Since I am an amateur in review writing, I went to my neighbour, Gurwinder Singh, who is an expert and writes book reviews for “Balle-Balle Times”.
After knocking at the door for a few seconds, he opened the door. As usual he was wearing a vest and his shorts and had a heavy turban.
“Oye, Welcome puttar”, He said.
“Hello, Sir”, I replied.
“Come in and have a sheet.” I followed him into his office and sat opposite him.
“How can I help you?”, he asked.
“I need your expert comments on the book ‘The Digital Fortress’ by Dan Brown.”
“Oh, Dan-ji! He is a very good writer, but I can’t understand what happened to him in this book.”
“What happened, sir?”, I inquired.
“I’ll tell you everything but first lets eat something.”
After a healthy lunch, he took me to his messy reading room. We both sat down opposite each other and then he started.
“One evening while coming back from work I bought a copy of Digital Fortress because I had liked Dan-ji’s Da Vinci Code.
That night after eating my dinner I shat down on my great-grandfather’s chair and started reading the book. The weather was cold and outside the window the moonlit night sky looked beautiful. The leaves of the trees were swaying with the breeze and…”
“Can we leave the details of the environment and get down to the book, sir?”, I interrupted.
“Oh yes, So I started reading the book with high hopes of being entertained. The story was interesting but there was too much of computer stuff, which I could not understand.”
“Can you tell me what you understood?”, I asked.
“Sure. There is this beautiful girl called, Susan Fletcher, who is the head cryptographer of NSA (National Security Agency). She is called by her boss immediately to his office at an odd hour and on a holiday. When she reaches at the agency she finds it too empty even on a holiday. It seems everyone has been given a leave from his or her duty. When she goes to her boss, he tells him some high tech problem. I’ll describe it in my own words. The main decrypting machine in the agency has been fed with an unbreakable code, which threatens the security of the entire country. She is amazed because it is impossible that the machine cannot break a code. But after much explanation she agrees with him. Now she has to find the person who made this code and persuade him to break it. But the problem is that he is already dead, and before dying he gave his ring to someone close to him.
On the other side of the story, Susan’s boyfriend has been sent to investigate in the death of the code-maker. But the problem is that, he is an academician, and no one is able to understand why he is doing a cop’s job.
Susan tries to investigate into this mystery code and its maker and finds that she is surrounded with a whole lot of lies, which endanger her boyfriend’s and her life.”
“That seems an interesting story. Then why were you disappointed?”, I asked.
“The End is not at all good. There is too much of useless hype. Dan-ji has tried to thrill everyone at the end but he didn’t realize that the readers are not stupid. The suspense is not at all a surprise. At the end there is a small mystery code to be broken, which was broken by me easily and the head cryptographer could not break for 15 to 20 pages.”
“That’s not like Dan Brown stuff”, I said.
“I know, that is why I was disappointed. But still his style of writing is going to take him to great heights.”
“Tell me something about what you felt after finishing the book? Did you regret reading it?”
“No, I got a lot to learn about computers after reading this book. The starting is interesting and mid-story is also well written but as I said the only problem is the climax. It is not at all up to Dan-ji’s capability. Nevertheless the book is a page turner.”
“So do you recommend this book to your friends?”
“Yes, but I advice them to keep their expectations low.”
’’Thank You, Sir’’
’’Anytime my boy.’’
So that was what Our Expert had to say. I hope you appreciate his help. Comments are always welcome.