Independent on Sunday, The: Books: More Blofeld than Bill Gates

The Cryptographer

By Tobias Hill

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Tobias Hill's crack at a futuristic, blockbuster thriller is a puzzler in itself, an attempt to marry cut-out conventions to the remarkable poetic imagination transmuted into prose in his previous fiction.

His Cryptographer is, on first meeting, a Bond-film big-business baddie, crowded by hangers-on at the centre of his silicon-paved corporate HQ. A one-time teenage hacker who invented a digital language that could be stored in flowers, John Law is approaching middle age as "the world's first quadrillionaire", unimaginably rich from authoring the computer code that has replaced cash in the novel's 2020s setting. He's a kind of Bill Gates but more Blofeld than bore, rumoured even to have lodged data in human chromosomes. In place of a purring pussy, he has millennia- old trees transplanted into his corporate courtyards, and a fiddle in his accounts that seems designed to draw the Revenue on to him.

Anna Moore is their representative, a girl-'tec equally totted up from the textbook: single-save-for-cat in a stylish flat, heart lost to her ageing, drummed-out, dipsomaniac mentor; absent father, AbFab mother, higher-flying older sib. Her flaw or her saving grace is to believe that "love and money tend towards others" and that "greed and generosity are evidence of love". She wants to know who Law thinks about when he thinks about money, but, having drawn her apparently deliberately toward him, he pays his bill and closes her investigation.

Fortunately this is a red rag to a bull, and Anna can't keep herself away. On the cusp of a crack-up herself, she scents the same in her quarry and sets out to open a chink in the impregnability of a man who has spent his life constructing the unknowable, the code that can't be broken. Law has built his own San Simeon with the proceeds, on the Thames estuary at Erith of all places, a parish which he force- purchased for the purpose. Holed up there with a chainsmoking glamourpuss wife and a son who conducts daily experiments on his own diabetes, he waits, caught in a web of numbers, for our number- crunching heroine to chomp through the strands and free him.

Though the thriller-thrust starts to falter, Hill's broader purpose kicks in as Anna closes on the man behind the money. Conjoining the names of his central characters gives us Moore's Law, the dictum that computing power will double year on year, that once the snowball starts rolling it can only get bigger and more unstoppable. Though Law can indeed stop snow - a Christmas party at his estate features an artificial, landscape- wide thaw - he can't stop his own success, and the man who forged the unfathomable has become similarly so to his family. His wife suspects him not of infidelity but of courting his own fiscal destruction, something their son is already acting out with his insulin roulette.

In a sweet little reversal of expectation, Anna finds the Cryptographer playing with his boy, not 3-D chess or logorithmic ludo, but simple snakes and ladders, the first game, the one that teaches every child the way the world turns. Having remade money, Law is making the world go round single-handed, and it's too much for him or for anyone.

Anna's search for salvation must switch to herself, to her reintegration into a system where climbing career ladders leads to showdowns with snakes. Law, caught in a closed loop between the rungs and the reptiles, can't lift his head long enough to help what's happening around him, to the people who might otherwise buffer business away and give him something more to live for.

Hill's message is clear: salvation comes from remembering who we are, not what work makes us. There's a real relief to the resolution that the author engineers in the closing lines, one that outweighs the frustration of the thriller project, and we realise that another code-war has been waged here: between the demands of thriller-by- numbers conventions and the imperative to tell the truth about life. Sometimes the two can be one, but sometimes, as here, it pays to push them up against each other, and see which wins out.