In this stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world’s most popular thriller writer. The Lost Symbol is a masterstroke of storytelling that finds famed symbologist Robert Langdon in a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths . . . all under the watchful eye of Brown’s most terrifying villain to date. Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol is an intelligent, lightning-paced story with surprises at every turn. This is Dan Brown’s most exciting novel yet.
Dan Brown's first novel since his mega-bestseller 2003 The DaVinci Code now arrives in mass-market paperback. The Lost Symbol propels Robert Langdon on a wild twelve-hour race through Washington D.C. on an urgent search for keys to the secrets of freemasonry, the Founding Fathers, and psychokinesis.
“Dan Brown brings sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead . . . His code and clue-filled book is dense with exotica . . . amazing imagery . . . and the nonstop momentum that makes The Lost Symbol impossible to put down. Splendid. . . . Another mind-blowing Robert Langdon story.” —New York Times
“Thrilling in the extreme, a definite page-flipper.” —Daily News (New York)
“Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of beautifully spaced reveals and a socko unveiling of the killer’s true identity.” —Washington Post
“The wait is over. The Lost Symbol is here—and you don’t have to be a Freemason to enjoy it . . . .Thrilling and entertaining, like the experience on a roller coaster.” —Los Angeles Times
“Robert Langdon remains a terrific hero, a bookish intellectual who’s cool in a crisis and quick on his feet . . . .The codes are intriguing, the settings present often-seen locales in a fresh light, and Brown keeps the pages turning.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A fascinating pleasure. . . . Upends our usual assumptions about the world we think we know.” —Newsweek
“A roaring ride. . . . A caper filled with puzzles, grids, symbols, pyramids and a secret that can bestow ‘unfathomable power.’” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Dan Brown is a master of the breathless, puzzle-driven thriller.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
After scores of Da Vinci Code knockoffs, spinoffs, copies and caricatures, Brown has had the stroke of brilliance to set his breakneck new thriller not in some far-off exotic locale, but right here in our own backyard. Everyone off the bus, and welcome to a Washington, D.C., they never told you about on your school trip when you were a kid, a place steeped in Masonic history that, once revealed, points to a dark, ancient conspiracy that threatens not only America but the world itself. Returning hero Robert Langdon comes to Washington to give a lecture at the behest of his old mentor, Peter Solomon. When he arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his lecture, he finds, instead of an audience, Peter's severed hand mounted on a wooden base, fingers pointing skyward to the Rotunda ceiling fresco of George Washington dressed in white robes, ascending to heaven. Langdon teases out a plethora of clues from the tattooed hand that point toward a secret portal through which an intrepid seeker will find the wisdom known as the Ancient Mysteries, or the lost wisdom of the ages. A villain known as Mal'akh, a steroid-swollen, fantastically tattooed, muscle-bodied madman, wants to locate the wisdom so he can rule the world. Mal'akh has captured Peter and promises to kill him if Langdon doesn't agree to help find the portal. Joining Langdon in his search is Peter's younger sister, Kathleen, who has been conducting experiments in a secret museum. This is just the kickoff for a deadly chase that careens back and forth, across, above and below the nation's capital, darting from revelation to revelation, pausing only to explain some piece of wondrous, historical esoterica. Jealous thriller writerswill despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again.
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It's not for the expected reasons. Sure, Robert Langdon's love for semiotics and tweed jackets echo those of another professorial type named Jones, but Dan Brown's hero eschews action for more cerebral approaches, leaving what passes for ass-kicking to his beautiful code-breaking sidekick, Sophie Neveu. The emphasis on "the sacred feminine" in tandem with those millennia-old skeletons crawling out of the Catholic Church's closet echo Katherine Neville's 1988 bestseller The Eight, which also played fast and loose with accepted history (even as it made readers feel smarter) and beefed up the girl power. One could also make the argument that Brown has expanded and enhanced the hallowed master plots of Lester Dent (Doc Savage), taking pulp perfection to a bursting extreme. But for me, when I returned to it recently, The Da Vinci Code exhibited strange premonitions of Stieg Larsson's Millennium novels, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, two books that both emulate and transcend obvious influences.
Brown and Larsson are both better at crafting narrative engines than sentences, and both manage to hook the reader with seemingly unimportant expository dumps and rambling pages of dialogue. What really links these two authors together, however, is the sheer, unadulterated joy that comes through in their thrillers. Clearly, both love what they write and are made giddy by the dual prospects of educating the reader about their pet projects (Brown on how ancient religious rites permeate society, Larsson on the way society abuses and discards women) and finding clever ways to keep the pages turning. Such fervor can't be faked; readers not only smell the false article a mile away, they put up with a lot -- including frequent turns of cliché -- to get to a taste of the real thing.
And there lies the rub of The Lost Symbol, a book six years in the making. Its contents appear to be linked inexorably to the years of hype and expectation that formed the wake of The Da Vinci Code. It can't possibly sell as well as its predecessor -- or can it? More pragmatically, can it sell in sufficient quantities to meet the hopes and bottom line of its publisher, Doubleday (now merged with Knopf) and that of its parent company, Random House? The same conglomerate went through similar hype deflation a decade ago with Thomas Harris's Hannibal, which fans justifiably hated for how Harris turned a menacing villain into a cannibalistic hero, the apparent result of an author falling too hard for his creation. (And the less said about Hannibal Rising, the better.)
No wonder then that the mood at the launch party for The Lost Symbol, held on September 14th in midtown Manhattan's opulent Gotham Hall, was a mix of stately old-world glamour and barely suppressed anxiety, with so many corners of the publishing industry having a vested interest in the book's success. And yet, perversely, as soon as The Lost Symbol blares its opening "FACT" -- about a document locked in the safe of the director of the CIA -- high stakes and impossible expectations are dissipated with the gleeful pop of a balloon.
Let's get right to the bottom line: The Lost Symbol works, albeit with reservations. It works because whatever mental alchemy Dan Brown needed to turn away from the noise and ramp up his creative signal, to stay away from distractions and focus on the story, takes hold with the opening utterance that "the secret is how to die." From the first sentence, we know what we're in for: there's a traitor in the midst of a sequestered society -- this time, as long-rumored, it's the Freemasons -- whose members include the most powerful people in the land, and our villain hungrily searches for the solution to an age-old proof known to few, doubted by many, and scoffed at by far more. Last time out the quest was for the Holy Grail; now it's for The Lost Word, or maybe, as I kept thinking of it as I turned the pages, L'Elisir Pensiero (for the Italian-challenged, that's the "Elixir of Thought.")
Once again, Robert Langdon is Our Man Skeptic. Once again, he's summoned by an early-morning phone call at the behest of someone he trusts, this time his longtime mentor Peter Solomon, who besides his father is "the other man I never want to disappoint." But the Smithsonian bigwig has gone MIA, and the pretext for luring Langdon to the nation's capital -- a last-minute substitution to give a lecture -- gives way to more pressing concerns, like reuniting Masonic pyramids with their capstones, cracking codes that mix multiple eras of semiotics, incurring the ire of larger-than-life CIA directors, and staying out of the way of the aforementioned villain, who has a nasty tendency to make grandiose statements, go to extreme lengths to stay celibate (just like The Da Vinci Code's albino assassin -- what's up with that?), and engage in torture tactics possibly condoned by the previous administration.
The Lost Symbol has much to impart about the mind-body problem as filtered through the work of Peter's younger sister Katherine, who more than dabbles in noetic science, or "leading edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness", according to the website of the real-life Institute for Noetic Science, based in Northern California. "The truth was that Katherine was doing science so advanced that it no longer resembled science," which means that her personality is a bit lacking when she's in the midst of danger -- as she often is -- but brightens up in flashbacks when she explains how a human soul can be weighed ("High-precision microbalance...Resolution down to a few micrograms"), or when she chides Langdon's for his innate skepticism with regard her chosen field: "Is it not possible that we are still living in the Dark Ages, still mocking the suggestion of 'mystical' forces that we cannot see or comprehend? History, if it has taught us anything at all, has taught us that the strange ideas we deride today will one day be our celebrated truths." The psychology is purely of the pop variety, its predilection for positive thinking glossing over the dark groupthink-y side of communal thought. Katherine's statement about how truths are tempered by changing times, however, bears out in a different way, as pertaining to technology. It's strange and discombobulating -- in a thriller so chiefly concerned with Ancient Mysteries and sacred rites -- to see an iPhone used as an important plot device, Langdon scratching his befuddled head over Twitter ("You know, I still haven't learned how to send a twitter." " 'A tweet,' " [Katherine] corrected, laughing"), and a young woman gushing over Katherine because she's blogged about her. But because Brown has wisely let six years of time elapse between adventures, he's right to acknowledge the leaps and bounds made on the technological scale, even as he takes care not to dwell on them too much.
While The Lost Symbol operates through Langdon's earnest, dangerously na?ve eyes (the idea that teachers speak openly, his italicized declaration late in the book, and don't teach in code, seems a tad disingenuous from the man who earlier on teased his students with all manner of hidden hints and winking assertions), Brown hasn't lost his sense of self-deprecation and cornball humor. "New York Editor" Jonas Faukman -- the anagrammed version of Brown's editor at Doubleday, Jason Kaufman -- reappears to further the plot, grow frustrated at Langdon's inability to deliver his latest manuscript, and shake his head that "Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors." A woman who recognizes Langdon on the chartered plane to Washington enthuses over his book "about the sacred feminine and the church," only to apologize, commiserating that he must get tired of being recognized: "Your uniform gave you away...[t]hose turtlenecks you wear are so dated. You'd look much sharper in a tie!" Even at the apotheosis of danger, Langdon still has time to muse that "calming visualization had been the only way he had managed to survive a recent stint in an enclosed MRI machine...that and a triple dose of Valium."
Eventually order is restored, the Solomon family finds unexpected keys, and Langdon gapes anew at the wonders of Washington D.C., from the top of the Monument to the bowels of government chambers; untold connections keep clicking into place. Brown's brew is strong and entertaining, like the Saturday afternoon serials of yore, enough to dissolve the frenetic chaos of real life for a few hours. But The Lost Symbol wages a continuous battle between the cerebral and the visceral, with the balance tipping too often towards the former at the expense of the latter. Saving the world and unlocking its magical mysteries are all well and good, but maybe next time the stakes have to hit Robert Langdon more locally to initiate the man into a more publicly known closed society -- those of the smartest action heroes in popular media. --Sarah Weinman
Sarah Weinman writes "The Criminalist," a monthly column coming soon to the Barnes & Noble Review, and "Dark Passages," an online crime fiction column for the Los Angeles Times. She blogs about the genre at http://www.sarahweinman.com.
