Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson. 1999.

When future historians analyze US culture in the beginning of the 21st century there will likely be many PhD dissertations dedicated to our fascination with WWII.
 
Sometimes I find myself watching another movie, miniseries or documentary, wondering if we will ever run out of material. Maybe it will never stop, not before we have a complete digital recreation of every moment. Like the project to model ancient Rome in 3D.

So what could possibly add to the discussion? What hasn't been explored dozens of times in countless mediums?

Cryptonomicon primarily covers the efforts of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. This is the entity that enabled the Allies to decipher German and Japanese radio communications. The importance of code breaking in WWII is a topic that has obviously been explored, but I don't often see it referenced in fiction about the war. In that sense, the book is in a category of its own.

More important than that, however, the book is able to make a point about the war and its aftermath that I'd never considered prior to reading it. The point is complex, it can't just be restated. It involves really being inside the minds of people involved in the war and its human toll. It makes this point by switching between narratives in different eras based on characters with indirectly connected roles. For me, this was the intellectual meat in the book that made a lasting impression. 

Cryptonomicon is very long (almost 900 pages in paperback). My goal in this review is to provide a glimpse of what I believe Stephenson's point about WWII is. I hope it is enough of a glimpse to encourage you to make the investment in reading it.

So, let me set the stage.

In the early 1940s the human race was engaged in global warfare. A group of nations not raping, slaughtering and enslaving races of people were doing everything they could to stop a group of nations who were. Distinctions between civilian and military life were blurred or irrelevant. The future of human society was at stake. Would genetic identity have an official role in the future of a person's life? Or would equality and justice prevail?

Life in those times meant trying to find a way to apply one's life and skills to the war effort, there was no greater cause. 

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was a young man at the beginning of the war, and his attempts to apply his life and skills in the Allied forces is the narrative in Cryptonomicon focused on code breaking. Lawrence had the privilege/burden of being born with a rare type of mind. As a child, he is said to have had "a peculiar relationship with sound." Due to his father's occupation as a preacher, he spent a fair amount of time around pipe organs. One day, the church instrument broke and the only person who could fix it was the local math teacher. Being curious about the device, young Lawrence sat with the math teacher as he removed the panels concealing the pipework inside. Curiously, there were long pipes and short pipes.

The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When Lawrence understood, it was if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda - the part where Uncle Johann dissects the architecture of the Universe in one merciless descending ever-mutating chord, as if his foot is thrusting through skidding layers of garbage until it finally strikes bedrock. In particular, the final steps of the organist's explanation were like a falcon's dive through layer after layer of pretense and illusion, thrilling or sickening or confusing depending on what you were. The heavens were riven open. Lawrence glimpsed choirs of angels ranking off into geometrical infinity.

Lawrence, with his rare mind, is great at math. It is because of this greatness perhaps that he is an abject failure at pretty much everything else. Consequently, the interpersonal, self-discipline and goal-setting skills required to get, say, a degree in mathematics are things he does not possess. Even though he spends time studying with Alan Turing and others in Princeton, he eventually has no choice but to join the Navy. The only responsibility he can be assigned with any confidence in that organization is to play the glockenspiel.

This is what he is doing on the deck of the USS Nevada during Pearl Harbor. When the bombs begin dropping he is mostly preoccupied with the complexity of the events around him. Picking up a weapon is out of the question, he's simply not built to do such things.

The book is written in two eras, the second is present-day and concerns Lawrence's grandson Randall Lawrence Waterhouse. Randy is talking to his girlfriend about his male relatives (including his grandfather):

"One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept-because everybody's been there-but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it."
"Which is still kind of pathetic."
"It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic."
"What, then?"
"I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."

Lawrence Waterhouse is a mystery to his commanding officers and most of his colleagues and peers. What the military eventually discovers, however, is that despite these shortcomings, with a certain amount of freedom and resources, one of the byproducts of Lawrence's mind is near complete awareness of enemy communications.

Lawrence was a member of a nation with a particular approach to civilization. This approach involved, as a principle, making room for him and his idiosyncrasies. The Allied forces represented this approach to civilization. This fact had a decisive impact on the outcome of WWII, a war that decided whether humanity would live in freedom or in slavery. Freedom, apparently, works better. Consequently, we have more of it.

The Allied approach was perhaps messier, less formal, more concerned with what worked than tradition or code. At one point later in the war, Japanese soldiers are watching an incoming bomber squadron from the deck of a ship in the middle of a shipping convoy. Up to that point in the war, bombing runs at sea like this had been mostly ineffective. The bombers just could not line up their targets. A new device was developed, however, to counter this problem: an air-to-sea torpedo. This is the reaction of a Japanese soldier, Goto Dengo, as he watches the new device in action:

The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in a middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies.

No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.

The American Marines in Shanghai weren't proper warriors either. Constantly changing their ways. Like Shaftoe. Shaftoe tried to fight Nipponese soldiers in the street and failed. Having failed, he decided to learn new tactics - from Goto Dengo. "The Americans are not warriors," everyone kept saying. "Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors."

The Marine Bobby Shaftoe is a friend of Goto Dengo. They met while they were both stationed in Shanghai before the war begins. He is the heart of this novel, the character whose narrative most readers will look forward to returning to. He is the embodiment of the Allied approach to civilization, the personality that results from flexible, patient strength.

The following is an exchange between Shaftoe and a commanding officer during one of dozens of intelligence and counter-intelligence missions he is given through the course of the story:

Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. "Sergeant! Would you identify this material?"
"Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!"
"Sergent! How many letters are there in the alphabet?"
"Twenty-six, sir!" responds Shaftoe crisply.
Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Bramph whistle coolly at each other-this Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.
"Now, how many numerals?"
"Ten, sir!"
"And of the thirty-six letters and numerals, how many of them are represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?"
"Thirty-five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one we need to carry out your orders, sir!"
"Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed.

Of course, the sacrifices of Bobby Shaftoe and the millions of soldiers like him who died in the war, result in victory and peace. A peace that we all now enjoy. It is a peace, however, that will only last until the next time power is seized by forces willing to trade destruction and death for a chance at more power. This is where the modern era and the narrative of Randy Waterhouse comes into play.

Randy's story involves a business he is attempting to build with his friend Avi (a grandson of a victim of the holocaust) and his girlfriend America "Amy" Shaftoe (Bobby's granddaughter). I won't go into a lot of detail about what this business is, except to say that it attempts to address complexities of human society that allowed the worst evils of WWII to happen. For example:

• Having money or power is not the same as wielding it, especially if it is your intent to wield that power in the prevention of suffering.
• Having information or knowledge of history does not necessarily mean you can prevent it from happening again. History is created by masses of people who do not know what you know. There are always forces that have an incentive to prevent the free flow of information for this very reason.
• Having critical information does not imply a way to act on that information. Sometimes, knowing more about a problem can only make it more difficult to solve.

Most readers will probably not identify with the Randy narrative. The idea Stephenson proposes (i.e. Randy's business model) has not yet been attempted even 10 years after this novel was published. For this reason it may be difficult to associate it with anything we deal with in our lives. For a technology-loving nerd like myself, however, the idea has stuck with me. I find myself keeping an eye open for a group involved in actually making it happen. 

I don't know if the idea will actually address these issues, but after reading the book I believe there is hope that it could. I don't know if I can describe exactly how, but it is an idea that seems to be philosophically connected with the approach to civilization the Allied forces represented.

I should stress, though, that Randy's business is not the point of the book. Readers who reach the novel's conclusion, which is focused on Randy's business, may be left feeling underwhelmed. The point of the book that I am trying to provide a glimpse into, is that the three narratives say something important about the Allied approach to civilization.

1. Lawrence is a social outcast and studies with other hyper-mathematicians who would likely not be supported in Axis nations. Alan Turing is a homosexual, for example, and would probably be imprisoned, enslaved or worse in Japan or Germany.
2. Bobby Shaftoe is a loyal but at times insubordinate warrior who would have had his independence beaten or trained out of him in Axis nations.
3. Randy is a lover of role playing games with an obsession for cereal. He succeeds in an environment that has been fertilized for innovation and change. An environment that would not exist today had Axis powers won the war.

The Allied forces represent an approach to civilization that America now largely upholds. As a consequence, all Americans have the privilege and burden of nurturing it. But in order to nurture something you have to understand it. This is why Cryptonomicon had to be so long. It is not enough to say that "we won". This book is about why we won, what made us different. It is about why the challenge will probably come again, and why we must be true to our history when that time comes.