No opportunity for product placement is missed. Neighbourhoods are "upscale", an office building is "prestigious". The villain inhabits a "sprawling mansion", which in an elegant variation 300 pages later is called a "spectacular mansion". In descriptive mode, Brown composes real estate listings. (He replies: "I am", though I was hoping he'd say: '"Affirmative".)
"Are you familiar with the private air terminal at Boston's Logan Airport?" someone asks Langdon. They converse with a lack of idiomatic verve that would embarrass an automaton. Characters – "systems security specialist Mark Zoubianis" and "sys-sec Rick Parrish", for instance – come with occupational tags, since they're only memorable as the plot's functionaries. The writing is as bad as Brown's admirers have come to expect: imagine Coke gone flat. IM Pei's pyramid in the Louvre courtyard, beneath which Langdon surmises that Mary Magdalen lies buried, is here up-ended as the pyramidal Washington Monument, whose tip contains the paltry solution to the panic that convulses the city. Westminster Abbey cedes its role as a sacred site of illumination to Washington National Cathedral, whose sublimity inspires Brown to take inventory of the bells in its carillon and the pipes in its organ (53 and 10,647 respectively).
The Last Supper is replaced as a repository of forbidden knowledge by Dürer's Melencolia I, and the cryptex designed by Leonardo recurs as an impenetrable granite cube which only spells out the secret it contains when boiled in a pasta pan.
The avenging angel who tracks them is not Silas, the self-flagellating albino monk, but a self-gelding bodybuilder who nicknames himself Moloch, after one of the devils in Paradise Lost. Saunière, the murdered Louvre curator, becomes Peter Solomon, the kidnapped and mutilated CEO of the Smithsonian Institution Saunière's granddaughter is matched by Solomon's sister, recruited as Langdon's sidekick. New names are assigned to players familiar from The Da Vinci Code. Langdon, having saved the Vatican from a nuclear blast in Angels & Demons, now comes home to give another dreary academic lecture, after which he sprints off to preserve the US government from a revelation that could destabilise the world. What he promises consumers is more of the same, and in The Lost Symbol he has stirred up again his formulaic blend of motorised chase and mystical mumbo-jumbo. His new novel might scavenge for remnants of what he calls "the Ancient Mysteries", but the mystery that really excites him is a modern one, a trade secret known to only two members of a corporate brotherhood at the Coca-Cola headquarters: the magic spell that turns water not into wine, which is all Christ could manage, but into bubbles and money.īrown, like Coke, is a global brand. Forget about Brown's hints of a closely guarded wisdom that can lead us hierarchically from earth to heaven, like base metals transmuted into gold. His novels speculate about the suppressed details of Christ's sex life and the location of the Holy Grail, the hermetic experiments of alchemy and the etymological riddles of biblical scholarship – oh, and I shouldn't forget the most highly prized secret of all: the formula for whatever mixture of syrups, caffeine and sodium benzoate makes up Coca-Cola.Īt the beginning of The Lost Symbol, Brown's "symbologist" Robert Langdon, about to start a frantic quest for the priestly lore hidden beneath the monuments of Washington DC, likens "the recipe for classic Coke" to the occult rites of the Freemasons.
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