Book Review: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

In the end, even Agent Scully believed most of the stuff Agent Mulder believed. And that was about UFOs, aliens, and other weird things. Here, in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon plays the skeptic over and over again, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Kind of reminds me of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Where to begin? How about some background between Dan Brown and I. The Da Vinci Code was my introduction to Robert Langdon and I enjoyed the book pretty well. I quickly read Angels and Demons and, frankly, liked it better. Recently, when Langdon’s third adventure was announced, I was happy and knew that I’d read it. I also knew Brown faced his own personal Kobayashi Maru test, a no-win situation: how the hell does he follow-up The Da Vinci Code?

Not all that well, truth be told. The Lost Symbol is marketed as a thriller. Okay, I’m good with that. But with that tag, certain things are expected: guns, chases, near misses, danger, pulse-pounding excitement. You are geared to expect these things to happen relatively rapidly in the course of the novel. Earlier this year, I read Jeff Abbott’s Trust Me and boy did it fit these expectations well. I could not put the book down. With Brown’s book, in the early going, there was a couple of nights when I was pondering “do I sleep or read more?” Sleep won, more than once. Don’t get me wrong, I can deal with slow-burn books (wrote one myself) but at least turn up the heat sometime in the first forty chapters, or one hundred fifty pages. I’m not kidding: it took forty-one chapters for the running to start.

As Brown would have Langdon think, What the hell?

Langdon is summoned to Washington, DC, to give a lecture. Instead of a room full of people, he finds the severed hand of his friend, Peter Solomon. The hand is positioned in such a way that it acts as an invitation to the chase. Langdon receives a call from a mysterious (and whispery, in the audio version) person: break the code and save Peter’s life.

This can’t be happening.

Yes, Langdon, it can and it is. So shut up and deal with it.

I can’t. It’s some lunatic who thinks there’s a pyramid hidden underground. He’s crazy.

What's crazy is the number of times Langdon thinks the entire situation is weird, crazy, or insane. This from the guy who uncovered the "truth" about Jesus's marriage.

When Inoue Sato, from the CIA’s Office of Security, shows up, Langdon’s more worried about Peter’s safety than helping her. He never once stops to wonder “hey, Peter’s kidnapping and Sato’s national security emergency might just be related. Come on, man! You’re supposed to be smart. All he does is insist the kidnapper is insane and he, Langdon, just wants to help poor Peter.

Langdon’s perception—of himself, of the thing the kidnapper wants, of the legends and the mysteries surrounding it all—is out of whack. Like Agent Scully at the beginning of “The X-Files,” Langdon believes nothing. It takes Sato to lay it out for him as only a government agent can and he’s still a reluctant hero. He just doesn't believe. Even at the end, when The Truth is revealed, the dude is a skeptic. Whatever.

Frankly, at times, I didn’t care if Langdon broke the codes and the symbols or not. I was not emotionally invested in the story. Even the female character, Katherine Solomon, Peter’s younger sister and the kidnapper’s second target, is there to try an enliven a stale plot. It’s hinted that Langdon and Katherine had some sort of feelings in the past but there is no spark at all.

Are you sure? What about the scene where…

Shut up, Langdon. This is my review.

The villain is a quintessential villain from any thriller: very intelligent, on top of his game, supremely confident, and dull. I figured out who it was long, long, LONG before the characters did. Even so, I would have expected any of them to catch on earlier than they did. When the big reveal happened, I’ll admit the scene played out nicely but, come on. Did they not even suspect?

The pace of the book is well done. Yeah, it’s often tedious and filled with way too many “mini lectures” and “as you know, Bob” moments. But Brown knows how to space out the cliffhangers. In these past few months, I’ve read the first three Tarzan books and have ingrained in my head Edgar Rice Burroughs’ style. Dan Brown writes the same way. Hey, that’s not bad, mind you, as long as you know what The Lost Symbol is: pulp fiction. It’s not literary in the slightest not does it pretend to be, despite the subject matter. It’s a page-turner, even if the only cliffhanger is the answer to a mini lecture.

Like a politician who doesn’t know when to get off the stage, the action climax of the story occurs fifty pages from the book’s end. Fifty pages of tedium that you have to wade through for what?

An intellectual climax. The true meaning of the book.

That may be what you think, Langdon, but it’s just a bunch of fruitless nothingness that did very little to make the ending anywhere near the emotional resonance Brown wanted.

Am I glad I read it? Sure, I guess. I would have gotten around to it eventually. Will I read the next Dan Brown book? Almost certainly. I’ll probably do as I did here: check it out from the library and listen to the audio.

Like I mentioned earlier, Brown was in a no-win situation. Like the fourth Indiana Jones movie, there was just no way to live up to the expectations that had built up steam for the six years since The Da Vinci Code exploded on the world. All the Da Vinci Code imitators had cluttered the market, making Brown’s story merely one among many as opposed to the one that started it all.

He’ll come back, just like the rock musician Sting does. After every fun album (Nothing Like the Sun, for example), Sting gets all intellectual and tries too hard. The resulting record (The Soul Cages), while good, is never as good as the one before it or the one after it (Ten Sumner’s Tales). In addition, the one after it is judged to be great mostly because the bar had been reset so low that just about anything would be better.

I think that’s where Brown finds himself now. For every overnight success, there is often a sophomore slump. It doesn’t matter if the artist or writer had written other books prior to Becoming Famous. For all intents and purposes, The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s first book. The Lost Symbol is his sophomore slump. I’m looking forward to the rebound book, the one that’ll knock the socks off of everyone because they didn’t see it coming.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

By Russel D McLean

The landlord of a local pub waved at me the other day. I was on my way to the launch, driving with my dad who was helping us take the stock from bookshop to the bar where we were going to do the actual event. The guy waved at us from across the street, so we wound down the window to shout hello.

He yelled, “Them twice! Us once!” and laughed.

Talking about another pub mentioned in the novels. How they’d appeared in more scenes than his own establishment. He was joking, of course, but it did get me thinking about the locations I chose to focus on in the books (and the short stories).

Dundee is a real city with a real history. When I chose it as the setting for my crime novels, I knew I was setting myself a challenge. You always do when you let your fiction impinge upon the real world.

It’s part of the reason why I use real bars (but create fake ones where bad things happen) and namecheck streets on occasion – I want the city I write about to be filtered through the perceptions of myself and my characters, but still recognisable to anyone who’s ever visited the place. But the city is a background on a canvas, not the focus. As a background, it must therefore serve to bring the focus of what I am writing about into sharp relief.

So while my fictional Dundee resembles the real thing – right down to some of the bars, even those mentioned with less frequency than others – I do not think it will ever actually be the real thing. This would be an impossibility on my part and, I believe, actually very dull for the reader.

Look at this way: as true to life as much of George Pelecanos’s DC may be, you bet your ass it is filtered through his perceptions. Same with Block’s NYC, Burke’s Lousiana and so forth. They are filtered so as to fit the world view of the novels in which they are used.

Taking the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, think about how different the city becomes filtered through the procedural eyes of Iain Rankin, the genteel mind of Alexander McCall Smith and the screwed up psychopathy of Allan Guthrie. All of them write about the same city – sometimes even the same places – but they all create such markedly different worlds.

When writing about real places in fiction, a writer rarely does simple reportage. They are always twisting the facts and the reality to fit their worldview. Sometimes they will talk about real places within the city, sometimes they will create fictional locations that seem plausible additions to the real world because they need to make a point, dramatic or thematic (and often both).

I chose Dundee deliberately as a setting not simply because I knew the place, but because I felt the city had something in it that reflected the kinds of stories I wanted to write. And, yes, I had to filter the city to do so, but my hope is that I have captured something of the city that is not simply recognisable to locals, but that feels real even to those who have never been here.

Your One Stop Blog Shop

By Dave White

Yeah, you can go to Crimespot and check out all the new posts that are up there. Of course you can. And that's fine and dandy, I love the site.

But if you do go there, you're actually going to have to read the blogs. And, as I've riffed on before, blogs really only have a few repeatable topics... So, instead of shooting on over there, I'll give a rundown of what you can read on blogs almost every day. (BTW, on my blog you can probably discover that I've written about 90% of this topics as well.... except the first one.)

HOW TO WRITE A SEX SCENE:

My favorite. This one ALWAYS shows up. And it always starts off like this, right after the "SEX" subject line: "Well, now I've got your attention, right?" HO HO! Wink Wink Nudge Nudge. That's right folks. Writers who read blogs for advice are really just a bunch of adolescents walking into their first sex ed class.

SO AND SO IS AWESOME:

He is. I love his books. He's been really helpful in my career. He's a really nice guy. In fact, he's awesome. And you can read about it on at least one blog each day. So, instead of reading each post... just read it here and remember it... SO AND SO is awesome.

SELF-PUBLISHING

If you've ever self-published a book, you know how FREAKING AWESOME it is. HOW MUCH BETTER IT IS than publishing in New York. I mean, you can SPEND YOUR OWN MONEY to put a shabbily edited book out there. And it's so much better than big publishing because, I mean, you wrote the book and you published it, and you're not biased at all right? I mean John Grisham sold his book out of his trunk and look at him now...

BIG TIME PUBLISHING IS THE DEVIL

Nevermind the fact that they paid you money to put your book out there. And edited it to the finest detail. And gave you a great, professional cover. And you can find it in REAL bookstores. They really screwed you over because they didn't give you co-op. They didn't send you on a national tour. And they didn't take an ad out in the Sunday Book Review. Hence publishing is the devil.

KINDLE vs. REAL BOOKS

KINDLE is awesome. No REAL BOOKS are awesome. No KINDLE. No REAL BOOKS. Either one is going to RESHAPE AND FIX PUBLISHING.

WHAT IS NOIR?

This is a 45,000 word essay about the intracacies of a noir novel and how the word translates into black so it must be a DARK book. And everyone is screwed. And honestly, deep down, does it really matter? Because there will then be 400 comments and no conclusions will be made. Except someone will decide this post is actually about "What is hardboiled?"

WRITING IN THE OPPOSITE GENDER

It's so hard. I can't think like a woman. No wait, I can. But I can't think like a man. Women are crazy. Men suck.

THRILLER WRITER SO AND SO SUCKS

James Patterson sucks because his chapters are short. Dan Brown sucks because he writes in italics. Let's face it, the writer of this blog (even me) is jealous because they sell millions upon millions of copies and the writer doesn't.

LITERARY VS. GENRE

GENRE is a red headed ugly step child that deserves to be chained up to a rusty radiator in the basement. OR But LITERARY, why won't you appreciate meeeeee???

PROMOTION

TWITTER WORKS HERE'S HOW! FACEBOOK WORKS HERE'S HOW! BLOGS WORK HERE'S HOW!!! I know how to promote and it's all I'm going to talk about...ignoring the fact that an average reader doesn't care about promotion and my book only sold 1,000 copies in the first year it was out.


And finally:

BARRY EISLER or JASON STARR or JASON PINTER have really nice hairdos. And SARAH WEINMAN is a DEITY from CANADA!


And there you have it.

There are a lot of good blogs out there... and a lot of good topics to read through.

But sometimes it feels like this is all there is. So, maybe, before you sit down to write your own blog post... think and see if what you're writing about has been talked about ad naseum. Can you say something new about this topic?