Reviewers dubious about Dan Brown's new novel

The cover of Dan Brown's new novel. Photo / AP

Opinion

After Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol was released this week, we look at how it is being received by reviewers around the world.

Some are critical of the amount of detail he crams in and his style of writing, but most agree readers get more of what they enjoyed in his previous bestsellers, including the Da Vinci Code.

Newsweek's Malcolm Jones

Brown doesn't care about the things that occupy most novelists - realistic dialogue, characterisation - and apparently neither do his legions of readers.

But complaining that he doesn't do well with the usual conventions of fiction is like complaining that Manny Ramirez is not a great left-fielder. It ignores what he is good at. Brown is a maze maker who builds a puzzle and then walks you through it. His genius lies in uncovering odd facts and suppressed history, stirring them together into a complicated stew and then saying, what if?

What if Jesus married Mary Magdalene and then the Christian church covered it up? What if all the Masonic symbols that adorn our nation's capital (not to mention our money) all point to the existence of ancient mysteries that might be unlocked with the right keys? The underlying assumption behind most of his fiction is summed up late in The Lost Symbol: "There is a hidden world behind the one we all see. For all of us."

Times Online - Andrew Collins

Brown writes genre fiction but his Langdon thrillers are laced with art history as well as political and theological fact, making their dismissal as junk both patronising and misleading. If anything, The Lost Symbol is too heavy on the footnotes. The pace of the unfolding jeopardy - a kidnapped mentor, a dismembered, pointing hand, a ruthless tattooed ghoul - is slowed down, rather than dumbed down, by all the exposition. The balance between story, puzzle-solving and Open University course was well maintained in the previous two books; less so here.

The New York Times' Janet Maslin

The author uses so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenage girls. Then again, Mr Brown's excitable, hyperbolic tone is one of the guilty pleasures of his books.("'Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish.' His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. 'It's ... Latin.'") It's all in a day's work for Langdon to ponder "a single solitary image that represented the illumination of the Egyptian sun god, the triumph of alchemical gold, the wisdom of the Philosopher's Stone, the purity of the Rosicrucian Rose, the moment of the Creation, the All, the dominance of the astrological sun" and so much more in that cosmically mystical vein.

The Lost Symbol manages to take a twisting, turning route through many such aspects of the occult even as it heads for a final secret that is surprising for a strange reason: It's unsurprising. It also amounts to an affirmation of faith. In the end it is Mr Brown's sweet optimism, even more than Langdon's sleuthing and explicating, that may amaze his readers most.

The LA Times' Nick Owchar

Brown's narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopaedias. ("The sacred symbol of the Hebrews is the Jewish star - the Seal of Solomon - an important symbol to the Masons!"). But no one reads Brown for style, right? The reason we read Dan Brown is to see what happens to Langdon: We want to know if he will overcome slim odds to uncover Mal'akh's motives and a cunning plan that, while not involving a vial of antimatter, is a major threat to national security.

And yet, it's hard to imagine anyone, after reading The Lost Symbol, debating about Freemasonry in Washington, D.C., the way people did Brown's radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in The Da Vinci Code. That book hit a deep cultural nerve for obvious reasons; The Lost Symbol is more like the experience on any roller coaster - thrilling, entertaining and then it's over.

Entertainment Weekly's Thom Geier

Langdon remains a terrific hero, a bookish intellectual who's cool in a crisis and quick on his feet, like Ken Jennings with a shot of adrenaline. The codes are intriguing, the settings present often-seen locales in a fresh light, and Brown mostly manages to keep the pages turning - except when one of his know-it-all characters decides to brake the action for another superfluous, if occasionally interesting, historical digression. (Did you know there's a carving of Darth Vader on the National Cathedral?) Even after the book's climactic showdown, you must slog through another 50-plus pages of exposition that Brown couldn't cram into the main narrative. Sometimes it seems that authors, like their villains, don't know when to leave well enough alone.

The Washington Post's Louis Bayard

The "Da Vinci" template remains largely intact. Where, in the previous book, the savagery was committed by a massive albino monk, here it is committed by a massive tattooed monk. With the help of bronzer and a blond wig, he is able to talk himself past every security phalanx the federal government can throw at him while also threatening to bring about "a cataclysm from which this country might not recover."

But will Washington recover? The Lost Symbol promises to do for us what Dan Brown has already done for Paris, London and Rome: turn our city into a minefield of occultism.

- NZ HERALD STAFF