The first thing I noticed about this book was that it was 920 pages long. The second was that the description on the inside flap strongly evoked a cheap thriller novel. Blah blah Nazis. Blah blah super secret code. Blah blah heroic but misunderstood protagonist. Great, I thought. Now I have to blunder through 920 pages of this psudeo-science, gun-toting, history-abusing nightmare.
And so I did. And you know what? It was PHENOMENAL.
Oh my GOD. This book. This book! I say that a lot, but I mean it this time. I had dreams about this book. I tore through that last 500 pages like the house was burning down. It was just so new and fresh and exciting and hilarious and the characters are brilliant. Everything is brilliant. You, Mr. Stephenson, are brilliant.
Okay, guess I'd better take a breath here and talk about what actually goes on, huh? This is a book about cryptology, the science of codebreaking, but it also manage to be a book about WWII, math theory, the Internet, and modern Asian economies all once. There are approximately four main characters who all are related/meet/have tried to kill the others in some way.
The first is a man named Lawrence Waterhouse, a brilliant but rather hapless young American. After his glockenspiel catches on fire at Pearl Harbor, he is transferred to a cryptology position, and when he starts to effortlessly decode everything they put in front of him, they move him to Bletchly Park in England to assist the code-breaking effort there. His main job is to keep it a secret from the Nazis that their unbreakable Enigma code is not so unbreakable. His other job seems to be going on long rants about cryptology as applicable to bike wheels and masturbation.
The second is Lawrence's grandson, Randy Waterhouse, who is a brilliant computer engineer running out of a failed relationship and right into a somewhat shady business venture in Southeast Asia that entails creating a data haven. He likes Captain Crunch and beards, and is often very confused about everything that is not a computer, including females.
The third is Goto Dengo, a Nipponese (Japanese) solider in WWII who escapes from death in several remarkable ways, teaches judo to our fourth major character, and eventually ends up in the middle of the jungle digging a very mysterious, very intricate structure for the Nipponese government that becomes quite important later.
The fourth character, Bobby Shaftoe, is a raging badass and about a million different kinds of awesome. He's a Sergeant in the Marines during WWII, but after he's put on special assignment to Detachment 2072, he spends a lot of time crashing planes in the North African desert, skiing across Norway, befriending German U-boat pilots, drinking, sleeping around, and killing people left and right. I want to marry this man.
This book is intense. Stephenson is prone to giving five or six page long descriptions of the mathematical formulas he's employing, which I can only understand half of, and lots of other descriptions of computer/Internet technology, which I understand almost none of. Still, this book is incredibly informative and thought-provoking, never mind being entertaining as hell. I gotta say, at some points I got really bored of Randy's storyline and wanted to go back to the giant hilarious tragic mess that was WWII, but it all worked out alright at the end (except for the conclusion to the Andrew Loeb storyline, what the fuck?). I don't think I'll be re-reading this for about fifteen years, but it's got everything. I actually had an intelligent conversation about code breaking with my cousin who has a joint major in math and physics after reading this book. I feel powerful. And these characters, my god; if you don't have a burning desire to meet some or all of them by the end of this book, something is seriously wrong with you.
Okay, I'll leave you with one last thing, since it made me laugh so hard I cried. It's a conversation between a major and one of my new favorite characters of all time, Bobby Motherfucking Shaftoe:
"The major goes back to the report. 'This Reagan fellow says that you also repeatedly made disparaging comments about General MacArthur.'
'Sir, yes, sir! He is a son of a bitch who hates the Corps, sir! He is trying to get us all killed, sir!'"
Read the book, then you will get why this is hilarious.
In Summary: This has been called the ultimate math/computer science nerd book. I am a literary/religion/plant nerd, and I still found it unspeakably incredibly. I now want to read everything Neal Stephenson has ever written, and I probably will.
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