HC Reviews

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

Digital Fortress is a code. A disgruntled ex-NSA employee unleashes it on the NSA's super decoder computer and it's up to the heroine, Susan Fletcher, to figure out how to stop it.

The idea of this book is a good one. The right to privacy versus the right of the government to be able to protect its citizens is a great debate. Unfortunately, this book doesn't execute the idea all that well.

The characters are all a bit too perfect.
Susan is not only brilliant, she's beautiful. All the men love her. She can figure out almost any code or puzzle before anyone else (except at the end, when it was convienent for someone else to remind her of something).
Susan's boyfriend, David, is a professor who speaks 5 different languages. He becomes "super secret agent man" overnight and gets to use his eidetic memory to help the NSA solve the code.
The bad guy is a trained killer yet he manages to get outmaneuvered by a Spanish professor.
The other bad guy isn't really a bad guy, he just believes in his cause and wants to teach the government a lesson.

When they're all sitting around at the end trying to figure out the pass key to the code (which the "bad guy" gave to them), I wanted to scream because I understood the clue the minute I read it, yet the characters were all stumped. A roomful of genius IQ people and they couldn't get it? Whatever.

The only thing that I did like about this book was the explanation of a phrase David used to sign all his notes to Susan (but even that irk me a bit). Susan would beg him to explain it and he wouldn't, telling her "You're the cryptologist, you figure it out" but she never did.
Ready? The phrase was "without wax." Like he would send her flowers and say, "Susan, I love you. Without wax, David."
Here's the explanation:

During the Renaissance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched their flaws with cera--"wax." A statue that had no flaws and required no patching wax was hailed as a sculpture sin cera--"without wax." The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. The English word "sincere" came from the Spanish sin cera.

Ok. That's cute, but I ask you, how on earth would she be able to figure that out? She was a cryptographer, not an etymologist. She breaks codes, she doesn't study the origin of words.

Posted by xinh at December 25, 2004 09:11 PM