I just finished Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress (DF), and I can’t say that I truly liked the book. After having read The Da Vinci Code (DVC) and Angels & Demons (A&D), DF seemed all too predictable, and quite a bit dated.
The story followed the same pattern as the two previously mentioned Brown books: the main character is an intelligent hero (in this case a heroine) with an equally intelligent companion, both of whom are trying to solve the same puzzle (although they do not know this for quite some time), while being tossed into strange conflicts and situations that sometimes are just too uncanny or strange, until the problem is finally solved through some haphazard detective work (and at least for me, what seemed to be many idiotic Duh! moments). The technical aspects of this book bothered me more so than anything else. For example, at one point the head Sys-Sec (Systems Security) officer aptly named Jabba because of his obeisity yells “VR!” to his right-hand woman, who brings up a visual representation of the NSA databanks being attacked by hackers from around the world in realtime. It is described in such a way as to make it seem like you were watching a video game as hackers tried to break into the NSA computers. It was just too flashy.
Without getting into too much more detail about the story, I will only say that this book is a decent read, although by no means does it compare with the thrilling story of A&D, and it comes nowhere close to DVC. If you’re looking for a great read, pickup the other two books and pass DF up. If you just want to read another Dan Brown novel, go ahead and read this, because it follows his story pattern exactly. I once thought of Dan Brown as a great author, but now I realize that he’s just like R.L. Stine and other serial writers: a single-story author who can from time to time come up with an interesting story to fit his usual pattern in an unusual way.
0 Responses to “Digital Fortress”