high behemoth at the heart of Digital Fortress. No-one is supposed to know it’s working, and cracking terrorist's codes with ease ~ the civil liberties people, moaning that everybody’s email was subject to shady Government scrutiny, had been told it was a failure. But working it is... until it gets stuck, with its own nemesis writhing away inside it ~ a code that changes key, impossible to crack.

Susan Fletcher, then, starts the book getting called in to the office, a giant would-look-good-at-the-cinema complex with what reads like serious understaffing issues, to go over the problem this causes with her boss, Strathmore. Over many chapters we learn the background to the plot, wherein Dan Brown offloads all he learnt in research about codes and modern cipher-cracking and intelligence gathering. It turns out this coded message is of global importance, for it is a computer programme already on the Internet, in code, that will give every computer user in the world perfect security. The message being decoded, we are told, is the very instruction for the perfect encryption.

These code-breakers need this to stay encoded, otherwise they will never be able to read any bomb plot transmitted ever again. The source for this miraculous code the whole NSA thought impossible, yet knew was their worst nightmare? A rogue ex-employee, who had a beef with the nature of the NSA’s recent technology, and in one of the hundreds of plot holes in the book, was never hushed up. He’s returned, with this dastardly program. He's left behind the key to crack the instructions, which the NSA desperately need ~ they can then learn from their superior enemy, and stay on top of the game, and leave the world still using crackable codes, but there’s one problem.

He’s died in the prologue, in Spain.

Luckily, Strathmore has a cunning plan to retrieve the key, for he has decided to send Susan's boyfriend across the Atlantic to find it. Yes, the man is completely unsuited for espionage, and has no clue what he's doing, what he's looking for ~ he finds out what it is by chance ~ and so on, but hey, he speaks lots of languages and is clever, so he'll do.

It's a plus point to the book that the threat isn't some mad idiot planning to blow up the world, but is something plausible, and of reasonable concern, that would change the world completely, were these cyber-police left without even a truncheon. But one can pause in this book review here, and admit that this is just the average, fat airport novel, a pot-boiler, a throw-away entertainment. There still needs to be a lot to be digested and thought about before any recommendation is made, however.

The threat, as has just been said, is real. Luckily for Dan Brown it hasn't aged in 6 years, and his writing about the internet seems to not have been made out of date by interim progress. Some readers will know more about that subject, and may find some things implausible, or recognise some details as pure fantasy, but there you go. It reads satisfactorily.

The characters have to be up to scratch. Each gets about one paragraph of description, before it's on to the dialogue or plot. From Susan's we learn she looks a lot like Scully from the X Files, and is a bit of a hottie, as they say in America. Strathmore is a silver fox who has a fatherly leaning to his favouritest, and only female, code-breaking agent. The other characters, and due to the under-staffing there really aren't that many of them, are OK, but are often saddled with awkward names (the unpronounceable Chartrukian), yet are reasonably interesting (Midge Milken, the 60-odd year old woman everyone has the hots for). We really can’t expect more than thumb-nail sketches and the occasional inner thought process to define the character, and those are all we do get.

One lapse is the lack of detail we get about the boyfriend, David Becker. Every few chapters we cut to his chase in Spain, which is full of the most ridiculous swings of fortune, circumstance and chance encounters, but because it all starts in the midst of the plot background near the beginning, we never get up to speed as far as caring about him goes. It turns out this chase, involving everything from the least secure airport runway in Spain to a punk festival, is crucial to the plot, but we aren't terribly excited by it.

The writing, then, skips from scene to scene, and isn't that bad. It's light, easily digested. Skip through the "he said"s and "she frowned"s and the dialogue rattles the story along. None of the chapters are very lengthy, yet especially in the middle, even at two sides, they can seem too long. The story is evolving in such a way that you can guess what the chapter contains, skip to the last line, find the guess correct, and move on.

That's not to suggest the whole book is second-guessable. The intrigue of the plot, where we find the true motives of all concerned, and even whether certain people are goodies or baddies, is better. Nasty people turn out to be good, good bad, people you thought were bad but would prove good turn out to be the early token dead guy. The discovery of the total truth for us, as well as the key for the code, is the real reason for the story.

There are however flaws in the writing. A better editor would have taken some of the deadwood out. The fact that criminals turned to email because they didn’t like their mobile phones being tapped is mentioned twice in the same early chapter, and elsewhere there is repetition. At 500 pages, albeit small and with fairly large print, we could do with a bit of trimming. There also seem to be inconsistencies, as the super-computer goes from taking an hour on a code to 6 minutes throughout the book (which is almost real-time in reading, it covers such a short time-span).

There are also the hellish plot-holes. Should we let Brown off that the worst are in sections of the plot which are red-herrings anyway, and so never really mattered? Possibly. But there are a lot of howlers, and when the main characters start acting completely against their flimsy type, we really aren’t sure how much respect we should give to the author.

Can we congratulate Brown on the pace? Well, as we've seen, we can skip a small proportion and come out none the poorer. This might enable us to rush through to the end of the book, but don’t we want to take our time, and get value for money? If we take ten seconds on predicting, rightly, where each chapter is going, should we feel glad we're rushing towards a rollicking ending? Or should we be considering that nowhere is there really an urge for that just-one-more-chapter, oh-cripes-it’s-four-in-the-morning sensation? Page 305 is where a suitable cliff-hanger arrives, to break your reading sessions, but the page-turning quality is rather poor.

And do we indeed have a rollicking ending? Er, unfortunately, no. For as soon as a whole host of staff arrive to fight the final countdown, they suddenly turn into idiots, and the pulsating conclusion is wasted, as we’re thirty pages ahead of them, watching Brown spell out the obvious just for their sake. It's rather unguessable at the start, but you don’t have to be that close to the end to see what's coming. Still, if that’s all obvious, the last page has a cipher of the author's own for you to puzzle over.

Digital Fortress, then, is a bit of a missed chance. As a first book it reads quite well, but the author had been a lecturer in creative writing. Unfortunately he's also insultingly shoddy in his research, as the Seville he mentions is almost unrecognisable. He's wrong about the Plaza de Espana, and as for steps in the Giralda? Since when? If you don't skip chapters to save time earlier, you find yourself skipping pages from embarrassment at that scene.

As a missed chance, then, in an over-burdened genre of disposable books, this is just as disposable as so many other books. It reads OK, and some of the scenes stay with you, but so do many of the inadequacies. It’s written in an easy style, with some authority, apart from the fact he could never have been to Spain, and is never without some interest. But the end result is so very "so what?".

To people seeing how damnedly popular Brown is, theediscerning would give them the conclusion this was never a hit the first time round, simply because it never deserved to be a hit. To fans of the airport blockbuster techno-thriller, he would say this is a moderate way to spend a few hours, but don’t expect much.

To people still considering a purchase, he would say there is no sex, no bad language he can remember, and the few casualties are never described with any adult detail, so it’s OK to be read by all. He would point out that no-one should ever pay the whole £6.99 RRP, what with all the High Street offers around, and on-line discounts. He would conclude that there are a lot of pages for your money, but still not enough brilliance to make this book stand out, still not enough thrills to make this a stayer on your shelves.

If Dan Brown needed telling he was on to a winner, he found out when there started to be books sold *about* The da Vinci Code. This is another book selling because of that hit, and not for any other reason. Digital Fortress would get three stars for being neither good nor bad, but an acceptable bit of froth, but loses a star for being so wrong about Seville. That’ll learn ‘im.

Digital Fortress, ISBN 0-552-15169-6. Corgi publishers; www.booksattransworld.co.uk, www.danbrown.com.

 

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