Another ripping yarn from the word processor of the author of The da Vinci Code.

As I said in my review of Brown's Angels and Demons, I didn't want to read about the Illuminati again: I think I do now. At least, Brown's first two books centred around the Illuminati and that really did give them a focal point that Digital Fortress lacks.

Nevertheless, Digital Fortress is another tale that is well put together, that has a central hero type character and that has the fight involving good over evil.

The central hero character in this book, however, is split into two: one male, David; and one female, Susan; and they are both sides of a loving relationship. They are physically and metaphorically split into two in that the book opens with them living all lovey dovey and then he is whisked away to Europe all of a sudden, never to return during the lifetime of the book.

She stays at home, well, at work really, throughout the book and is central to the success or failure of the central mission in which the book becomes embroiled.

Sickeningly in a sense the hero is handsome and very clever: speaking many languages, teaching at a University and so on. She is extremely smart, moving inexorably to the top of her chosen field and, OK you've guessed, very pretty with a stunning figure.

If I were a feminist or a masculinist I'd write to Brown and tell him that ugly people can be clever too! That's not a serious point though I can imagine some people for whom this could be a problem!

Hero goes to Spain and has to find something, you know, just find something: a huge clue to cracking a code; but no one knows what the clue is.

David is chosen to go to Spain because of his linguistic abilities and because he is being paid a shed load of money to do so! His part of the story is a fascination: this is the best part of the book I think. Brown either has an excellent tourist's guide to Seville or he has been there with pencil and paper firmly in hand. Angels and Demons made me want to go to visit Rome but Digital Fortress didn't have the same effect I'm afraid. Whilst Brown has given us some useful insights into life and architecture in Seville, he didn't bring it to life at all. Apart from when he fell in with that attractive prostitute and her gargantuan German client.

I have to say that I felt that Brown could have done more with this part of the story. Even though David was in Seville for only a day or so, he packed in a load of adventures and even though his adventures relied on some monumental leaps of faith I liked them!

At some stages I wanted the action back at home to stop so that we could follow David's adventures a bit more. I won't give too much away by telling you that he was chased in a deadly way all over Seville and how he made such progress was a fascination to behold.

Susan, on the other hand, was in danger up to and beyond her neck for almost the entire book. She was up against the enemy for a while and then we learned that maybe the enemy was a bit closer to home than she was prepared to accept: some people had to die before she even got a sniff of any of that, though. The shenanigans that took place at the National Security Agency were sometimes far fetched and the basic plot of a massively powerful computer being weighed down by an unbreakable code that may have turned out to be a virus rather than a code was not that interesting.

Unlike da Vinci and Angels, I didn't feel that Brown's research had taught him much. The Illuminati at least had some substance to it and Brown was able to fill out his stories with interesting snippets about them. In this book, we learned a few, a very few, things about computers, their power and code cracking; but not a lot more than I knew already. If I'd been pushed I could have found out about them myself in half an hour or so too.

I didn't find the background sub plot of people running around the NSA in the way that Brown put together credible or interesting. In fact, I thought the weasely character that Brown created as the whistle blower type to be an irritation and I wanted that part to fall off the page!

Still, I read the book, enjoyed it and am about to start his fourth book Deception Point so watch this space for the review of that one too!

Oh! and the code that we had to crack wasn't that cerebral and I cracked it ... I talked to someone else who's read the book and they cracked it too.

 

© Duncan Williamson
24 October 2004

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