The Dan Brown Enigma (26 page)

The review ended with the speculation that people are not likely to be standing up and debating freemasonry in Washington after reading Brown’s novel ‘the way people did Brown’s radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in
Code
. That book hit a deep cultural nerve for obvious reasons;
The Lost Symbol
is more like the experience on any roller coaster – thrilling, entertaining and then it’s over.’
[276]

Newsweek
called the book contrived. ‘You have to swallow a lot of coincidences. You have to believe that a man will board a private jet and fly from Boston to Washington DC on a moment’s notice without once speaking to the man who asks him to make the flight. You have to buy into the idea that fathers do not recognise sons. You have to accept that people do not talk as they do in life but instead converse in whole paragraphs in which they exchange large clumps of abstruse information.’

Indeed the review also said Brown doesn’t care much about the normal conventions of fiction. ‘He doesn’t care about things that occupy most novelists – realistic dialogue, characterisation and apparently neither do his legions of readers.’ Complaining about this is the same as complaining that BMW isn’t a good car manufacturer. It’s not important. Brown, according to the review, ‘is a maze-maker who builds a puzzle then walks you through it. His genius lies in uncovering odd facts and suppressed history, stirring them together into a complicated stew and then saying,
what if?
’

Ultimately the review also praises the novel as being a fun read. ‘Brown may not be much as a conventional novelist, but he knows how to make you keep turning pages.’
[277]

The opinion in
The National Post
was not enthusiastic. The reviewer, Robert Wiersema, believed it was wrong to stack Brown’s books up against other novelists: ‘any new work from Dan Brown needs to be evaluated on its own terms, and in the context of his other works.’ Evaluating it in this way, Wiersema found
The Lost Symbol
to be ‘a staggering disappointment’.

Wiersema felt that the new book lacked what was unique about his previous work. ‘Mal’akh, for example, is a psychotic villain straight out of B-movie central casting, always implausibly one step ahead of Langdon and his cohorts. He also bears an uncomfortably close similarity to Francis Dolarhyde, the tattooed, Blake-obsessed, apotheosis-seeking killer in Thomas Harris’
Red Dragon
.’

The plotting and direction, Wiersema felt, were considered to be clumsy, and the trademark twists and turns that Brown had used so well in previous novels were not in evidence in
The Lost Symbol
. ‘An effective approach in his previous books, here the metronomic regularity of leading declaratives (“If Langdon had not yet grasped his role here tonight, soon he would” and “…Robert Langdon might suffer a similar fate” etc.) is almost insulting in its clumsy manipulativeness.’

Wiersema went on to state that Brown had insulted the reader when using his usual procedure of keeping information back to build tension while the real identity of Mal’akh was ‘so thuddingly obvious I would be stunned if a single reader hadn’t figured it out less than a hundred pages in. This makes the next 350 pages, and the big “reveal” an exercise in frustration. I was distracted from the narrative as I tried to convince myself that Brown couldn’t possibly be so obvious, couldn’t possibly stoop so clumsily. Unfortunately, he was. And he did.’

The review ended by calling
The Lost Symbol
a ‘heavy-handed, clumsy thriller’. The disappointment, it said, came from knowing that Brown can do better. ‘If it didn’t have Brown’s name on the cover, it would disappear without a ripple. Sure, it sucks the reader in, but, ultimately, it plays them for suckers.’
[278]

In the UK
The Daily Telegraph
also gave
The Lost Symbol
a rough ride, saying that although it wasn’t ‘quite the literary train wreck expected, there is less distraction from the familiar hokum which, precisely because it is so familiar, looks ever-less like ingenious puzzle-spinning and ever-more like a wearisome party trick.’

The reviewer, Jeremy Jehu, suggested that as
The Da Vinci Code
had divided families, perhaps
The Lost Symbol
might bring them back into the fold because ‘they could all find it simply bland.’ Jehu certainly didn’t hold back. He called the narrative ‘lumpen, witless, adjectivally promiscuous and addicted to using italics to convey excitement where more adept thriller writers generally prefer to use words.’ If the book had a saving grace, he said, it is the setting, which gave Brown much more opportunity to get his locations right because it was set in America, ‘not Europe, a culture whose manners and mechanics Dan Brown utterly and hilariously failed to comprehend in
The Da Vinci Code
and
Angels & Demons
.’
[279]
Harsh words.

Countering that point of view was
Time,
which said that the story was fun, if not a little bruising. Even though there were a lot of things the
Time
reviewer did not like about the book, there were some fundamental things that were right. ‘It would be irresponsible not to point out that the general feel, if not all the specifics, of Brown’s cultural history is entirely correct,’ wrote Lev Grossman. ‘He loves showing us places where our carefully tended cultural boundaries – between Christian and pagan, sacred and secular, ancient and modern – are actually extraordinarily messy.’

For example, Langdon points out that the Capitol building was created as a shrine to the Temple of Vesta, ‘one of Rome’s most venerated mystical shrines,’ and that the Temple features a painting that shows George Washington looking like Zeus. ‘Power is power, and it flows from religious vessels to political ones with disturbing ease. This may or not be obvious, but it is true, and deeply weird, and not at all trivial.’

Grossman also said that in Brown’s world there are no such things as coincidences ‘and things are not just things: they mean something. Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, is after all a symbologist (following a branch of human intellectual inquiry that – it cannot be stated enough times – doesn’t exist, at Harvard or anywhere else).’
[280]

Another area where Grossman provided positive feedback was in talking about Langdon’s ‘inexhaustive sense of wonderment’. According to the review, Langdon’s inner struggle lies between his healthy scepticism that is firmly routed in academia and ‘the ever mounting evidence that the world contains something miraculous that said scepticism can’t account for.’

Grossman concluded that in
The Lost Symbol
Brown was trying to illustrate the fact that Washington DC is one of the world’s great capitals, with its own share of secrets, mystery and intrigue, ‘one that can hold its own with Paris or London or Rome.’ Brown, Grossman says, was trying to reclaim Washington’s richness, ‘its darkness, and its weirdness. It’s probably a quixotic effort, but it is nevertheless touchingly valiant.’

So we know what the reviewers thought of
The Lost Symbol
but what about the readers? At the time of writing more than 700 people had written a review for
The Lost Symbol
on Amazon UK, with the book getting an average three-star rating (193 people had given it five stars and 167 one star).

One reviewer who gave the book five stars called it ‘excellent,’ and said, ‘You couldn’t ask for anything better from Dan Brown.’ But the one general thread running through the comments was that
The Lost Symbol
was disappointing compared to
The Da Vinci Code
.

‘Don’t get me wrong – the book is certainly a page turner and in the style of Dan Brown always leaves you on a cliffhanger wanting to know what happens in the next chapter – but I felt the story line was a little disappointing and seemed to lack depth and fizzle away towards the end. I expect more from this author now and am interested to see how (or if) the character develops in the future.’
[281]
That said, the reviewer still gave the book a four-star rating, even though he said Langdon’s actions had become ‘a bit boring’.

Another four-star review said the book was entertaining and ‘like all of Brown’s books it is hard to put down with cliffhangers at the end of each of the short chapters. I enjoyed the book and I guess the best conclusion is that this, like his other works, is pure escapism, as they are very far-fetched and the plots do stretch the imagination.’
[282]

At the lower end of the spectrum, one two-star review opined that the ‘plot didn’t flow as it was broken up by too many “facts” and I couldn’t personally understand the links that the characters were making to move the plot forward. For this reason, I found myself scanning certain pages and wishing I could hurry up and finish it.’
[283]

Another reviewer said, ‘You do not sympathise with any of the characters whatsoever. In fact you are more likely to wish that the villain would come out on top. At least that would make things interesting. Dan Brown has concentrated far too much on facts and figures that end up becoming awfully tedious, and you end up feeling that you would have been better off reading an encyclopaedia. I suspect that, as can sometimes happen after an author becomes successful, Dan Brown has been a little lazy with this novel. I hate to be so negative, as I really do enjoy most books I read, but this book was really bad.’
[284]

And finally, one of the many one-star reviews intoned, ‘This is a complete load of rubbish, based clearly on a formula which may have worked once or even twice but clearly it is short on ideas and relying very much on reputation to carry it through.’
[285]

Another urged readers to save their money, while one ended by saying, ‘Face it, Dan Brown, your basic story wore out with
The Da Vinci Code
, time to try a different approach.’

So we can say from the above that first, the book is entertaining for some readers but not for all, and secondly that it reflects the world around us through the facts, realistic locations and culture that Brown has gone to great lengths to include in the book. The locations are certainly real and described accurately.

However, it is formula writing. Brown hit on his formula with
Angels & Demons
and has simply substituted locations and science, but the characters are very similar. Langdon’s female companions are almost identical, the villains are very similar as are the plot lines. On that principle, Brown falls down with
The Lost Symbol
.

Is it an adventure? Those readers who gave it four or five stars think it is. Many said it was a page-turner and very hard to put down because of Brown’s trademark cliffhanger chapter endings. So we can say that most people think it is an adventure.

Is it written in a witty stylish way? The answer to this is probably not, because there isn’t any indication from the reviews or comments from readers about this book being witty or even having any humour or charm at all. Most of the reviewers agree that the writing is not good or is heavy-handed, which makes the idea of it being written in a stylish way a little difficult to accept. Still, it is up to the reader to decide if Brown’s fifth novel meets the five principles or not.

This brings us to the facts and the science. ‘Our history is as sick and weird as anybody’s!’ Lev Grossman wrote in his
Time
review. ‘There’s signal in the noise, order in the chaos! It just takes a degree from a nonexistent Harvard department to see it.’
[286]
Brown says it’s almost all real. He puts a Fact page right at the beginning of this book and expects us to embrace his version of the truth. But is it fact or is it all smoke and mirrors?

N
ow we’ve come full circle in the Dan Brown story, there is one question that only Brown can answer.

In both
The Da Vinci Code
and in
The Lost Symbol
Brown started each book with a Fact page. In the case of
The Lost Symbol
that page says that all the rituals, science, artwork, organisations and monuments in the novel are real. The book opens with a ritual where the new initiate to the Freemasons drinks red wine out of a human skull that represents the decay of the flesh while the wine represents blood. This is said to be part of the 33rd Degree ritual and it is performed at night in the Scottish Rite House of The Temple in Washington DC. According to Brown, ‘The ceremony is described accurately. The fiction comes in as to whether or not it still happens at this moment in history in this room.’
[287]

However, this claim was refuted on NBC’s
Today
programme in October 2009 by the Grand Archivist of the Scottish Rite of the Freemasons, Arturo de Hoyos, who is also a 33rd degree Mason. He said that there were errors on the first page of the book. ‘We don’t perform the 33rd Degree in this building. We don’t confer it at night. The candidates to the members are dressed wrong. And the ceremony’s wrong.’

But in the same programme Lodge 198 in Colorado opened its doors to the cameras. The Senior Warden in this lodge said he was sick and tired of people saying that Freemasons had no secrets. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.’

This lodge practices alchemy, which in the old days tried to turn base metals into gold but now represents personal transformation, taking men who are already good and turning them into something special. Initiates into the brotherhood are taken through an intense ritual that begins when the initiate’s vision is taken away by a ‘hoodwink’ which is placed over his head. Dressed as the Grim Reaper, a Master Mason warns the initiate that he will be enlightened, overcome darkness and be purified, but if he is afraid he is not to continue.

The initiate then goes into a chamber of reflection where the ‘hoodwink’ is removed ‘and you’re presented with what is a very interesting image. And Dan Brown described it pretty well in his book.’
[288]

Brown’s hope with this book is that ‘it starts to pull people in the direction of the ancient mysteries, to look at the world through a different lens. This idea of the power of the human mind and the ability of thought to actually transform the world in which we live,’ he explained.