Poorly written; Dan Browns WORST (Digital Fortress - Dan Brown)

Member Name: wellyboot

Product:	Digital Fortress - Dan Brown
Date:	07/06/05 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good basic plot

Disadvantages: Very poorly written, Dull and repetitive, Some bits are just plain stupid

Digital Fortress – DAN BROWN
isbn 0-552-15169-6 £6.99

At the heart of Digital Fortress lies the issue of personal freedom versus national security. How much information should be available to government agencies? The villain of the piece is code named N. Dakota, whose core belief is that people are entitled to freedom of speech and in privacy when doing so. With the NSA’s super-computer, TRANSLTR, the government are already privy to a wide range of personal information and his fundamental feeling of wrongness lays grounds for his subsequent battle to bring down TRANSLTR by way of infecting it with a virus.

Because of firewalls and multiple other lines of defense, infecting TRANSLTR is a complicated process requiring some fiendishly clever plan to get inside it. N. Dakota develops a piece of software that he claims is an un-breakable algorithm – its very existence threatens to make the multi-million-dollar TRANSLTR obsolete, effectively crippling U.S. intelligence.

When the head of the NSA (Strathmore) gets wind of the plot to auction off the encryption pass-key’s to the highest bidder he immediately takes action, soon receiving the seemingly fortuitous news that N. Dakota has died and has the pass key on his person. Strathmore decides to send the partner (Prof. David Becker) of his head cryptographer (Susan Fletcher) on a mission to retrieve the encryption pass-key.

Meanwhile, Strathmore searches for a backdoor hoping to be able to insert some code before re-releasing it. No one would be any the wiser, not knowing that the code had been tampered with. By inserting this code, the NSA would then have their own secret back-door, allowing them to infiltrate the programme whenever they chose, giving them supreme access to snoop potentially all digital communications.

When attempting to insert the code however Strathmore makes the executive decision to by-pass GAUNTLET (TRANSLATRS essential safety filter mechanism). Keeping this lapse in protocol to himself, a terrible chain of events is started…

For those who have some programming and hardware knowledge some of the concepts of the book will appeal, however, all ‘jargon’ is explained so that anyone could understand what’s going on.

The basic framework of the book is good, however, just before half way through the book Mr. Brown’s writing style becomes noticeably sloppier. The suspense is lost and I felt like he was repeating things over and over again and found this both unnecessary and irritating.

Some aspects of the book are just plain ridiculous. Consider Susan Fletcher, with a genius IQ of 170. She is one of the world’s very best, and the NSA’s finest cryptographer and yet she was unable to figure out that the code name 'N. Dakota' was a simple anagram of the name of a high profile, rebel coder well known to the NSA? Give me a break!

Indeed, by the end of the book you really do clearly get the sense that he is struggling to keep the story going and I picked up on the fact that he begins to use the same phrases over and over. ‘She sensed’, ‘he sensed’ are used so many times that I actually laughed out loud! He is also guilty of stretching out sections. I think the book would have benefited from at least 100 pages less than the just over 500 pages that it actually is.

The Da Vinci code was good book for a number of reasons, one that I would give 9/10 to, Digital Fortress comes no where near this and I would honestly say, that it is one of the most poorly written books I have ever read and would give it no more than 3/10 (mainly for effort and for the decent basic plot line).

If you are a fan you will be disappointed, if you are new to Dan Brown, this book is likely to put you off reading the others.

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