Finished Cryptonomicon. The second half of the book is immensely better than the first half in terms of having things actually happen such that the reader not only pays attention but cares about what is going on, italicized to highlight the utter, utter lack of this in the novel's first half. Unfortunately, it remains astoundingly poorly written, replacing the first half's lack of action with a sudden and quite abrupt lack of continuity or coherence. A non-comprehensive list of offenses follows, there are spoilers but given the madcap nature of the book I don't care and neither should whoever reads this.
- 90% (if not more) of the important events in the book happen "offscreen," with POV segments constantly cutting out right before something interesting might happen, or starting right after something interesting has happened and proceeding as though the reader should already know what's going on, playing coy and maybe bothering to actually state that, say, a massive earthquake wiped out a character's house once in an offhand sentence several pages later.
- I am unconvinced that Neal Stephenson has ever had a meaningful platonic social interaction with a female human being, much less an interaction that might be construed as a romantic relationship. Despite a number of female characters being important to the novel, not a single one of them gets a POV chapter. Ever. Women get a couple of POV paragraphs at most, and when these occur they always inhabit a strange space halfway between narration and the imagination of the current male focus. This would not be offensive, or even particularly notable, were it not for the fact that all the women who do appear are portrayed as incapable, unintelligent harpies or baby factories. Bitches and whores, to the bone. Even Amy Shaftoe, who seems like a strong character at first, takes a sudden fall from competence the instant Randy takes a serious romantic interest in her and spends the latter two thirds or so of the novel doing absolutely nothing of consequence, being upstaged by her father (who inherits all of the badass ability she first displayed), and finally getting shot and having to be carried while every other (male) character around her fights back. Most of it is displayed as willful incompetence, to boot. I only watched Denpa Teki no Kanojo a week ago and already this has supplanted it as the most shockingly misogynist modern work I've encountered.
- Plot threads and characters are picked up and dropped like rocks in a labor camp, in a crescendo of turnabouts culminating in the ending. What the hell happened to the Dentist? He's a major antagonist and driving force throughout the book, he visits Randy in jail for reasons unknown, then poof, he's never heard from again and everyone somehow manages to just quit and walk away from that whole Epiphyte business! But SUDDENLY, Andrew Loeb appears as a crazed maniac in the jungle! Remember him? No? Probably for the better because if you do your brain will break even more trying to figure out why and how he wound up there. What about the Sultan, or Kinakuta in general? What happened to Bischoff and Rudy, did they make it? Did Wing and Goto really never bother talking to each other about setting up some sort of joint venture? Why does the entire book suddenly do a 180 and turn the focus to a search for this gold bunker, which IS hinted at and talked about and IS NOT AT ALL important in the first half of the book? What exactly is Enoch Root's society, and for that matter who is he anyway? Oh wait, he is actually a world-weary repentant immortal alchemist-deity appearing as a crossover from Stephenson's other novels like a bad White Wolf character. I wish I was making that up but that is actually what he is.
- Prose techniques on the other hand are a little too consistent. The entire book, cover to cover, is written in a monotone of drolly ironic narration, and employs the same devices over and over again. Look, here comes an upbeat side character providing contrast to our grim, world-weary POV man! One sentence to two pages later, upbeat side character is suddenly and arbitrarily killed, and the text provides a helpful zoom-in on how arbitrary, swift, and inevitably brutal the poor man's death is. Just in case the reader hasn't quite gotten the WAR IS HELL thing jammed entirely down their throat yet, you know. Also, any striking detail or event described in one or two sentences will inevitably resurface, while anything that takes pages to describe can be safely skipped as it will turn out to be of no importance whatsoever later on. And then there's Stephenson's oh-so-random-it's-clearly-meaningful-and-deep method of suddenly breaking into ridiculously overdetailed description for no apparent reason, like the two pages taken to describe a human as a collection of fleshy sacs and chemicals, or the infamous Cap'n Crunch breakfast that puts Death Note's potato chips to shame.
This book is completely terrible. It tries to be The Da Vinci Code and winds up as poorly articulated, contrived, misogynist WW2 fanfiction with a Marty Stu fantasy crossover cameo to put the icing on the cake of crap. Dan Brown's writing is artistically superior to this, and that is a statement I had hoped never to make. I am left with zero desire to read anything else by Stephenson and a sense of utter bewilderment. Is there some sort of joke I am missing out on? Is there a final part of the book encrypted somewhere that at least ties up some of the plot holes? I just don't know what else to say.
