The Dan Brown Enigma

by Graham A Thomas

  Ice Station Zebra feels real. The reader goes right into the story along with the narrator. The description of the cold and the lonely icecap comes from MacLean’s own experiences as an able seaman aboard HMS Royalist during the Second World War. MacLean did two tours aboard this cruiser on the Arctic Convoys and learned about numbing cold first-hand. The same ship later took him to the Pacific theatre where he saw action escorting carrier groups against Japanese targets in Sumatra, Burma and Malaysia. This wartime experience can be seen in his early works, including Ice Station Zebra.

  Having been at sea for most of the war MacLean knew the sea and what life was like aboard ship. He understood the mind-numbing cold and the bleakness of the Arctic Circle from his days in the Arctic Convoys. For example: ‘We flitted through the howling darkness of that nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra, we now covered five.’ Or: ‘After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice-storm that I was bowled completely off my feet.’

  Ian Fleming said the key to writing a good thriller is to write about what you know, to base the book on something that happened and build it from there. MacLean used his personal experiences in his books, but what about Brown? There is no record that Brown ever served aboard a ship or that he spent any length of time in the Arctic Circle, so for him to write about being stuck out in the open on a glacier and make it sound real, must be from a combination of painstaking research and a vivid imagination.

  ‘Outside the habisphere, the katabatic wind roaring down the glacier was nothing like the ocean winds Tolland was accustomed to. On the ocean, wind was a function of tides and pressure fronts and came in gusting ebbs and flows. The katabatic, however, was a slave to simple physics – heavy cold air rushing down a glacial incline like a tidal wave. It was the most resolute gale force Tolland had ever experienced.’

  So how does Deception Point stack up against the Curzon Group’s five elements of a good thriller ?

  The ‘big idea’ for Deception Point came from the research Brown had done on Digital Fortress. He’d finished writing Angels & Demons and needed a break, as he explained in his witness statement. ‘I was exhausted from the research and writing of such a complicated religious thriller,’ he said. ‘Even though I had lots of viable material left over from all of my research on religion/art/Rome and the Templars etc., I felt like I needed a change of pace. I decided to write what I later termed a “palate cleanser”.’

  Having researched and written about the covert and secretive organisations (the National Security Agency in Digital Fortress and the clandestine brotherhood of the Illuminati in Angels & Demons), Brown needed something different to write about. ‘I found myself hard pressed to come up with a more secretive topic,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, I had recently learned of another US intelligence agency, more covert even than the National Security Agency. This new agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), figured prominently in my third novel, Deception Point.’[104]

  At the same time, the press had also been commenting on NASA’s string of failures, saying that the agency was becoming a bottomless pit for taxpayer’s money without much coming back in return. Weren’t there more important things closer to home for taxpayers’ money to be spent on? ‘Then again,’ Brown said, ‘could we as human beings really give up our quest for discovery in space? Deception Point centred on issues of morality in politics, human progress, national security, and classified technology. The crux of the novel was the link between NASA, the military, and the political pressures of big budget technology.’

  Up until the point in the book when the meteorite is discovered with fossils embedded into it, the anti-NASA feeling espoused by the President’s opponent has been growing but then this amazing discovery puts NASA back on the map. Or does it?

  The protagonist in Deception Point is the top intelligence analyst to the White House, Rachel Sexton. She is the daughter of Senator Sedgewick Sexton, a presidential candidate with his eyes fixed firmly on the White House. It is he who is running the anti-NASA campaign with great success. Rachel – who is in her mid-thirties, single and described as attractive – works for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as a ‘gister’. As the book explains, gisting (or data reduction) requires analysing complex reports and distilling their essence (or gist) into concise, single-page briefs. Rachel holds the NRO’s premier gisting post – intelligence liaison to the White House.

  At the opening of the book Senator Sexton’s presidential campaign is rolling forward. The polls show he is more popular than the besieged President Zachary Herney. The President knows of Rachel because of the daily intelligence briefs she sends to his National Security Advisor.

  Unknown to Senator Sexton, to Rachel or anyone else outside of NASA, the President has sent a team of scientific experts to authenticate NASA’s findings in the meteorite buried deep within the Milne Ice Shelf off Ellesmere Island in the Arctic. The meteorite was found by NASA’s new Polar Orbiting Density Scanner (PODS), one of a collection of satellites orbiting earth and monitoring the planet for any signs of large-scale change. Embedded in the meteorite are insect fossils that are similar to – but not the same as –those found on earth, so NASA claims these fossils are evidence of extraterrestrial life. Rachel is sent up to join this team of experts and act as an independent authenticator.

  Senator Sexton is using the NASA failures to fuel his campaign and the general public are buying into it. Why send missions to Mars when there are people in the US without education, clothing, housing etc.? Sexton wants to abolish NASA and use its funding for schools across the country. NASA is desperate for good news. Because of its poor standing, the President has sent four scientists – TV personality and oceanographer Michael Tolland (who also owns the boat involved, the Goya), an eccentric but brilliant astrophysicist Corky Marlinson, glaciologist Norah Mangor, and palaeontologist Wailee Ming – to authenticate and verify the findings.

  But while the scientists and NASA employees are embedded in relative warmth and comfort in a giant habisphere on the ice shelf, outside a Delta Force team is monitoring the discovery for a mysterious boss known only as The Controller. In the pit from which the meteorite has been extracted, Ming spots an irregularity that shouldn’t be there if NASA’s data is correct. Leaning into the pit to get a sample of the water, he is attacked by a microbot operated by the Delta Force team, falls into the water and drowns.

  Tolland also spots the irregularity in the water and quickly tells Marlinson and Rachel, who report their concerns to Mangor. She realises there is seawater in the closed area of the pit where there should only be freshwater – melted ice from extracting the meteorite. To make sure they are right, the four scientists go outside onto the ice shelf to scan the ice from a distance. On the scan they discover Ming’s body in the water pit and a column of frozen sea beneath the opening from which the meteorite was extracted. This leads to the conclusion that the meteorite was drilled up from the bottom of the ice.

  While they are considering the implications of this, they are attacked by the Delta Force team and Mangor is left dead. The other three manage to get away in a nail-biting chase across the ice that sees them plunge over a cliff and end up on a piece of ice that has broken away from the main glacier. Sure they are going to die, Rachel remembers that the US has hydroplanes mounted on sea floors around the world. She begins banging on the ice, and this is picked up by a submarine. The three survivors are rescued, while the Delta Force team believe they have perished in the freezing ocean.

  From the submarine Rachel contacts the President’s security advisor, telling her about their discovery, as well as contacting her boss at the NRO, William Pickering. He has them airlifted from the submarine by helicopter away from the danger zone to an airfield in Greenland, from where they are flown
to Washington.

  The real motive for Senator Sexton wanting to get rid of NASA eventually comes out. Private companies want to see space exploration privatised and Sexton has been receiving large amounts from these people for his campaign. Rachel’s relationship with him is strained as she blames him for her mother’s untimely death and she is unaware of her father’s true motivation. She believes the President and NASA are part of a conspiracy to kill them to cover up the fact that the meteorite is a fake. It is a massive PR exercise designed to bolster the incumbent President in the upcoming election.

  Rachel, Tolland and Marlinson need one last bit of evidence to prove the whole thing is a sham and that can be found aboard Tolland’s ship anchored off the coast of New Jersey. The Delta Force team learn that the three survivors are now aboard this ship and arrive via helicopter gunship to kill them. Rachel manages to send a fax to her father asking for help just before the team arrive.

  Aboard the Goya, Rachel, Tolland and Marlinson manage to stop the Delta Force team, but they are still at the mercy of The Controller in the helicopter gunship. When it touches down on the heaving vessel, Rachel is stunned to see her boss William Pickering emerge – he is The Controller, the one who has really been trying to kill her and her friends. He tells her about her father’s true motives and how he (Pickering) masterminded the fake meteorite to attack Sexton’s campaign and, in his eyes, protect the American people. However, it all went wrong when the President sent the scientists to the Arctic to authenticate the findings. At that point Pickering realised they would discover his plot, so anyone who knew about it had to be eliminated. Violence erupts as the three scientists try to get away. The Delta Force team have been immobilised in the claws of a submersible on the ship’s deck but Pickering grabs a machine gun and fires several bursts at them.

  The ship is anchored on a magma plume that sends hot water racing to the surface from the bottom of the sea, causing an inverted tornado in the sea. The vessel is crippled in the fight and starts heeling over. The helicopter gunship slides off the deck into the sea with Delta One still in it. The hot magna ignites its Hellfire missiles, creating a water vortex and the gunship is sucked down to the bottom with William Pickering still aboard.

  Sexton reads the fax that Rachel sent him and realises with this news, nothing can stop him on the way to the Oval Office. He decides to go public but instead of sending copies of the fax to the press, incriminating evidence comes to light and he is publicly humiliated – his campaign is in ruins. President Herney tells the American people the truth and presumably gets his second term. At the novel’s end, Rachel and Tolland are romantically involved.

  That’s the story of Deception Point. Brown does take considerable time building up the discovery itself before he reveals it’s a fraud and getting the protagonist into a situation where her life is in danger. Indeed, it’s not until she arrives at the glacier that the pace really starts to take off. But there are plenty of hints that something isn’t quite right. While NASA is working to extract the meteorite from the ice and believing they’ve found evidence of life outside the planet, a Delta Force team is using sophisticated technology to monitor the activity. So the reader knows something’s wrong. Why would a Delta Force team be on the ice shelf if everything was okay? It is Ming’s discovery that is the turning point. Our heroes then realise their lives are in mortal danger and from that point on Brown takes us on a roller-coaster chase.

  But is it any good? Again, the reviews are similar to those of the first two books, largely positive but some negative. Bookreporter said that Brown was ‘quite the craftsman, displaying a knack for character sleight-of-hand while always playing fair with his audience.’ No one in the book is what they appear to be, except perhaps the three heroes, Rachel Sexton, Michael Tolland and the hugely annoying Corky Marlinson. ‘The only certainty is that Brown, within the space of a few novels, has developed into one of the best of the authors labouring in the suspense field.’[105]

  A reviewer on Bookbrowser said that Brown had masterfully blended ‘science, history and politics in his critically acclaimed thriller Angels & Demons’ and with Deception Point he ‘has crafted another novel in which nothing is as it seems – and behind every corner is a stunning surprise. Deception Point is pulse-pounding fiction at its best.’[106]

  Publisher’s Weekly said that Deception Point was ‘an excellent thriller, a big yet believable story unfolding at breakneck pace, with convincing settings and just the right blend of likable and hateful characters.’[107] The Library Journal added to the accolades by saying that it had ‘intrigue aplenty, both in the Arctic and in Washington, and Brown does not disappoint with this genuine page-turner.’[108]

  Not everyone was so enthusiastic. One reviewer on Kirkus Review called the book a ‘tedious techno-thriller’, saying that the characters were wooden and that the gadgets were more believable than the people. ‘Brown’s scientific knowledge isn’t what ultimately dooms the book. The story, which has an initial rush to it, bogs down once it starts plodding through all the government shenanigans and secret plots. Although Brown is a more astute storyteller than most of his brethren in the techno-thriller vein, and won’t lose any fans this time out, he’s never able to convincingly marry the technical and the human sides of Deception Point.’

  Other reviews called the book predictable. ‘You can turn your nose up at the pointless love interest,’ sniped one on Amazon. However the criticism of predictability is tempered by the reviewer’s description of the book’s climax: ‘The final action scene was brilliantly choreographed, a masterpiece of cause and effect. Initially a “samey” feel, yet after a quarter of the book you’ll be hooked and won’t put it down until it’s all over.’[109]

  While the positive reviews number in the hundreds, there is a theme that runs through many of the negative ones, criticising Brown for just scratching the surface of his characters. ‘You never feel as if you really get to know them properly,’ said one such reviewer, ‘which makes it difficult to know just how you feel towards them. In the end I settled for ambivalence. I’d have liked to have known more about Rachel and her relationship with her father, what makes Michael Tolland tick, and with several other characters we only had an outline sketch, with no colour added. On the basis of a school report I’d say, “Dan must try harder with his characterisations.”’[110]

  In addition, some reviewers complained that Brown writes his books on a formula, one saying: ‘Deception Point follows the same path as his other works, with only the basic premise of the story and the characters’ names and professions changing. For Deception Point (the one about the thing NASA found), substitute The Da Vinci Code (the one about the Holy Grail), or try Digital Fortress (the one about the unbreakable code). In Deception Point, Brown gets away with this formula, but I’m not sure how much longer he’ll manage this.’

  Like his first two novels, Deception Point is indeed formula writing, which Brown has admitted. ‘Of course, there is a twist in the tail, as there is in all my books. Like its predecessors, Deception Point incorporates my usual elements – a secretive organisation, a love story, a chase, and plenty of academic lecture. At the heart, however, my books are all essentially treasure hunts set within a 24-hour period.’ [111]

  In truth, the formula aspect is difficult to escape. The interchangeable plot is essentially highly intelligent people caught up in a situation that puts their lives in danger as they try to work out the clues, and along the way two of them fall in love. The details change with each novel but the characters remain essentially the same. Rachel Sexton is interchangeable with Susan Fletcher in Digital Fortress. The Commander in Digital Fortress is William Pickering in Deception Point. Michael Tolland in Deception Point is David in Digital Fortress with a key difference being that Rachel and Michael’s relationship is just beginning while David and Susan’s is already well established in Digital Fortress. The object of the treasure hunt in Deception Point is the meteorite while in Digital Fortress it was the r
ing.

  Stacked up against the five principles of good thriller writing, the book has to entertain the reader and Deception Point does that, as we can see from the largely positive reviews and comments. (Deception Point gets a 3.5 star customer rating.)

  It should also reflect the world around it, which Brown has done through his extensive research into a wide variety of topics, mostly technical, to give the story authenticity. For example, ‘Presidential Decision Directive 25(PDD 25) grants Delta Force soldiers “freedom from all legal accountability” including exception from the 1876 Posse Comitatus Act, a statute imposing criminal penalties for anyone using the military for personal gain, domestic law enforcement, or unsanctioned covert operations.’

  The third principle is that a good thriller doesn’t need to follow formulas. This is where Brown falls down. He uses an interchangeable plot with interchangeable characters based in different settings on a different treasure hunt for different reasons.

  A good thriller also needs to take the writer and the reader on an adventure. We know that Brown has done this in Deception Point because of the reviews, many of which have said that all his books are ‘packed full of suspense’. Deception Point is filled with twists and turns to keep the reader guessing. The plots cuts back and forth between locations and Brown uses his short chapters with cliffhanger endings to keep the pace moving. Once the action kicks in he moves it with lightning speed and the climax at the end is a finely crafted and skilled piece of writing equal to that of MacLean’s work.

  But there is one element that MacLean peppers his works with and is difficult to find in Deception Point – humour. For Brown his third novel was meant to be fun and easier than the first two, but halfway through he began to think that he might have made a mistake because he was bored by politics and he felt uncomfortable using a female lead. ‘I had been far more interested in the Vatican, Langdon, codes, symbology, and art,’ he said. ‘I had no money, and I found myself wondering once again if I should give up. Fortunately, my wife has always been a tremendous support system and she encouraged me to keep at it.’[112]