Dan Brown’s book will still be read by millions, so what if they’re disappointed, asks Kishore Singh
Like most people, I read Angels and Demons after Dan Brown found fame and fortune with The Da Vinci Code — and no, I didn’t like the movie either — even going through Digital Fortress as a sworn-into-the-secret-pact Brown loyalist. And waited for the return of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon with his bag of hidden codes and mysteries and refreshingly novel way of exploring the medieval world that wraps itself around our here and now.
Alas, some things are better anticipated than fulfilled. The Lost Symbol is everything that the Code was not — it is formulaic, repetitive, suffers from a weak plot, Langdon is written up as a wimp, the villain makes Mogambo look more evil than comic, and the unlayering is as exciting as peeling an onion while your eyes tear up. Brown, it seems, used up his whole bag of tricks in Angels and Demons, repeating a chunk of it in the Code when the former didn’t register on the publishing richter scale, and seems to have had nothing more left over for any new book that flogs the same subject to its certain death. That he took 509 pages to do it is a remarkable ode of faith on the part of his editors, and an act of faith for his readers who might well wonder whether the original Brown has been replaced with a Noetic clone, but still the hysteria remains. No one believes a Brown can be so bad, it’s unreadable. They’re wrong.
Somewhat predictably, the book begins with Langdon being summoned — this time to Washington — where a mentor’s hand, cut at the elbow and placed at the heart of the Capitol Building, has been tattooed to provide the secret code to the Ancient Mysteries that he must discover if the owner of the hand, Peter Solomon, is to survive. Goading him on is the evil Mal’akh, a member of the secret Masonic society’s rare 33rd level, who must find a hidden portal before the night is out, setting Langdon off on a reluctant chase beneath the Capitol Building, through a maze of chambers and tunnels and staircases, uniting with Peter’s sister and Noetic scientist Katherine Solomon, whose laboratory Mal’akh wants to destroy for its attempt to reconcile mankind’s future with its ancient past.
Unfortunately, the suspense fails to build up, leave alone hold, partly because the Masonic order does not excite the same degree of voyeuristic curiosity as organised religion and the “lies” of papal Rome, Joseph, Jesus or Mary Magdalene’s purported sex lives that Langdon “nails” in the previous bestsellers, but largely because the “secrets” he uncovers in Washington, including Freemason George Washinton’s apotheosis to godhood, are neither revealing, nor extraordinary, and certainly not scandalous. (The BJP, the VHP and the RSS, on the other hand, may want to recommend it as a school text for its references to the Vedas, the Bhagvad Gita, Krishna, Buddha et cetera being repositories of mankind’s ancient and future knowledge.) As Langdon and Katherine move from one clue to the next, one can’t help wondering why they don’t have a more holistic outlook considering they’re both familiar with the capital’s history and architecture — pyramids, satanic pentacles, Masonic compasses and all.
If the plot is on life-support, Brown unfortunately gives up the ghost of the storyteller, interspersing the jagged “action” with wholly unwanted diatribes on a variety of subjects that slow down the already meandering plot. Since the story is limited to just one night, it could have been written as a taut thriller, instead it ends up resembling a dowager’s patchwork quilt with hardly any link between one patch and the next.
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Which is why this spoiler: Pump up the steroids and wear makeup, and your own dad won’t recognise you! Don’t test our faith any more, Mr Brown, we’re outside the code.
THE LOST SYMBOL
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 509
Price: Rs 699
