Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Wordful Wednesday: The Lost Symbol

I never consciously set out to read everything Dan Brown wrote, honestly.  Back in 2004, I became aware of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon and decided to give it a look.  First, I read Angels and Demons, which I enjoyed rather a lot, even though I had to suppress laughter once or twice when Brown’s writing exceeded my ability to suspend disbelief.  (But he got big points from me for using the “pretend to drown/suffocate when being throttled/drowned” thing I always figure main characters should use.)

Then, I read The Da Vinci Code, intending it to be an exercise in apologetics.  And true to my expectations, I found plenty to object to.  But I also enjoyed the book.

I subsequently read Deception Point, which I enjoyed, in spite of being able to predict all of its twists. 

Then I made the mistake of reading Digital Fortress, which I found insulting and actually fairly boring.  Perhaps more on the insulting thing later.

The bottom line is that I’m not a huge fan of Dan Brown’s work, but I keep reading him.

I’ll admit that I set out expecting to, or perhaps determined to (if I’m being honest) really hate The Lost Symbol.  And I can’t say that I found it to be a really  good book.  However, if I’m being fair, it’s not the worst thing I’ve read.  And I don’t expect it to be on my list of Bad Books of 2010.

Because, darn it, I kept turning the pages.  Much as I tried to not care what was behind that canvas that the characters initially thought was a stone wall, I wanted to know what was behind that canvas!!!!

The book features the same lead character as Angels and Da Vinci.  Namely, Dan Brown, also known as Robert Langdon.  It wasn’t so blatant in the first two books that Langdon=Brown, but it’s totally there in this one.  (Ooh, and apropos of the current pop-culture Zeitgeist, such a character is often termed an Author Avatar.)

For those who don’t know, Robert Langdon is a Harvard Professor of Symbology, which means he can find wild conspiracies nearly anywhere.  In The Lost Symbol, Langdon is once again called upon to decode things that no one else could.  But this time, it’s in the United States!

In fact, it’s essentially National Treasure, only without much of the fun.

Langdon is tricked into finding a Super Sekrit Masonic Symbolic Thingamajig and deciphering it.  To save his friend’s life, of course.  And there are twists and turns, and bad guys seem like good guys, and good guys seem like bad guys, and things aren’t what they appear, blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada.  (But the Lobster Bisque was good.)

It’s not that the book was boring or anything, but I didn’t find it all that gripping.  And it’s definitely too long, packing about three hundred pages worth of action into a svelte five hundred pages or so.

And I know I’ve said that I like short chapters, but Mr. Brown went a bit overboard, with his typical chapter including about five pages.  And normally shifting subplots at every division. 

And now we come to the one thing that really hurts Brown’s writing:  He doesn’t expect much of his readers.

In the first place, most of his twists are about as unpredictable as a fastball on a 3-0 count.  (See how I expect my reader to decipher the baseball analogy?)  In the second place, his writing is unusually redundant.

For instance, there's a point in the book in which a character receives a text from her brother's phone, the phone which we know to be in the possession of the Bad Guy.  It has its desired effect, and we're able to infer the thrust of the message from conversations Katherine has with the Bad Guy (who she believes to be a Good Guy).  However, Mr. Brown apparently wasn't satisfied that we'd understand the origins or contents of the message, so he explicitly states that the Bad Guy sent it. 

And then he shows us the message in its entirety.

Again, we already knew everything about the message.  And the same kind of thing happens again at least once.  It reminded me of the climax of Digital Fortress, where the fate of the free world rested on scientists figuring out the basic difference between Uranium 238 and 235.  The reader might not have known it, and Brown didn’t expect them to know it, but the scientists would’ve known it probably a few seconds before I did, which was about five seconds.  You might guess I found it rather insulting.  (BTW, the answer is “three.”)

The climax of The Lost Symbol comes around a ways from the actual end of the book, after Langdon makes a strange and somewhat cowardly decision, and after the Bad Guy commits a rather grievously stupid error.

That’s as close as I’ll come to revealing the plot of the book, just in case anyone else decides to read it.  I will say that it’s basically a long apologia for Freemasonry and Unitarianism. 

And of course, it’s not really a Dan Brown book unless there’s some misuse of Scripture.  The most glaring was his ridiculous insistence that when Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is within you,” He was making some sort of pantheistic, New Age point about the divine spark in all life.  Brother.  A much better translation, as agreed upon by anyone who knows anything (read: people other than Dan Brown), is “The Kingdom of God is in your midst.”  Meaning it’s arrived.

And that’s not the only erroneous claim Brown, through his characters, makes about Christianity and Christ.  But I won’t dwell.

Will I pick up Brown’s next book?  I suppose I will.  Somebody’s got to do it.

I’ve got a couple of books in the works right now, and I may review one of them tomorrow, as it’s a Theology book and therefore can be reviewed on Thursday.  The other is one my dad recommended, and I should finish it later this week or early next week.