It’s hard to know where to begin talking about a Dan Brown book. There is the onslaught of PR that comes before the book’s release (secured by video camera and guards), the bizarre guesswork about the release date (9/15/09), and the people convinced he is just wrong, about so much:
- Literary offenses: Tom Chivers and The Telegraph spotlight Dan Brown’s “20 worst sentences”
- Cultural offenses: Slate’s David Plotz writes that Brown gets everything “awesomely wrong” about the nation’s capital
- Historical offenses: The Telegraph rakes Brown over the coals with “50 factual errors”
This is not to mention religious offenses, certain to come from various Christian or Masonic groups, the two groups primarily dealt with in this novel.
So, the Brown book has to be taken for what it is rather than what it isn’t. It’s a “thriller” in genre and so should be judged accordingly. And this is why the book just isn’t as good as The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons.
The Lost Symbol follows Robert Langdon as he tries to unpuzzle where the Masons have hidden The Lost Word that will unlock the wisdom of the ages. The problem this novel has is that Brown has really limited the scope—we follow Langdon and his adversary, we follow one CIA security officer and one researcher. The bigger web that this secret society casts is never as fully actualized as the conspiracies in his other novels.
The stakes just don’t seem very high—at one point it could be boiled to this: Langdon must prevent a video clip from being uploaded to YouTube.
Part of this has to do with Brown’s apparent love for the Masons and all they represent—he goes out of his way to build understanding for their rituals and worldviews.
The novel’s basic philosophical premise seems to be that Masons are the good guys, a group dedicated to protecting ancient wisdom that allows us to each become gods. Brown’s fawns over their open-minded pluralism and sees in them an answer to reconciling all faiths—Christian, Buddhist, Islam, Jewish, etc. These are all merely pointing to the same end, a God who would empower each of us. To get there, Brown liberally quotes various leaders from each group out of context to highlight peripheral similarities in language. Never mind group’s claims to exclusivity or simple ways the various contradict one another.
But after establishing them as good the job becomes more difficult to make us care why their secrets get out. If they’re so good and have such logical explanations for all activities, what is there to fear?
The pacing, like his other works, is brisk as it rotates points of view. The symbolic puzzles are here as well, intertwined with historical DC venues. But the book lacks the heart and ambition the other two had.
If you like mysteries or puzzle-based books, look at The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno. It has complex, round characters and personalizes some of the bigger questions that Brown dodges.
Additional Dan Brown oddities:
- A making of the book, literally the way they made the book.
- Good Morning America’s interview, who spent time searching some of the sites referenced in the book
- Brown’s own willingness to feed the fire with “bizarre facts” and a “symbol quest”
- Slate has a (satirical) interactive Dan Brown sequel generator
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