Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46831 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Synopsis
John Law is a man full of secrets. People call him the Cryptographer, or the Codemaker. He is mysterious and charming, the world's first quadrillionaire, the inventor of an unbreakable code, of a new form of electronic money. As a man, he is admired and distrusted more than most. Tax inspector Anna Moore's talent is for getting clients to talk. She is good at what she does, one of the best. So when the Revenue assigns John Law as Anna's new client, her first task is to discover just what it is he's trying to hide...

About the Author
Tobias Hill has published three award-winning collections of poetry. Skin, a collection of stories won the PEN/Macmillan Award for Fiction. Underground, his first novel, was published to great acclaim in 1999. A former poet in residence at London Zoo, Tobias Hill is a Visiting Fellow at Sussex University.

Customer Reviews

Blemished, but a gem nonetheless
I came across a lone copy of this book on sale in the book section at my local supermarket a couple of days ago and picked it up never having heard of this novelist before. I read the back cover, then opened it and read the first page and knew it was going home with me simply for the writing. And it was worth the read. The prose is deft in this slow-moving, mood-rich story about tax inspector Anna Moore assigned to investigate the world's richest man.

John Law ostensibly is the story, his name is on everyone's lips, but we see very little of him. The story is actually about Anna's near-obsession with the Cryptographer rather than about the Cryptographer himself. Despite that, one does somehow come to care about Law and what happens to him when his world tumbles. I did find Anna's mum Eve asking her daughter to go begging to Law (whom Anna knows only as a client, and barely at that) astonishingly unbelievable. More so when Eve then picks up the phone and rings Law herself ... and gets him in person. As if! No matter that someone has money they don't need and will never miss, I saw no realism in Eve asking a perfect stranger what she did. My quibbles with such imperfections, however, paled next to the graceful writing that made this little story pleasurable reading.

A good writer, an intriguing title, a poor novel
I am very much at a loss to understand why some reviews are so enthusiastic about this book.

Yes the prose is almost poetic at times, and is a pleasure to read, though that, definitely, is limited to the first half of the book; even Hill seems to tire of the effort involved in writing like that with this storyline and thin cast of characters.

There is supposedly a romance in here between the cryptographer and the tax inspector - which comes about through one short meeting about tax and one additional brief meeting at a party at the cryptographer's palatial home. Otherwise there just is no relationship between these two characters until a rather ridiculous "will they, won't they get I together" kind of meeting right at the end of the book.

"Enigmatic" is a grandiose way of describing the cryptographer. "Cardboard" might be better. He barely appears, and when he does it is in a photograph. The world is falling apart as a result of something he has done, or failed to do, and so far as the main two characters are concerned, responsibility for such a disaster is an also-ran compared to the pseudo-importance of this silly so-called romance.

Hill had a kernel of a good idea: We are relying heavily on computer systems, and disaster may be just one virus away. But in this book no one seems to care (except an ineffective hacker who has a couple of walk-on appearances). The whole thing is just one big sloping-shoulder shrug. That maybe a valid message, but it has been delivered more by what Hill didn't do with his story, which deteriorated more or less into a bit of inconsequential navel-gazing on the part of the tax inspector.

Implodes halfway through
Having read the Love of Stones I was looking forward to a book that should have been perfect for me, he's a great writer and the plot sounded like it had huge potential. Unfortunately, halfway through the novel he seems to run out of ideas and the rest is a rather limp falling-away that made me feel like I had to go back through it and see if I'd skipped a few pages. A big disappointment considering how talented the author is.