K-SCORE: 91
Author: Neal Stephenson
Spoiler Level: Major
“Stephenson’s knowledge base to write this beast had to have been truly incredible.”
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is a masterfully written epic of World War II history, cryptography, and treasure hunting. I believe the novel sits around 500,000 words, making it considerably longer than my sci-fi epic Sapphire (300,000). Stephenson’s writing impressed me the whole long way. If you have ten days to spend reading over a hundred pages per day, you could do far worse with your time than mainlining this. Stephenson is brilliant and when he demonstrates that genius, he does so in a way both edifying and entertaining.
Cryptography and WWII history are not subjects I can claim I’ve cared a huge amount about in the past. It’s not like they’re hobbies of mine. So I wouldn’t have picked this up on my own, but Stephenson taught me a great deal on these topics and got me interested in them without getting lecturey or losing track of his narrative. That’s an incredible feat.
“ I’m envious both of his masterful use of language coupled with a keen eye for the world and his freedom to waste pages writing what he wants to write about. That’s why I say this novel is best taken like a shot of adrenaline; pump it in all at once. Let Neal Stephenson talk to you for sixty hours or so. He’s a genius.”
His take on WWII is fascinating. I remember distinctly the line about the US Military being “first and foremost a network of typists and file cabinets, second and organization that builds things, and a distant third a fighting force.” The war kind of plods along in the background as you follow specialized Army and Navy man Bobby Shaftoe and savant mathematician Lawrence Prichard Waterhouse. The intersection of stuff people actually know about (i.e. Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto's assassination, The Battle of Manila, etc.) with these characters is wonderfully entertaining. They both have a vaguely absurdist viewpoint and unique stance on war, leaders, and society. Often this leads to genuine comedy like Shaftoe constantly bringing up the lizard he saw eat a Nipponese (Stephenson always uses Nipponese/Nippon over Japanese/Japan) soldier and Lawrence sending Detachment 2702 out to do apparently nonsensical things that served only to cover up the fact that he and Alan Turing had broken Nazi codes.
The chapters bounce between times, so alternately you follow modern day Waterhouses (namely Randy) and the modern day Shaftoes (namely America and Douglas MacArthur) as they deal in a world of computer surveillance, antagonistic lawyers, upset government leaders, rival businessmen, and so on, on their quest to set up a secure data haven in a remote island in the Phillippines and support it by uncovering the gold with which their ancestors became intertwined.
“It makes Treasure Island’s stash look like something the tooth fairy would leave under your pillow.”
The other notable character who gets chapters was my favorite: Goto Dengo. He’s a Nipponese soldier who slowly comes to an understanding about the foolhardy ways of his emperor and nation’s leaders and the danger of the ridiculous dedication to dying for their country that the Nipponese have, and he does this while going on a personal death-defying journey surviving shipwrecks, island cannibals, and the ultimate Axis gold vault of Golgotha that he is commanded to build and that his officers try to imprison/inter him in. His story I found to be the most interesting, the most emotionally resonant, and the most exciting, and consequently the development he had is the most substantial.
In a treasure hunting story, you want the good guys to get the treasure, even if they’re a bunch of thieves. It’s satisfying and escapist. Stephenson’s pile o’ loot was bigger than any I’ve ever come across. It makes Treasure Island’s stash look like something the tooth fairy would leave under your pillow. Billions and billions of dollars worth of gold and precious gems, the kind of money that alters the world economy. Goto was one of a couple people who survives to know where it all is buried and he convinces me that such a stock of gold is valueless in the wrong hands. He has a conversation with Enoch Root towards the end of the novel that is the best series of dialogue anywhere in there. Goto has learned that the Axis put value in gold, tangible money, and tried to raid for it and use it to support a vision of world conquest, but the real value of any nation is in its people, their vision, and their ambitions. So he left it and wouldn’t share his secret until Avi came around. Avi, throughout the story, is motivated always by the long term prevention of genocide, firmly believing the Holocaust to be “the worst thing that has ever happened.” When his vision, Randy’s unveiling of Golgotha using his grandfather’s old story, and Goto Dengo’s secret collide, the whole novel just fits together perfectly.
The development of other characters is decent as well, and Stephenson does a great job of portraying human connections, possible because individual personalities, that seem impossible given the state of the world. I loved Bischoff, the best of the best U-boat captain who claims to know better ones at the bottom of the Atlantic. His interactions with Bobby Shaftoe are great. Bobby doesn’t develop as much as others, but he’s always amusing and gives the best tour of the war. And the Shaftoe “display adaptability” motif is funny and functional.
If you have to pick a single protagonist, you’d pick Randy. Randy has some excellent moments and gives Stephenson a lot of opportunities to zoom off on humorous modern day tangents, but he’s not the best character by a long stretch. Way too much of the novel, Randy doesn’t really do anything noteworthy. We’re told he’s a hacker, but for the first 600 pages he does precious little hacking, instead attending business meetings and flying around Southeast Asia. When he does get to hacking, it’s intriguing and fantastic, expertly researched hacking that demonstrates Randy’s worth, but by then he’s just behind on development compared to other characters. Randy needed more time at the end and others less, but Stephenson must not have wanted to mess with the structure he’d established in order to fulfill those needs.
Stephenson’s knowledge base to write this beast had to have been truly incredible. Calling it ‘well-researched’ would be akin to calling an atomic clock ‘fairly accurate.’ If experts have a dispute for some computer tech description, some cryptographic analysis, or some historical point, then I can only imagine that it’s a subject in dispute, up for debate. And all the time I felt like I was absorbing this information (to varying degrees) as I read. The cryptography analogy with the bike wheel and chain is impeccable and all of the material on modern software and the paranoid people who create it is captivating and relevant.
There are a few problems with Cryptonomicon, of course, despite how much I admire it. Firstly, Randy encounters very little hacking resistance much like the stakes for Lawrence’s code-breaking are low. For Lawrence it’s okay because he gets sad after he solves a problem (like cracking the safe), so his motivations aren’t purely aligned with winning the war. But Randy and the other Epiphyte guys face off against mostly lawsuits and even those loom only as vague threats. There is the great section at Ordo’s headquarters, but not enough of those throughout. They are all encrypting their communications ten different ways and fearing for their lives almost as much as they fear for the security of their data, but I just didn’t see the threat most of the time. Randy has to break an old code from prison without displaying the results on the screen of his laptop at one point, which is super cool, but you never really meet or understand the antagonists. That’s not good narratively. Why is The Dentist a character? What’s he doing at the end? What about the other secret admirers and the people they met in the sultan’s palace? They don’t really come back or become relevant.
Pages 800-1000 ish are great as the plot starts to come together, past starts to interlock with present, but the very end was kind of weak. Stephenson is willing to write three pages on Randy’s wisdom teeth, but he’s not going to give me any denouement after Golgotha? What ends up being the fate of The Crypt, of all its majority shareholders, of Doug’s company, of Wing? Where do Amy and Randy end up? Why exactly is he discovered by the media towards the end and how does that play out? I think that as soon as the war ends and all the codes are broken, Stephenson didn’t have enough interest in his characters to continue their lives into a more settled resolution. So Cryptonomicon jerks to a stop instead of leaving with a bang or sliding smoothly home.
My last significant complaint: Enoch Root isn’t a good character. He’s everywhere, seemingly invulnerable, maybe magical, transcends times, and I never understood his motivations or could appreciate his actions. I think Stephenson uses this character overtly to fill gaps and doesn’t have flawlessly thought out designs for him, which is cheap, especially in a novel so deftly crafted otherwise.
The element that makes me excited to read other books by Neal Stephenson, though, my favorite part of Cryptonomicon is the writing itself. I’m jealous of it. I’m envious both of his masterful use of language coupled with a keen eye for the world and his freedom to waste pages writing what he wants to write about. That’s why I say this novel is best taken like a shot of adrenaline; pump it in all at once. Let Neal Stephenson talk to you for sixty hours or so. He’s a genius. Even if he’s talking about Captain Crunch, it’s worth hearing what he has to say. His perspective on life is unique and valuable and he knows how to dish it out.
I could feel, as I read, his opinions melding with my own or enhancing things I’d already thought about - like how any serious use of guns is indicative of human failure somewhere and how lawyers in our society are a tremendous intellectual waste. Stephenson gave so many viewpoints in Cryptonomicon and offered up so much analysis from varying perspectives, I came to find a hazy image of his own personal world view, and that’s how an author should shine through his story. Fun tidbit: far as I can tell, the only two groups of people Stephenson seems to find irredeemably terrible are California intellectual elite college professors and the Nazi high command.
In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson courageously wrote exactly the book he wanted to write. It was as if he didn’t give a shit whether you made it to the end or not, agreed with him or not. He was going to give honest, well-researched, carefully constructed content regardless of his readers and because of that he wrote a huge book that is very much worth reading. Just be prepared to give it a lot of time and a lot of thought.