Deception Point

I squandered a whole night last night reading Dan Brown’s Deception Point, his second novel, also the thickest one among all four. I have about two fifths to go and already feeling distasteful. Probably it’s an unwise thing to do to read a writer’s work in anti-chronological order, especially for someone in the thriller/suspense business. Brown was either being too ambitious here molding science, politics, government conspiracy and murder mystery into a perfect story, or he didn’t yet know how to cut down words. In any case, my main problem with this particular book isn’t the page count or narrative skill; it’s the attitude, call it American pride, arrogance, unilateralism, or downright militarilism and imperialism.

Brown loves stuff that’s largely unknown to the mass—NSA, CERN, Vatican, Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, da Vinci’s manuscripts, cryptography etc, and Deception Point, which is no exception, deals with NASA and dirty politics in and around the White House. Well, very exciting. Having read the other three books I couldn’t help subconsciously expect Brown to be gripping full attention all the time and dripping fascinating knowledge and insights all over the place, and above all, erudite and citizen-of-the-worldish. This last criterion he fails to meet. He writes about Special Cops on presidential order killing civilian scientists, American or foreign; about the supreme importance of American national security and ‘precious American lives’ lost to terrorist bombing, about their competition with the treacherous foes China and Russia, about, gloatingly, the superior weapons the US has developed and kept the world in the dark about, and the prospective privatization of space by various mammoth American corporations etc. Granted, he writes about the aforementioned as part of the narrative and characterization, and yes, those may not represent his personal opinion at all, but I beg to differ. I do think a sharp reader is able to tell the author’s opinions and intentions through the way he writes. Although I hope very much that the remaining 2/5 of the book will convince me otherwise, I feel that in the book Brown brims with a type of American pride that I detest, to put it mildly. To put down horrific ideas without qualifying them in any way whatsoever is in a way endorsing them. He writes about privatization of space as if the whole of the universe belongs to Americans and Americans alone; he writes about American lives lost as if other lives mean dusts at best and evil and threat at worst. And the high-tech killings, he describes it with such vivacity and enthusiasm you’d almost think he savors writing down the morbid experience with great deal of delight. Maybe I am being reactionary, overcritical. I hope I am, but I dislike this novel. decidedly.

Moviegoer

I finally got to borrow this book titled THE MOVIEGOER by WALKER PERCY (I always thought it's the other way round until just now. What kind of first name is WALKER?) from the library. It's a book that was long ago recommended to me in yahoo literature chatroom by some kind, well-read buddy, and was since taken note of and searched for in everywhere there was a library of sorts, and not found. What kind of fascinating book is this that got me so obsessed? I don't know, really. I knew nothing about the plot, the era it was written in and about, the genre or whatsoever. The only thing I recall is that it was mentioned and endorsed along with a string of other household names like Guy Maupassant and Kurt Vonnegut (which wasn't household name to me then but soon to become the biggest favorite, an addictive inspiration of sorts. Jude knows this only too well…) Anyway, the fact that the book had been so hard to find was probably a major drive force that propelled me along in the search. The name of this site, incidentally, was a directly plagiarized thing from the title of the book. (So is Slapstick from Vonnegut's novel…which reminds me of Woolf's words, that we are (at her time) at the fag-ends (i.e. cigarette butts) of civilization, that all that could be said are said already, and there're no more ambitious things to accomplish. She's right in a way isn't she. Or that's just a legitimate excuse to practise plagiarism.. Now that I have borrowed and read 1/8 into it, I still can't say what kind of book this is except that it strongly reminds me of Sartre's Nausea, probably influenced by it (since THE MOVIEGOER was written in 1963, 25 years after Nausea.), and the opening words sorta confirms my impression—'…the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair. –Soren Kierkegaard, THE SICKNESS ONTO DEATH'. Kierkegaard, of course, is one of the founding fathers of existentialism, earlier than Sartre and Camus, a Danish philosopher and theist whose work wasn't much recognized until after his death. How strange it is to be confronted by existentialism in a book that had attracted and totally eluded me years before I even knew such philosophy! I hope I could write a review on it someday…