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Book Review: Cryptonomicon

August 25, 2000 on 3:12 pm | In Books | Add a Comment

Cryptonomicon, by Neil Stephensen. Read Aug – Sep 2000.

A 900-page disappointment. The jacket copy compared Stephensen’s tome to Gravity’s Rainbow, but the only thing Stephensen has in common with Pynchon is the relative heft of the book and that both authors used WWII as a starting point.

Stephensen is a writer with ideas, some of which are original and engaging. He’s able to tell a story too — in a shaggy dog sort of way. But while many of the set pieces in the book are very entertaining, Stephensen has failed to deliver the Big Idea.

Cryptonomicon is a brief history of cryptography that takes WWII as the point at which Everything Changed and it is a modern tale of a computer nerd who almost accidentally helps to build a data haven in a sultanate adjacent to Borneo. Stephensen attempts to tie it all together with a package of plot devices too clumsy to explain here, but by the end of this shaggy dog tale all he has successfully done is bring all the surviving characters to the same place.

The jacket copy puffs expectantly about a sequel (which is one way to excuse an irresolute ending), however this reader has better things to do with his time.