Reamde
By Neil Stephenson
If you were a Chinese teen hooked on internet gaming, with a
knack for writing virus code to increase your odds to make millions of dollars,
are you closer or farther from an international man hunt of a jihad bent
terrorist? If you were a software
engineer for the Russian mafia would you suspect you’d be teamed up with a
Chinese tour guide and Chinese gamer to reap millions and spend it on a man hunt? What are the odds of hot tottie MI6 agent
falling in love with a Russian mobster?
And then mix an Eretrian
young woman adopted as a refugee by an Iowan family, with an uncle who is a CEO
of the software company that is victimized through, virus hacking, and
kidnapping. In my opinion the star of the
book however is Abdullah Jones the terrorist. He
is smart, vicious, and brings a sense of humor to his terrorist plans.
The book has a comic sense of intrigue as it pits MI6, FBI,
hackers, and family in a manhunt from Xiamen China, to the Philippines,
British Columbia, to Northern
Idaho where right wing extremists walk through life with a pistol
on their hip and a rifle over their shoulder.
There is the hijacking of boats, biz jet planes, and rickshaws. Apartment building blow up, shots ring out in
the fog, raids on peoples homes, internet cafes become the hub of
information. This is all weaved into an
internet game called T’Rain. The
characters had to play the game to figure out their next move in the plot. So I’ll leave it to you to find out which
character determines Abdullah Jones’s fate..
In Stephenson’s writing style for this book he sends little
time on character building. This
component is built in to the action scenes where when any specific character is
called to perform some unbelievable act of survival, they draw on some part of
their past that guide them through. As
the scenes heat up with explosions, chases, escapes intrigue, Stephenson blends
metaphor after metaphor that colors the intrigue with a unique brand of subtle
humor. Imagine two different groups
tracking two different targets, each not knowing the other exists. And as the teams collide characters switch
sides, and love stories begin to surface.
The intrigue is almost ‘slapstick’.
In the end the reader is turning pages in suspense and laughing quietly
along the way.
With many of the books I read I look for the message. Being a person that resonates around the
philosophy that we are all one in spirit, I found layered in to a scene of a
character about to meet his maker, that philosophy makes its entrance. Stephenson dedicated a whole page to it.
“Chet went on about parallels and the meridians. The fact is that we live in a curved
space. Parallels are straight. Meridians bend towards each other and their
beginnings and ends are all one. When
the nautilus – the first nuclear sub – reached te North Pole, it transmitted a
message. You know what the message
was? … Latitude ninety degrees north.”
Chet said. “See they couldn’t specify the longitude, because there, all the meridians
are one. They were on al the meridians,
and so they were on none of them. It/’s a singularity”. … “Birth and death.” Chet said.
“The poles of human existence.
We’re like meridians, all beginnings and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our
separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling
our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we will all converge and our
ends as much the same as our
beginnings.” I suspect this was random on Stephenson's part. But I mark every coincidence on with some sort of meaning as everything happens on purpose.
