Code to Zero / Man from St Peters

The story opens with an unforgettable scene. A man awakens on the floor of a men's rest room in Union Station in Washington, D.C. He has a terrible headache and no memory of who he is. He finds that he is dressed like a street person, and a man awakening in another part of the rest room tells him that he passed out from too much drink.

The story evolves from there at solving three questions. First, who is he? Second, how did he lose his memory? Third, how can he avert the potential harm that led him to lose his memory?

The story takes place primarily in 1958 as the United States was about to launch its first satellite, Explorer I. Flashbacks take the action back as far as 1941, when many of the characters were students together at Harvard University.

When people ask me about a novel, there are a certain set of predictable questions that I get. As I thought about this book, I realized that it had something for almost everyone. My wife always asks me if it's a love story. Well, this one certainly qualifies as it builds the emotional relationships between two of the leading characters over 27 years.

The next question is whether it is a fast read or not. This one also qualifies, because you are pulled along by the action.

After that, someone always asks me if the story is like any other stories they might have read. Well, this one has echoes of The Manchurian Candidate (about mind control and induced memory loss), the best Cold War spy novels of Le Carre (with agents, double agents, and double crosses), the unrelenting action of The Day of the Jackel (charging from one crisis to another), and many elements from Love Story (irresistible attraction being overcome by events).

I find that the truly successful and popular novels always add some important factual knowledge for the reader, that forever changes the reader's perception of the world. This book contains many wonderful details about the technology behind Explorer I that I would have loved to have known before. You will find these gems in a brief paragraph that precedes each little section in the book (divisions in time are denoted this way). It also is mind-opening in its development of the problem how someone would find out who they are if they lost their memory and had no resources.

So why didn't I say that this book was a five star or higher book? Well, it suffers from very poor editing and proofreading. Every few pages, there is an appalling mistake that takes you completely out of the story while you focus on the mistake. Let me give you a few examples that most people would have caught. (1) The epilogue talks about Apollo 11 landing on the Moon and proudly proclaims that the year is 1968 in large bold type at the top of the page. Oops! Can people so soon have forgotten that it was 1969? Very sloppy. (2) The story makes a great fuss about how one of the characters will get into a house in Alabama. Then, another character mysteriously has a key when you would expect that there was no possibility of him having a key to the house. I was all ready for how he would break into the house, or how he would locate a hidden key. It was a big letdown when he used a key that shouldn't have been there. (3) One of the characters drives around in a Ford model that didn't come along for another two decades or so. And there was no reason for Mr. Follett to even tell us what model it was. This is pure sloppiness. I could go on.

My advice to the reader is to simply expect lots of little mistakes, and to try to ignore them.

My advice to Mr. Follett is that he correct the worst of these errors before the next printing of what is sure to be a top selling book for some time to come.

Other readers who are not so generous will also quibble with using a public event that obviously turned out historically in a certain way as the backdrop for the novel. I must admit that the story would have been more interesting if I did not know that the satellite would successfully launch.

Perhaps the story could have been made into a science fiction story where someone was trying to be sure that history stayed the same, along the lines of many Star Trek novels. That would have reminded readers of even more stories they have read before. Personally, I think that would have been a mere gimmick.

Perhaps the only reasonable alternative would have been to focus around a future event of significance, like the first use of high speed engines capable of approaching light speed. But that would have meant I would never have learned all of the interesting details about Explorer I. All in all, I'm satisfied with the choice of using this event for this story.

Following up on this story, I have an idea for you to consider. Imagine yourself pursuing an adventure in which you were shabbily dressed and had no money, no credit cards, no cellular telephone, and no assistance. How would you conduct yourself to get the resources you need and have fun doing it?

Always be on the lookout for the right stuff!