Dan Brown's new mystery thriller is truly dire. In fact to call it a "mystery thriller" is to infringe against the Book Descriptions Act on both counts: it's a novel sadly deficient at once in mystery and thrills.
Lacking in characterisation and written in the most rudimentary style (and to say that Brown's novels possess a style – a term that implies something unified and individual – is again to dignify them with a quality they don't deserve), Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code got by on pace, plot, puzzles and controversy. In comparison, The Lost Symbol limps arthritically along. Its puzzle element – consisting largely of the recognition and interpretation of magic squares – is downbeat, even dull, after the baroque ambigrams of Angels and Demons and the provocative play with the Illuminati in that novel and Mary Magdalene and The Last Supper in The Da Vinci Code. Moreover, not only is The Lost Symbol thoroughly uncontroversial, it takes every opportunity to insist that it isn't. The more Brown's villain Mal'akh persists in his belief that Washington's Freemasons are guarding a secret something that's capable of turning him into a master of the universe, the more Brown's hero Robert Langdon voices his conviction that no such something exists. What to megalomaniac Mal'akh is literal truth is to academic Langdon symbol or metaphor, and never the twain shall agree. Thus such plot as the book contains is self-negating from the start, and the story inevitably fizzles out like a damp squib. At the end, instead of a revelation that was never going to arrive, Brown offers a paean to America, motherhood and apple pie – with motherhood in this case substituted by something called Noetic Science and apple pie by Freemasonry: the whole package a weird mix of patriotism and mumbo-jumbo.
Noetic Science is the province of Brown's heroine Katherine Solomon (the wisdom of?), and behold –
Katherine's work here had begun using modern science to answer ancient philosophical questions. Does anyone hear our prayers? Is there life after death? Do humans have souls? Incredibly, Katherine had answered all of these questions and more. Scientifically. Conclusively. (p. 208)
"Incredibly"? Incredibly! And presumably positively, since to answer them in the negative would be no more than science (albeit non-noetic) has already done. Meanwhile, if Brown isn't already a Freemason, expect him to be inducted into the order forthwith as a reward for the blatant propaganda in this book.
Brown has never been interested in creating anything more than functional characters, vehicles to pose and elucidate puzzles and to move plots along, and in The Lost Symbol his human principals are as one-dimensional as ever. Robert Langdon is a walking mouthpiece for the intricacies of arcane symbology, and likes nothing better than to deliver lectures while standing still or, for that matter, hurrying (as he often finds himself doing) from one lecture opportunity to the next. Yet even on his own terms he's unconvincing here: it takes this master of unravelment and interpretation just over a hundred pages to notice that the third line of the Masonic Pyramid he's reconstructed and visualised is composed of two words. Helped by my knowledge of classical Greek capital lettering, I spotted this as soon as I saw the grid reproduced some fifty pages earlier. And this is the Langdon of the eidetic memory – a memory that is not eidetic as soon as Brown's crevasse-ridden plot requires it to be so. Katherine Solomon is similarly a mouthpiece for the dubious wonders of Noetic Science. CIA Director Inoue Sato is "a fearsome specimen" all of four feet ten whose credulity is bottomless and whose sense of urgency is regularly punctured by her demands for lectures from Robert Langdon. Mal'akh is a monster even more absurd than the villain of The Da Vinci Code. Tattooed from head to foot (except for a circle on the very top of his shaven skull that has to await its inscription), and featuring a phoenix, the symbol of rebirth, Mal'akh is suspiciously reminiscent of the equally extravagantly tattooed Francis Dolarhyde, Thomas Harris's serial killer in Red Dragon.
Readers of Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code will be forewarned not to expect any sexual interest between Langdon and Solomon, for Brown doesn’t do sex. Except, that is, for one moment at the end of Angels and Demons when Vittoria Vetra promises Langdon some exceptional sexual hi-jinks due to the special techniques she's learned (from the late Duchess of Windsor, perhaps) – an announcement as risible as it is unexpected. (I for one would dearly like to have been a fly on the wall during this scene – if only to enjoy the scholarly lecture on Freudian symbolism that Langdon would have come up with in the aftermath of – if not during – coition.)
Here's how Brown introduces Katherine Solomon to the reader:
Tonight, scientist Katherine Solomon was feeling unsettled as she drove her white Volvo up to the building's main security gate. (p. 21)
That gawkily finger-pointing "scientist" is no Brownian aberration: compare, for example, "Security Chief Trent Anderson stormed back towards the Capitol rotunda…" (p. 62) and "Senior OS analyst Nola Kaye sat alone and studied the image that had been emailed to her ten minutes ago…" (p. 199). Brown, it seems, is unwilling to leave his reader in the least bit of uncertainty as to where his puppets are coming from: that he feels he must nail down a character's job before giving his reader any other identifying data about him or her only underlines my earlier contention that his characters are functions before they are anything else (which often they aren't). Nor does Brown rest satisfied with telling a reader just once what the salient physical characteristics of a particular character are: he hammers them home with tedious relentlessness. Thus every time Mal'akh appears he is one or more of massive/monstrous, tattooed, terrifying – just in case we failed to take this on board the first time round. Director Sato is a kind of pocket battleship version of Mal'akh, except in so far as we might assume her to be on the side of the good guys (though with justification we may not, given [a] that she's a government agent and [b] that we're all cynics nowadays where government agents are concerned). Where Mal'akh is massive, she's tiny; where he's tattooed, she's "mottled" like "coarse granite blotched with lichen"; and she too, of course, is "terrifying" (all p. 67) – Brown's favourite adjective, and one that he uses so routinely and frequently as to deprive it of any force it might ever have possessed. The methodological fault in all this, of course, is that of the tyro fiction writer who, fearing that he or she cannot trust the reader to add the verbal equivalents of the digits 1, 2, 3 and 4 together and make 10, continually tells rather than shows.
Brown's way with "terrifying" stands as a good example of his love of overstatement. As a writer he has all the subtlety of a raptor let loose in a chicken run. No cliché of thriller writing is beneath his notice, and he chucks the same few descriptive words at the reader again and again. When his characters are not running or hurrying from A to B, they are "frozen", "stunned", "surprised" or "shocked", left "gasping" or "staring" in "disbelief" at the latest manifestation of Brown's creative genius – even Langdon, who you'd think had used up any capacity for surprise after what befell him in Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Brown has no notion of how to build a climax; everything happens, metaphorically speaking, at maximum decibel level in The Lost Symbol.
At the same time, his capacity for solecism seems unlimited. Several instances have to do with the monstrous Mal'akh. At one point we're told that he owns "a myriad cars" (p.357). Chambers glosses "myriad" as "any immense number" or "numberless", leaving Brown's usage either meaningless or impossible. On another occasion he wears a ski mask "that covered all of his face except his eyes, which shone with a feral ferocity" (p. 204) Leaving aside the closing tautology, one wonders how any pair of eyes, shining or otherwise, could, in the absence of a facial expression to give them a context, tell you anything at all. Only two paragraphs later we're told that Mal'akh "grinned like a beast", leaving one with the conundrum of asking how anyone present could possible know, given that the grinner's face is hidden. Still earlier (p. 189), Mal'akh attacks Katherine in her car, "hurling his elbow through her side window" – something of a feat, one thinks, given that the elbow remains attached to his arm for use in later acts of mischief!
Another of my favourite sentences features our fearsome CIA Director: "Sato pulled out a pair of glasses and walked toward the hand, circling like a shark". The "glasses" are presumably spectacles rather than brandy snifters or binoculars, but who would know, given that Sato cavalierly appears not to keep them in a case and doesn't (so far as we know) put them on (although we find her taking them off ten pages later, having done a number of intense things with her "jet-black eyes" in the meantime, mostly to do with Robert Langdon). But that's a minor puzzle. A prize to anyone who can tell me how you walk "toward" something whilst "circling like a shark". I imagine what Sato did was walk round the hand, gradually closing in on it. A shark wearing spectacles – now there's a first!
A final specimen of Brown's descriptive ineptitude: "Dr Abaddon appeared without warning beside her, holding a tray of steaming tea" (p. 92). Here one wonders why a man with the apparent abilities of a djinni can't serve tea, like most people, in a teapot. Was it already poured into cups? Or did Katherine Solomon (Abaddon's only guest) slurp it out of the tray? Neither, because we find Abaddon pouring it half a page later. It must after all have arrived in a teapot: it was the teapot, not the tray, that was steaming all along! Brown was simply teasing us!
All this might seem to be taking a hammer to crack a peanut, but there is a serious point here. Far too often, Brown fails to make his reader visualise a scene. And why? Because his own powers of visualization – and his ability to translate the visual into precise language – are so poor. The reason for this cannot be that Brown writes too fast, for The Lost Symbol has been years in production. No, it's simply that as a writer he's remarkably limited. This becomes yet more obvious when one considers his approach to scene setting. Here, first, is his introduction to the Smithsonian Institution:
The world's largest and most technologically advanced museum is also one of the world's best-kept secrets. It houses more pieces than the Hermitage, the Vatican Museum, and the New York Metropolitan… combined. Yet despite its magnificent collection, few members of the public are ever invited inside its heavily guarded walls.
Located at 4210 Silver Hill Road just outside of Washington, D.C., the museum is a massive zigzag-shaped edifice constructed of five interconnected pods – each pod larger than a football field. The building's bluish metal exterior barely hints at the strangeness within – a six-hundred-thousand-square-foot alien world that contains a 'dead zone,' [sic], a 'wet pod,' [sic] and more than twelve miles of storage cabinets. (p. 21)
Here, in case you suspect this is untypical, is a further example:
Despite containing what many have called 'the most beautiful room in the world,' [sic] the Library of Congress is known less for its breathtaking splendor than for its vast collections. With over five hundred miles of shelves – enough to stretch from Washington, D.C., to Boston – it easily claims the title of largest library on earth. And yet still it expands, at a rate of over ten thousand items a day. (p. 181)
In passages like these, Brown writes like nothing so much as the author of a guidebook. Unintegrated into the visual field of any character, these examples of supremely lazy writing stick out of Brown's text like herrings' heads from a stargazey pie. It's moreover impossible to construct any sense of how the Smithsonian looks from Brown's "massive zigzag-shaped edifice constructed of five interconnected pods" – particularly since "zigzag-shaped" suggests sharp angles while "pods" implies smoothly rounded capsules. At the same time these extracts show what impresses him: size, bigness, facts – the sheer weight of numbers (which might I suppose explain Mal'akh's "myriad cars"). Clearly Brown expects his reader to be as impressed as he is, and maybe some people are; but to this reader such passages seem like routine recitals of mere statistics.
Here's how a talented writer of bestsellers sets a scene:
The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired.
This is the opening of Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's first novel. Fleming wrote it, according to John Pearson (The Life of Ian Fleming, p. 203), in seven weeks, and it has the immediacy, concision and punch of writing produced at high pressure. The passage thrusts the reader – sensually, even viscerally – into the midst of the scene. You are there with James Bond, seeing, smelling and feeling. There is no sense of Fleming posturing or talking down to the reader from the vantage point of experience or superior knowledge: he respects the reader, something I've already suggested Brown doesn’t do.
In his review of The Lost Symbol in The Spectator (26.8.2009), Philip Hensher remarks that "it is depressing to see the point to which the bestseller as a form has sunk". It would be unfair, however, to take Dan Brown's productions as a template of the form (if indeed the bestseller is a "form", which I doubt): there are plenty of good writers operating in the various genres from which bestsellers typically come. To name but some out of many living classy practitioners, there are in the field of the mystery thriller Arturo Perez-Reverte, C. J. Sansom and David Hewson; in that of the traditional detective story Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin and Donna Leon; in that of sf/fantasy Terry Pratchett, Ian McDonald and China Miéville; in that of spy fiction Robert Littell and (yes!) John Le Carré. There's plenty to enthuse about, if enthusing's what you want to do.
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