“˜Cryptonomicon’ looks at digital divide

BOOK INFORMATION  

Title: Cryptonomicon
Author: Neil Stephenson
Publisher: Perennial
Price: $16.00
Pages: 910

By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor

Information is a budding business and in today’s era of
digital madness, almost everything seems to hinge on its
dispatch.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that Neal Stephenson’s
grandiose novel “Cryptonomicon” reads largely like a
literary homage to all things informational?

“Cryptonomicon” is an ambitious epic, telling four
different tales taking place both during World War II and
today’s digital epoch.

Skimming the tip of the iceberg, “Cryptonomicon”
follows Lawrence Waterhouse, a rather abstracted American toiling
for Great Britain’s intelligence center, Bletchley Park,
during the Second World War.

His mission is to manipulate the information gleaned from the
recently-cracked German encryption engine Enigma so that it proves
beneficial to the Allies, without alerting the Axis that their code
has indeed been broken.

There are two other plot threads taking place during this same
time period. The first involves Bobby Shaftoe, a no-nonsense, gung
ho, chap whose job it is to carry out the dirty work in the name of
encryption. The second involves Goto Dengo, the Japanese Army
counterpart to Shaftoe whose job it is, for the most part, to lead
the reader on a rabid adventure.

The final story takes place in modern times. The grandchildren
of Waterhouse and Shaftoe, Randy and Amy respectively, attempt to
establish a data-haven, an Internet-based community where everyone
can have free access to information, in the Philippines. To create
this Internet utopia, they must resist the hostile takeovers
wrought by other businesses and governments. Ultimately there are
so many details, subplots, and characters that it would be
impossible to summarize them in anything less than a novel’s
worth of pages.

“Cryptonomicon” itself is 900 pages long. Though the
details of the plot may be complicated, the basic storyline is not.
The book reads mostly as a celebration of information. A large
portion of the novel is devoted to dissecting history, clarifying
cryptic references to all things digital, or explaining the
characters with their own unique mannerisms.

Take, for instance, the chapters devoted to Randy
Waterhouse’s Captain Crunch eating habits. Or the chapter
devoted to the death of Adm. Yamamoto. Or the chapter in which
Lawrence Waterhouse, whose sex-drive affects his hard-drive, plots
the quantity of his orgasms in a series of infinite sets.

Details such as these help flesh out the characters and would be
more distracting if it weren’t for Stephenson’s prose
style ““ a style so creative and hilarious that it is often
fun to read just for the sake of reading. It seems at times that
Stephenson is in love with each and every word in each and every
sentence on each and every page. “Cryptonomicon” is
peppered with under-the-table humor delivered with a stiff upper
lip.

This is, however, detrimental to the novel’s focus which,
while it can be seen as fictive writing on the spreading and
security of data, often deviates down the path of adventure even
Tom Sawyer would envy.

Ironically, it is the adventure sequences that slow the book
down. While these diversions fold back to connect to the
cryptographic basis of the novel, there are some episodes added
only to prolong a character’s individual plot line long
enough so that the reader remembers him by the novel’s end,
when the character has to do something really important.

The last 150 pages seem to run on autopilot. It is disheartening
when a novel bulldozes its way through history and cryptography
““ tying them into a plot populated by idiosyncratic and
richly-drawn characters ““ only to end with an absurd chase
through the jungle involving a psychopathic lawyer with a bow and
arrow.

“Cryptonomicon” is at its strongest when slicing
through the time barriers, peeling back layers to showcase
everything from World War II technology to digital cryptography. In
a sense, this is appropriate for a book whose topic is the flow and
passage of information through the eons. It is annoying when it
lapses into a simplistic and episodic narrative of men bleeding
testosterone.