Little Brother

I'm not quite sure what to make of Little Brother. I think a lot of my initial wariness stemmed from the fact that I have little in common with Marcus, the main character. Of course, this shouldn't necessarily dictate whether or not I enjoy any book, but in this case it had a lot to do with my connection with the story and the way the book was written. Marcus is a supergeek who has no problem rattling on about the technical specifications of certain types of computer coding and all the mathematical theory that goes along with that. Or, I guess I should say, Cory Doctorow doesn't have a problem doing that.

You see, at no point in the story did I feel as though the narrative I was reading could have actually come from a 17 year old rebel--I was always aware that, at some point, Doctorow was sitting behind his computer, up late at night googling hacker methodologies and trying to break them down in a way that young kids could understand. That made the unraveling of the extremely slow-developing plot harder to get through.

Pages and pages of nothing but copy-and-pasted how-tos about computer hacking. Most of the time they are for fictitious technological devices, so all the passages end up becoming useless or too convoluted to remember exactly what function they serve when they reappear in the story.

Doctorow tries to make a diverse group of sub-characters, but they are never very well developed--they are given a lot of dialogue, but their place within the convoluted homeland security crisis that Doctorow dreams up (which seems contrived and implausible at best) makes their dialogue seem strained and inauthentic. Also, he drops Marcus's three supporting main characters like obsolete VHS tapes before the end of the first half of the book.

Maybe I didn't like it because the tech-savvy geek world that all the characters inhabit is either all too real and beyond my comprehension, or else it doesn't feel nearly plausible enough that anyone would do the things they do in this book. The usage of text-speak and internet lingo in conversation never happens (really it can't happen, at least to the extent that it does in this story) but its use in narrative never should happen, no matter who the audience is.

The initial rising action gripped me and it was surprisingly well written, but then it petered out and the next 3/4 of the book was a compendium of hacker-happy yammering sessions. Praise should be given to Doctorow for attempting, at all odds, to make Marcus's fight against the DHS more plausible, but in this instance, the extra passages of detail cannot hold every reader's full attention.

Not to mention, most of the time, Marcus is fighting for his cause like the short-sighted, idiot 17 year old he is. He is, of course, entitled to his character flaws. But his half-baked reasons for inciting mayhem for the authorities only instigate more DHS crackdowns, and they more often than not get people killed, tortured, or sent to secret prisons. After 400 pages of high-risk, low probability rioting and hacking, the book is brought to a coldly realistic resolution that feels out of place and unsatisfying.

meh