Deception Point
Dan Brown

One of the biggest problems I had with Da Vinci Code was the recurring tactic of withholding information from the readers, giving us vague, dire pronouncements instead of letting us judge the facts for ourselves. This amateurism is still in evidence in Deception Point; the second sentence of the book reads: "Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him." There’s nothing really barbarous about being shoved to your death out of a helicopter. Callous, maybe. Arbitrary, certainly. But barbarous? Do I need to trot out the blood eagle example again?

However, this clumsy foreshadowing only happens a few more times, rather half-heartedly, and then it vanishes altogether in favor of the more gripping moment-by-moment narration. Where the historical detail of Da Vinci Code never fully absorbed me into suspension of disbelief, the scientific depth to Deception Point reminds me of the hard turns and convoluted twists of a Michael Crighton book. Like Crighton, Brown may not always use the most eloquent prose, but the eruditeness of the evolving plot makes up for the lack.

Illusion is peeled away layer by layer with the most obscure facts as the main characters track down the deception of the title. I don’t want to spoil anything, which is tricky since we know nothing at the beginning of the book, but essentially the characters are trying to conclusively prove or disprove the authenticity of an artifact. At the beginning, the evidence for its authenticity seems unmistakable, but one by one, the pieces of evidence fall apart. Inside the world of the story, this is believable because the villains created the question (what will fake this object perfectly?) after they discovered the solution (an artifact which has all the necessary qualities). But I still pull out of the world a bit at this point to wonder how Brown pieced it together–did he too discover the solution first? Or did he create the question and then track down all these obscure facts? Either way, the slow disintegration of the artifact’s authenticity is a dazzling display of scientific acumen.

Not so dazzling is the suspense surrounding the identity of the villain. At a certain crucial point, we’re down to two characters and we know one is dead and the other is a traitorous murderer. The execution has traces of the clumsy info-withholding tactic, and from all the dancing around I deduced that the obvious answer was wrong, and guessed the correct answer.

However, the underlying dilemma is a brilliant quandary.  Both characters are likable in different ways, but I liked one more than the other. And before I knew conclusively which one was dead and which one was the villain, I was forced to ask myself which one I wanted to be dead, and which one I wanted to be the villain. Essentially, to ask myself: is being the villain a fate worse than death?

Everyone has their own answer to that. Mine was no, and that’s how it played out–my character tumbled from the pedestal and became unlikable to me, and so his/her villainy became acceptable, and the ending neatly wrapped everything up. I’m not sure if I like that. If it had turned out the other way around, I wouldn’t have gotten real closure, but the book would also have stuck with me for much, much longer. I’d be probing that villainy-death turning point like a sore tooth for days.