Books with Secrets

A little while ago I started fantasizing about writing a novel with a secret subtext. I'm not talking about your standard layers of literary meaning, but actual hidden messages--sequences of characters that could be revealed through some sort puzzle-solving or decoding process. Ideally the surface of the novel would be convincing enough that most readers would not realize there was anything to be decoded. After having thought a little bit about how I would go about building such a thing, I started to notice signs that such novels may already walk among us. Here are few books that I suspect of harboring hidden mysteries, but that I'm too lazy to try to decode in earnest.

• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: The book's appendix describes a cryptographic system called Solitaire that uses a deck of cards as a key. The wikipedia entry for Cryptonomicon notes that some readers suspect the typos in the hardcover edition of concealing a coded message. The obvious next step here would be to find a Solitaire key -- a complete ordering of a deck of cards -- specified somehow in the book. The wikipedia entry also notes, by the way, that a code has already been found in Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.
  


• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson: (Psychic spoiler alert) Even though I haven't even finished this first volume of Stephenson's Baroque cycle, it's obvious to me that Enoch Root is a member of a secret society of math/science geeks descended from the Pythagoreans and dedicated to fostering the geek revolution that will save the world. My only question is whether this fact will be made clear in the story or remain a hidden mystery. In any case, the foot note on p639 tells us up front that there's a coded message in Eliza's letter. Are there coded messages that aren't footnoted, as well?


• Anything by Gene Wolfe: His lacunae are so carefully constructed that you can't help but wonder whether a grand master plan would emerge if you could fill in all the gaps.


• The Translator by John Crowley: A Russian poet who writes riddle-like poems involving word play sends a strangely worded letter to our heroine. Is it possible that if she had been less clueless the Cuban missile crisis could have been avoided? I don't have a clue, either, but I smell a puzzle.


• Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone by J. K. Rowling: As far as I can tell, the logic puzzle Hermione solves at the climax of the book cannot be solved with the information the reader is given (if I'm wrong about this please correct me!): Hermione has more information than we do. But I do believe that with the information we're given we can reduce the ambiguity to a single binary decision. This ambiguity seems too carefully structured to be accidental.
  


• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: Chapter titles and numbers are repeated according to a consistent but odd system. I haven't finished this one either (see previous post), so maybe it all makes literary sense in the end. I guess that's a reliable way to turn any book into a mystery: never finish it.

Maybe some of these suspected crypto-novels have already been unmasked. If so, let me know! Or drop a comment with your own literary paranoid fantasies.

Planetary

If the great achievement of Watchmen was to bring psychological realism to the improbable notion of costumed super-heroes, the achievement of Warren Ellis' Planetary is to dissolve the barrier between our reality and the sphere of the super-powered without compromising the weirdness of the uber. Drawing on the high paranoia of postmodern classics like The Crying of Lot 49 and the reality-meddling of Dick, Ellis creates a secret history in which versions of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Fu Manchu, Sherlock Holmes, Godzilla, and various other famous characters coexist and interact. In one of the title's most brilliant maneuvers, the Fantastic Four have their echo in an inscrutably villainous group known only as The Four, who apparently became the "secret chiefs" of the planet a long time ago. The four-member Planetary team (our heroes) in turn echo The Four. The distinction between the ideologies of the two groups is subtle: while the Planetary team act as historians and conservationists of the bizarre (their motto is "It's a strange world...Let's keep it that way"), the Four horde and exploit wonders. "We're adventurers, my crewmates and I," one of the Four tells us, "on the human adventure. And you can't all come along." Ellis himself walks the fuzzy line between these positions, dropping just enough hints about the big picture to make you believe there is one, but not enough to let you see it.

The first 18 issues have been collected in three paperback volumes.