It's fun that Katherine has "created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze", but not as fun as the heroine of Angels and Demons reaching similar conclusions "by using atomically synchronised cameras to observe a school of tuna fish". The heroine is Solomon's sister, Katherine, a specialist in "Noetic Science", which turns out to be Brown's usual mind-over-matter, quantum entanglement stuff. Also on the scene are a caustic CIA woman, the man in charge of the Capitol building, and a blind Anglican priest who's a senior Mason too. This key to the "Ancient Mysteries" is apparently hidden in the DC metro area, having been buried there by the Masons as far back as "the 1800s". This time round, Peter Solomon, Langdon's previously unmentioned mentor, has been kidnapped by a villain who blackmails Langdon into searching for "the Lost Word". Being set in Washington DC, the story also has fewer opportunities for English characters to come out with such expressions as "I guess we'll see who's short a few crumpets." Although there are a few self-deprecating in-jokes, and cautious references to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, which we sense Brown was against, the responsibilities of bestsellerdom weigh heavily on the book. Someone seems to have half-persuaded Brown that "symbolism" is a more effective word than "symbology", and there's no more talk of "trying to diffuse what looked like a second bomb about to explode". As usual." But the writing is mostly bad in an uninspired way. There are some brilliantly clunky passages: "My God, Katherine was right. Six years in the making, The Lost Symbol has plainly been copy-edited more vigilantly than his earlier efforts. The authors of the 1980s conspiracy bestseller that provided The Da Vinci Code's key revelation took Brown to court, without success, in 2006. Not himself." Then there's his imaginative geography and history and use of exploded conspiracy theories, many of them labelled "FACT" in his opening pages. Stone." "The eerie phone conversation had left him feeling turgid. Sample Brown sentences: "The room was dark. Yet his lack of writing skills soon made him perhaps the only novelist around whose work regularly gets picked apart in stand-up routines. His formula - twist-filled treasure hunts in upmarket tourist locations, plus creepy villains and hefty dollops of pseudo-learning - was pretty slick. The secret is how to die."īrown, a former English teacher, became the face of American commercial fiction when he unexpectedly hit the jackpot with The Da Vinci Code. Restrained by the best editing that money can buy, Dan Brown opens The Lost Symbol with italics instead: "House of the Temple. This is the first sentence of Angels and Demons (2000), the novel that launched "Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon" on an unsuspecting world: "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own." Its sequel, 2003's The Da Vinci Code, begins as follows: "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery." I expected Langdon's third outing to begin with something along the lines of: "Internationally admired administrator Jacobus von Pelzer felt the stiletto penetrate a spleen, which he knew was his, as he lurched through the Folger Shakespeare Library." But no.
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