Codex 44
| Codex | |
| author | Lev Grossman |
| pages | 348 |
| publisher | Harcourt |
| rating | 6 |
| reviewer | Isaac Jones |
| ISBN | 0151010668 |
| summary | A novel, "Part thriller, part literary history" |
Codex is a fun book, compelling enough to keep me reading even when I was occasionally sick of the characters. The book can be especially fun for a Slashdot reader when it refers to open-source software, but I didn't find Grossman's breadth and depth of nerd knowledge to be particularly satisfying.
The story and style of this book may remind you of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, because it's also about a search for an old thing through a maze of clues. The writing style is similar too, clearly aimed straight at the popular market, but lacking in the chapter-ending cliff-hangers of The Da Vinci Code. If you enjoyed that book, I recommend picking up Codex, though it's not as powerful a page-turner. I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, even though the snobbish part of me thought it was pretty silly. Snobbery has rarely kept me from enjoying something, though, and I liked Codex as well.
Codex is interesting and fun to read, but has a lot of weak points. I liked the female supporting character in many ways, but hardly liked the main character at all. I very much enjoyed the stories-within-the-story, and the low-tech and high-tech elements weaving back and forth. Read on if you don't mind minor SPOILERS.
Codex takes place in present day New York. Edward, the main character, is a guy with a great job who finds himself compelled to deeply change his lifestyle and behavior for reasons he cannot himself understand. In fact, Grossman doesn't ever quite manage to endow his characters with believable motivations, one of the major faults of this book. The reader knows what Edward's motivations are, since Grossman tells us, but I never found them very convincing. Edward is often inexplicably compelled to do things that he doesn't want to do, and gets drawn into situations that most people could easily walk away from.
Edward is also a very unlikable character. Even the other characters in the story dislike him, and point it out frequently. It's easy to see their point; the reader is left with the feeling that there's not much to like. This makes it a bit hard to get into his character, and though Edward makes some progress throughout the book, it isn't nearly enough.
Open-source software, and in particular an inexplicably compelling game called MOMUS, is featured throughout the plot, but it is not actually central to the story. The central story is about the search for a codex, which can perhaps be found in a family library that Edward has been manipulated into organizing.
The sense of immersion in new things is part the charm of Codex. I may not really believe that a man like Edward would get drawn into a computer game and a library with such complete abandon, but I'm glad that he did. Codex itself can draw the reader in at times, and I took several train rides where I didn't want to reach my destination because I wanted to keep reading.
While Grossman writes about nerds and open-source software, he doesn't write like someone who has ever been a part of it. He doesn't write about software the way Neal Stephenson does. Grossman writes about software as though he had some good ideas, and a friend or editor who knows about computers to keep him from getting it too badly wrong. That said, there are a few very annoying bits for us nerds. A scene where the main character enters the wild and strange world of a LAN party would have been almost bearable if it weren't for the secret handshake. At another point, a hacker tells Edward that he needs to get in touch with a super-hacker, but "He won't accept [your e-mail]. Your crypto isn't good enough." As if cryptography were an 31337 skill that some possess and some do not. Edward already knows how to use software, and he is a reasonably intelligent guy. I'm sure he could learn to encrypt an email.
Despite these weaknesses, Codex is a good read. It's creative, interesting, and occasionally suspenseful. It's the kind of book that you can get through pretty quickly, and though you may not be completely satisfied at the end, you will probably spend some time thinking about some of the Grossman's ideas.
You can purchase Codex from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I picked this up last week. (Score:2, Interesting)
Too much focus on tech (Score:3, Interesting)
Codex isn't a techno-thriller. Really, when I read it my immediate reaction was that it was part of this strange subgenre that seems to have popped up in "literary" fiction these days, namely suspense thrillers about books. I guess it's only natural, considering that the size of the reading populus seems to be ever-shrinking, that authors would eventually start writing fiction that involves characters who are more like today's readers -- in other words, people who are really into books.
Other books along these lines, off the top of my head, might include The Club Dumas [amazon.com] by Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Shadow of the Wind [amazon.com] by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, or The Rule of Four [amazon.com] by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Tomason. I haven't read the last one but either of the first two is probably better than Codex, even though The Club Dumas has a notoriously frustrating ending.
Another opinion: a mediocre book (Score:3, Interesting)
When it comes to matters of taste you can't say that someone is wrong. Someone may think that gold and red velvet wall paper is the height of interior design. I think that it is ghastly, something only Elton John could love. But my opinion is no more valid that the person who loves the wall paper.
I thought that the review was far too kind to Codex. I thought that Codex was a terrible book. The characters were wooden and the plot was predictable and empty. Yes there was some open source software, but it really did nothing for the plot. As others have noted, when it comes to mysteries/thrillers involving rare books, Perez-Reverte's Club Dumas is much better (the movie made from Club Dumas, the Ninth Gate directed by Polanski is also excellent).
It is worth nothing that not only is the author of Codex a poor writer, he's a weasel too. He wrote an article in Salon about how he cooked his score on Amazon for his previous novel ( The Terrors of the Amazon [salon.com]). He appeared to do this for Codex as well. There were a number of rave reviews by people who had never reviewed a book before on Amazon. Sure everyone writes their first review at sometime. But here is an admitted forger with a bunch of suspecious reviews.
My advice is that if you must read Codex, get it from the library. If you really must buy it, purchase the book used. But life is short and there are so many other good books. I recommend that you read something else.