“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.”
–The Secret Teachings of All Ages
“‘After all, every great philosophical shift in history began with a single bold idea.”
--Dean Galloway
In the vein of full disclosure, I should say I’m not a big fan of Dan Brown as a writer. Anytime an author is suspected of plagiarism, riddles his prose with romanticism and cliché, and relies on a pretty formulaic approach to plot, they are probably not going to end up very high on my favorites list.
“The Lost Symbol” is no exception when it comes to Brown’s shortcomings; they are omnipresent. His overly cryptic chaper endings are borderline hilarious and his formal style of sharing history, background and even physical addresses can be a little off-putting in a work of fiction. His stilted prose and reliance on overly emotional, maudlin and dramatic utterances can occasionally take you out of the tale a bit, even if only for a bit. He also leans pretty heavily on literary coincidence, such as when he places a genius cabbie in Langdon’s path at one point. Beyond these perceived problems, it’s, as usual with Brown, an easy read, aided by very short chapters and a fast-paced story arc.
“In that moment, standing atop the Capitol, with the warmth of the sun streaming down all around him, Robert Langdon felt a powerful upwelling deep within himself. It was an emotion he had never felt this profoundly in his entire life.
“Hope.”
All that being said, though, Brown’s strength is obvious and undeniable: the dude can tell a story, flat-out.
Brown has come through yet again with a compelling tale; though it sounds vaguely familiar to other plot lines, he uses an eerie and foreboding prologue to launch into a robust story. He delves thoroughly and deeply into Masonic ritual and its importance with elite members of American society, weaving in some pretty cutting-edge thoughts about the actual, physical power of the human mind in the process.
“‘What if I told you that a thought … any tiny idea that forms in your mind … actually has mass? What if I told you that a thought is an actual thing, a measurable entity, with a measurable mass?’”
Robert Langdon offers up familiar difficulties in his role as protagonist. His oddly stubborn, unchanging, narrow-mindness seems at odds with his position as a symbologist who has theoretically been taught to question everything. It’s also amusing to me that he somehow sort of forgot that he was in possession of an ultra-secret, ancient talisman entrusted to him by his best friend. Occasionally, his ego becomes the driving point of the story, used to excess at times, such as when he stops to lecture about the history of a painting as he and a companion are being pursued by freaking SWAT teams and Green Beret types. For some reason, Brown also always feels as if he has to incorporate some hints or teases of romantic links for Langdon, though they inevitably go nowhere.
In “The Lost Symbol,” Brown ventures into some vaguely homo-erotic passages, plus some disturbing human-sacrifice, sensory-deprivation, torture and afterlife themes. All of this seems a bit of a departure for Brown, offering up some pretty bold ideas and depictions of very controversial, obscure and abstract areas. I thought his description of death and hell were rather brave, especially since, even though his books have been quite controversial at times, he sticks pretty close to his company line that all of his stories are extremely derivative of actual places, actual events and actual history.
“He was pure consciousness now … a fleshless sentience suspended in the emptiness of a vast universe.”
“‘The Bible, like many ancient texts, is a detailed exposition of the most sophisticated machine ever created … the human mind.’”
This particular book features a nice twist at the end, and the conclusion itself is a little unexpected. It gets a little dense in terms of reading at the end, which impacts and changes the overall look and feel of the book itself; the conversation is shifted rather surprisingly.
I did feel as if Brown has created a rather religious book in some ways. Of course, this is not exactly a change in course for him as an author, but by bringing in a lot of disparate teachings and side-themes, he enlarges the discussion in important ways.
“Since the beginning of time, the ignorant had always screamed the loudest, herding the unsuspecting masses and forcing them to do their bidding. They defended their worldly desires by citing Scripture they did not understand. They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions. Now, after all these years, mankind had finally managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.”
The danger is that Brown is becoming the Tom Clancy of religious lore; it’s an equation that seems to work for him and I’ll never argue that he can’t put together an engrossing story, but at the end of the day, an author should always fight the perception that he is writing the same book over and over again.
I’m not so sure Brown is winning that fight … but then again, it’s a pretty good book.
“Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s technology. And so it had gone through the ages. The more man learned, the more he realized he did not know.”
“In the words of futurist Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
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