Book Review : Digital Fortress

It's Dan Brown folks, what did you expect - Jules Verne!!! First of all when I first ever heard the title Digital Fortress, the image in my head somehow was of a fortress floating in the sky, with the ultimate technology protecting some "Holy" secret that could devastate the world. Kind of like the S.H.I.E.L.D. Base, if you are a Marvel fan. But unfortunately there is no such floating fortress. Though to be fair to the book, the title isn't misplaced.

So what's different in this Dan Brown book from his other books. First of all, he is just a novelist, and you just consider his genre before actually criticizing him. I think this book was written way before Da Vinci Code, because otherwise Leonardo DA Vinci would have paid us a visit in this book too. Yes, there is no religious conspiracy angle to the story. It's actually a pretty geeky story.

The plot revolves around basically two parties - M/s Susan Fletcher & Strathmore, and David Becker & the Spaniards. The first page features lines like - "Susan moaned Sensuously", and you wonder if you picked up the wrong book from the stand. There is this top secret US organisation called NSA (not to be confused with NASA) which is the big daddy of the Internet, and the story is based on internal staff bickering. Yes, its as simple as that. Disgruntled employees unleashing viruses, stealing data, and not following instructions. This could happen to any organisation, but this ofcourse is the NSA!! The other half of the story is a ring chase, which you can skip over at times. Half way through the story you realise Strathmore isn't as clean as he seems, the typical detective story unobvious villain. And the story is pretty weary in the second half, and you wonder when is this going to end. Not to forget the whole cast of NSA employees we are introduced to in the latter half, remembering the names of which was terribly hard for me, so I kept going back. But Dan Brown was really helpful too by having names like HULOHOT and JABBA. Oh come on, you forgot Jabba the Hutt, the fat slurpy wormy mafia boss from Star Wars!!

Anyhow, moving on, I have always wondered why Dan Brown is always so keen to tell everything. I always thought good writers are the ones that withhold stuff from the readers. Every now and then, the story would come to a standstill, with one of the characters having a brain snap, and a page of wikipedia would open before you, with all the facts. It's almost like he's tempting the readers to actually go and verify the facts themselves. Anyhow, so finally in the end a password needs to be found out and for once you are not stopping a bomb from exploding, just protecting the firewall from crashing, and data being stolen (told you geeky) and finally the world is saved, and girl gets guy, and blah blah blah, all is well. The end.

It's not actually the worst of books. It's a good book to read if you are travelling in a bus or train, or the inflight movie doesnt suit you. But otherwise if you are just in the house, then I say Hardy Boys make for a better detective read than this stuff. Oh and yeah, if you had to pick up one line from the book to remember it would have to be - Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes, or in english - Who will Guard the Guards. Pretty cool huh!! Yeah, way to go Dan Brown, I would give him 2 out of 5, not bad!!