Author Neal Stephenson is verbose, and devilishly clever. He hops from character to character, and zeroes in on intricate details that swirl into essays of bizarre events and amusingly distorted views of everything from insects to submarines to Captain Crunch. The bit on how protagonist Randy, a modern day hacker and descendant of near-autistic code breaker Lawrence Waterhouse, eats Cap'n Crunch in the Philipines is usually the sort of thing that would drive me nuts, wasting space on Randy's minutiae-ridden life. But, Stephenson pulls it off. I found it endearing. Indeed, in Randy's case in particular, the minutiae is crucial to realizing how absurd and, well, safe his life is. It contrasts highly with Bobby Shaftoe, a morphine addicted WWII jarhead who's all action and not much thought. He literally goes out in a blaze of glory (pun intended -- his beloved is Glory, Philipine goddess and grandmother of Randy's girlfriend in the modern day).
And this tells us a lot about both eras. It is not a simple-minded condemnation of the modern era losers to ther bygone heroic era, either. Through his characters, Stephenson reveals the complex and abstract difficulties of the modern day, and the mortal and brutally simple difficulties of the war.
The books is, at its core, an ode to nerds. Randy and friends are fantasy role-playing hackers who get mixed up in baroque Philipine politics as they try to establish a virtual data center and create their own currency. They barely know what they've gotten themselves into.
And neither do I. That's the main flaw in the book. Randy's never really in danger. He's paranoid, and bad things happen to him. But, the structure of the book is basically flat. It ends mostly as it begins and as it continues. It remains amusing, even engrossing, throught out, particuarly the WWII era characters Lawrence, Bobby and Japanese soldier and engineer Goto Dengo, whose survivial tale against god awful tropical disease, straffing, sharks, cannibals, and building his own tomb is epic.
Stephenson sprinkles in some brilliantly fun explanations of cryptography. In one chapter, he includes real-life genius Alan Turing on a bike ride with Lawrence. He explains the famous Enigma code with a wonderful bike chain metaphor. Other chapters have equations, Unix code, line graphs (for ejaculations!) and other amusing diagrams in a kind of hyper-nerd nod to Vonnegut.
Despite its too-even build, the big novel was hugely entertaining. I kept turning those hundreds of pages, and become fond of Randy, in no small part because I identified with his white guy nerdiness.
Cryptonomicon: B+
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