Dan Brown- The Lost Symbol

Monday’s release of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol should bring back a few memories. Five years ago, no one could talk about anything other than Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. Everyone had a theory; church-goers wept; books and television programs about Leonardo Da Vinci and the Catholic church seemed to be everywhere. Dan Brown became a household name like J. K. Rowling and Stephen King. Then, after the mayhem had worn down, Brown all but disappeared. Between pushing Lost Symbol’s release date back year after year, critics panning Brown’s writing style, and the failure of the Da Vinci Code movie, the world just forgot about Dan Brown and his shocking page-turners.

Until now, that is. Apparently, enough people remembered Dan Brown to send Lost Symbol to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list after the first day it was released. The novel sold one million copies this Monday, prompting the publishers to rush-print six hundred thousand copies in addition to the five million already in stores. Readers jumped on Lost Symbol with nearly a fifteenth of the exuberance given to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and almost the same rush as Stephenie Meyers’ Breaking Dawn.

However, is it really worth the hype?

Lost Symbol certainly feels like a Dan Brown book. The reader is constantly reminded of protagonist Robert Langdon’s flaws and quirks (claustrophobia, academic skepticism regardless of what he witnesses from book to book, and a Mickey Mouse watch to remind him to stay young). There is yet another female companion/possible love interest (with no mention, of course, of Da Vinci Code’s Sophie or Angels and Demons’ Vittoria). The police (in this case, the CIA) have good intentions but tend to mess things up for Langdon, and there is a mysterious and dangerous villain with a lot of tattoos behind it all.

The book is relatively fast-paced with short chapters and historical, scientific, artistic, and other miscellaneous tidbits that force the reader to decide whether to keep reading or pause and open Google. In Lost Symbol, Dan Brown chooses to step away from the Catholic church and concentrate instead on the Freemasons, but the defensive yet ambiguous portrayal of a secret organization under God and science reads about the same as Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (and, to some extent, Digital Fortress).

The flaws that ruin Dan Brown’s other books continue to ruin this one. The novel reads like a movie script. The characters aren’t particularly engaging, and it’s hard to really care about any of them (the sole exception being Langdon, and then only from loyal readers’ history with him). The book goes back and forth between fast-paced action sequences and long periods of dialogue and exposition, causing the reader to jump from page to page and then want to put the book down for a while. It’s a fast read, but a tough one to really absorb.

It would be easy to get caught in the mayhem and excitement of the plot and assume it really happened, except that skepticism left over from Da Vinci Code madness and criticism makes it difficult to take the book at face value. More disappointing, however, is the fact that, interesting historical tidbits aside, if you’ve read one Dan Brown book, you’ve read them all. There is no real growth between them, and while many readers (myself included) might be content to read the same book over and over again, this particular book lost its power back in 2005. That is, except for the nostalgia factor. Grade: B-