Book review: Billion Dollar Brain

Another Deighton of the "nameless narrator" school. It is good. If "Twinkle" was the desert, this is the slow soft melancholy fall of snow in the Finnish forests. That atmosphere pervades most of the book; perhaps that makes the "Brain" scenes in the US even more an outlier; perhaps they could have been omitted.

I think various aspects are slightly unsatisfactory: Our Protagonist goes to Helsinki because Klaarna has been killed, but he is unimportant, so why do they care? His meeting Signe appears pure chance. And perhaps others; but I think that I don't really care about that; take the overarching plot as given.

Within that various scenes are lovely: Midwinter's little white animals hitting each other. The huge steaming beast in the misty forest that turns into the cavalry man and horse. OP waking up under corpses. Harvey stealing the fake eggs. The train, and the fake stop. Walking across the ice.

The computer-y stuff was perhaps the flavour of the year but doesn't age well and isn't Deighton's area of expertise: as this review points out, the titular Brain is supa because it works in base 10 not binary. Oops.

I like Deighton's writing. Sometimes, well perhaps often, he is trying a bit too hard with the "the sky was like a..."¹ stuff, but a lot of it works.

Notes

1. Also known as similies, I understand.