Deception Point

Dan Brown

New York: Pocket Books, 2001; ISBN: 0-671-02738-7; Pp. 538

Continuing my Dan Brown marathon in reverse, I arrive at yet another page-turner that feels a lot like Chinese food: you gorge on it and it feels fine while you're doing it, but a short while after you're done, you feel hungry again. This repeats my previous experiences with Mr Brown's fiction: it is fast, intriguing, and ultimately unsatisfying. Perhaps not surprisingly, this novel manages to be like that for precisely the same reasons his others are.

In terms of plot, yet again we have a brave, intelligent, and sexy female protagonist who runs into and promptly falls in love with the courageous, smart, and handsome male protagonist. Together, they uncover dark secrets, get chased around by perpetually incompetent brutes who kill everyone except their quarry, puzzle their way into conspiracies within conspiracies involving highly technical scientific-sounding and quite intimidating jargon where people who are supposedly the best and the brightest and the most specialized have repeatedly failed, all in chapter after chapter, each ending with foreboding cliff-hangers. Mr Brown should write for television.

This time the conspiracy involves a NASA find, a meteorite buried 300 feet into the ice in the Arctic. It is a stunning discovery because this particular meteorite is not just another piece of cosmic rock, it carries something that will revolutionize the way mankind perceives itself in relation to the universe... maybe. Or maybe not, judging by the deafening lack of cataclysmic re-evaluation of mankind's perception of itself in relation to the universe when President Clinton announced back in 1996 what turned out to be a giant mistake but what probably served as an inspiration to this novel.

Everything would be kosher except NASA is in trouble, financial and political. Its string of incessant failures have roiled the unscrupulous politicians (e.g. a Senator running for President who sells his support for a NASA-privatization law to the highest bidder), and well-meaning national security types (who dread just that privatization and simultaneously loathe NASA's loose-lips policy as it is). To top it off, the current President is a staunch supporter of the Agency both as a government entity (thus pissing off the market types) and as a civilian one (thus pissing off the totalitarian types). And the President is in trouble... elections are around the corner, and he has nothing to show for his spending.

One might say there are way too many excuses for the embattled NASA to manufacture the find, with or without the President's directive. Not surprisingly, our heroes stumble across one little puzzle involving partially frozen plankton, and the whole carefully constructed edifice starts to unravel faster than you can say "fake Moon landing." Naturally, the people behind the sham are none too happy, so they try to silence the witnesses, mostly by killing them. The chase begins almost immediately, and then continues for about 400 pages, which really is a bit of a waste since we already know (from the back cover and the title) that the find really is a sham.

So the question that drives the entire plot becomes "Who is behind it?" If you know anything about Mr Brown's novels, then the answer becomes evident about 200 pages before the end of the book. I am not about to reveal the identity of the mastermind, but if one follows a simple elimination procedure using a single criterion, one is guaranteed to guess right. What's the criterion? It is called, "the least likely character." It works like this: eliminate the most obvious (NASA), and then concentrate on characters. Start from the one to whom the clues are pointing most strongly. It's not him/her. Continue the process until you arrive at someone who strongly seems to support our characters and should have no fathomable reason whatsoever to do what what he/she is doing. That's the one.

It really is quite upsetting that Mr Brown resorts to such transparent devices. As in a bad Agatha Christie novel, we cannot uncover the identity of the killer through logic because we are missing crucial bits of information that someone else miraculously possesses. It's not fair. On the other hand, watch out for passages where Mr Brown heavy-handedly fails to mention someone's name or suddenly becomes very vague in a person's description. That's a sure sign that you are not reading about a person you have been misled into thinking about, but about someone else.

Not to mention repeated problems with various details. For example, the Delta Force, the supposedly lethal special force, the ones who reduce your survival probability to zero, the ones who are trained in every fantastic weapon prototype, these guys manage to fail to kill a woman, a TV personality, and even a fat guy several times. Not for lack of trying. These guys also supposedly fire a Hellfire missile in the heart of Washington D.C. and nobody notices. Not to mention that they are apparently murderous apes who do not hesitate to kill a high-ranking U.S. official, and who rather unprofessionally seem to enjoy killing civilians as well.

Another example is the frustrating habit of smart people doing stupid things throughout the novel. Here's a famous brilliant physicist whose role appears to involve being thick and in denial (the usual stereotype: he's so smart that his arrogance locks up his brain), failing to see explanations that even rookies notice (probably something to do with the other stereotype: penis-ego threatened by fact that one doing the suggesting is female), making sexist comments (no comment), and then urinating on himself (poetic justice, obviously). If it weren't for the brave, intelligent, and sexy heroine and the courageous, smarts, and handsome hero, this nerd would have ruined it for all of us.

The list could go on, but it won't. Suffice to say that characters are too dull to be of any interest. You know the woman and her guy will survive (note to Mr Brown: please, please, have a main character die once in a while), they will fall in love, and the evil dudes will get their just deserts. Which reminds me, the Senator is extremely evil, in a James Bond villain sort of way. And just as unbelievable. But then again, we have an explosive finale that involves helicopter spraying bullets over a bizarre ship anchored on top of an underwater volcano about to erupt, with vicious sharks swimming around, with the main characters' sole weapon a fax machine. I am not making this up.

In the end, Mr Brown novel disappoints for the usual reason: he seems to raise an intriguing question and then cravenly backs out through the easy exit. The ending is so pathetic, I was not laughing when the evil dude got what they deserve. At least I had fun reading the thriller. Good while it lasted but high in MSG. Can be hazardous to one's good taste.

October 20, 2004