Review: “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow
posted on May 3rd, 2008
It would be unfair to review “Little Brother” as a “novel”. In fact it is two books; the first is an engaging coming of age story of a seventeen year old boy struggling with a society that simultaneously treats him as a kid and forces him to grow up all at once, and the second is a primer on all the ways government currently infringes on the personal privacy of its citizens, how it hopes to do so even more in the future, and what each person can do to safeguard pieces of that privacy. “Little Brother” switches frequently and without warning between them.
The coming of age story strikes a tremendously effective balance between enjoyability and realism; the main character, Marcus, begins as a bit of a brat and grows more likable as the story progresses, without ever becoming perfect. Marcus’s friends are also likable but flawed, and more impressively, so are most of his enemies. It’s easy to identify with Marcus, as he’s facing the same two basic problems as we did when we were his age; how to finish High School doing as little work as possible without actually damaging his future, and how to convince someone to have sex with him. Far from being preoccupied with sex, however, Marcus is primarily obsessed with his own privacy, which eventually causes him to run afoul of the government and is the basis of the second book.
The second book, while also entertaining and informative, isn’t quite as successful. Avid readers of Boing Boing and Schneier on Security will have heard much of it before, and others might find it a bit pedantic. This book is mostly in the form of asides to the reader from Marcus: “Let me tell you about RFID chips…” The fictional United States in which the second book takes place bears a striking resemblance to our own, but with far more ubiquitous computing and surveillance. It was difficult to tell if Doctorow intended this to be our future or an alternate present.
As jarring as some of the transitions are, sometimes the two books combine beautifully, into an almost ethereal third book, a story not just about how a government can crush the humanity of one of its citizens, but also about how the apathy of the rest of the country is even more crushing. A story not just about how that citizen can fight back, but also about the people who love him who try to convince him not to. At its apex, we want Marcus both to keep fighting and to give up.
While the second book is obviously well-researched (Doctorow is a former Fellow at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation), it is actually the first book that makes the overall effort feel so genuine. The well-developed characters and the complex issues they face make it easy to suspend the rather large amount of disbelief presented by the political backdrop of the plot. These kids act like high school kids. They make mistakes. They grow. While the main questions of plot are resolved, not everything gets wrapped up in a neat little package. We are left to wonder, frustratingly at times, about the fates of certain characters and certain relationships.
Like many contemporary YA novels, “Little Brother” would probably be shelved in the “grown-up” section if the protagonist were 27 instead of 17; the themes are adult and important, and just because it is appropriate for teenagers doesn’t limit it to teenagers. The digressions on strong crypto are about as skippable as Ishmael’s on whale anatomy, so don’t let a disinterest in computer information privacy stop you from reading. Parents will find little objectionable, though there is a fair amount of implied violence and the book mentions, but is not graphic about, the existence of premarital sex.
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May 12th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
[…] Important. And Little Brother does have a dual nature—Larry’s already discussed it in his review—but I was pleasantly surprised by how readable a book it is. If it occasionally turned into a […]