I just finished reading The Lost Symbol, which came out in September. Like The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, the story follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, who has 24 hours to solve a treasure hunt-like riddle, and save his friend’s life, while worrying not only about his kidnapper, a physically imposing fanatic covered with tattoos named Mal’akh, but the CIA’s Office of Security, and surprise allies hiding in the shadows.
As with his two previous Robert Langdon novels, Dan Brown is great at constructing a treasure hunt incorporated with historical non-fiction, and building a good, thrilling plot around it, but his insistence on treating the story like an academic lecture (he actually explained that this was his aim in his witness statement in the 2006 trial he was involved in), is in full-force here, even moreso than in his previous two novels, and it irritated me throughout the book. I love trivia as much as the next person, and I love learning about the subjects used as the book’s underpinnings, but there’s a time and place for a lecture, and a thriller novel isn’t it. A fiction writer’s first priority should be to tell the story. It’s certainly possible to incorporate little bits of fascinating non-fiction into a fictional story, but Brown is constantly interrupting the flow of the plot to have characters begin lengthy sermons of obscure history, grinding the narrative to a screeching halt. In this way, Brown comes across as one of those douchebags who loves to interrupt a conversation to impress everyone with his knowledge of trivia. (I dream that one day he’ll show up in an episode of South Park to take Cartman on a treasure hunt, stopping every other minute to shove trivia down his throat, and gets bludgeoned by little Eric at the end of the episode for it.)
One wonders how much shorter and better-paced the book would be, Reader’s Digest published a condensed version without all the extraneous historical bloviating, much of which has nothing to do with driving the plot, and seems to serve no purpose other than to satisfy Dan Brown’s vain need to show us how knowledgeable he is in the area of pointless minutiae. Hell, the last fifty pages alone could’ve been jettisoned, or at least trimmed into an epilogue of respectable length. Trimmed of this fat, there is a fairly good story in here, with a frightening villain who generates genuine thrills in the reader, and a puzzle that slowly reveals itself to a reader on the edge of their seat to learn more. But even in this regard, though, the story has its flaws.
One is Brown’s recurring inability to create three-dimensional characters, especially in his lead. Langdon, despite ostensibly using his academic knowledge to drive the story’s treasure hunt forward, is a slave to the plot, which never reveals character or arcs across a theme. His main character traits seem to be nothing more than the fact that he’s claustrophic, and likes to swim. The villain essentially defeats and humilitates him, and it’s a supporting character who comes to his rescue. This brings into relief the fact that Langdon, despite being the main character, is really a boring, ineffectual, milquetoast character, and a pitiful excuse for a lead character in a thriller. Whereas a character like Indiana Jones combines the intellectual love of areas like history and archaeology in which Dan Brown imbues Langdon, Indy is also physically appropriate for this type of story. He actually gets into fights, jumps out of airplanes, uses guns and whips, drives in car chases, etc., while still projecting a humble man’s disdain of such exploits. Langdon is essentially a wimpy bookworm trivia nerd whose most fascinating traits to Brown are his tweed jacket and a Mickey Mouse watch.
This again ties into the “academic” nature of Brown’s writing itself. Good writers make their characters seem real by acknowledging how people in real life do not comport themselves in the formalized, didactic manner of a university lecture hall. They give them rough edges, bad habits, conflicting points of view, character flaws, quirky and idiosyncratic traits that allow the reader to relate. Brown, however, who sees storytelling as one big vehicle to talk down to his audience like an overstuffed Ivy Leaguer, imbues his characters and his dialogue with about as much individuality and nuance as a bowl of oat bran. It’s probably not a coincidence that the one exception, Director Sato, the most interesting character in the novel, whom Brown describes as despising a lecture (Gee, ya think she’s unique in that regard, Dan?), tells Langdon at the end of the novel that the next time he finds himself in a situation like this, to “leave the bull**** in Cambridge.” The metafictional irony of Brown having one of his characters say this is just off the scale.
Brown also skimps on the finale. Whereas the main point of tension that drives the story’s suspense is the race to find Peter before Mal’akh kills him, Brown completely robs the reader of this tension in the end with an ending in which the tattooed villain almost gives up, almost handing the protagonists the key to his defeat, and Langdon isn’t even the one who ends up using it. Sorry, but this is a complete cop out of the premise set up by the novel, and again illustrates Langdon as a weak character, and a poor lead.
If you’re like me, the story will hold you’re attention, but it’ll also frustrate the hell out of you, and may leave you disappointed.
NITS
Page 21
The Smithsonian Museum Support Center, or SMSC, is said to be composed of five interconnected buildings, or “pods”. But aerial photos I’ve seen of it, show four large buildings (the novels says the pods are the size of football fields), and four smaller ones across from the zigzag corridor running down the middle. Is this is a bit of creative license by Dan Brown, or did he make an error?
Page 22
A notice in the beginning of the book, before the story begins, states:
“All organizations in this novel exist, including the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences…All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.”
All the science is real? “This I gotta see, I thought.” Sure enough, this bold assertion turns out to be an exaggeration, to be kind. On Page 22, Katherine’s field is called “Noetic Science”. But a Wikipedia search on this term directs one to an article called “Noetic theory”, which is described as a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of mind and intuition, and its relationship with the divine intellect. This hardly sounds like a “science”. Moreoever, a search at the randi.org, the website of science and skepticism educator James Randi, shows that Noetics is a field in which one finds those associated with the promotion of ESP and global consciousness, which is not science, but pseudoscience.
A more detailed mention of the field occurs on Pages 55 – 57, beginning with this passage on Page 55:
Experiments at facilities like IONS and PEAR had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass.
Oh really? That’s funny, I’ve never heard of this. Thought, after all, is neither energy nor mass, but is simply information, an abstraction. So it has no mass, and could therefore not possibly effect it. So much for Brown’s insistence in the beginning of the book that all “science” in the novel was real. At least the antimatter portion of the plot of Angels & Demons was based on real scientific phenomena, even if Brown bungled their details.
On Page 56, the explanation continues with allusions to “mind over matter” and “cosmic consciousness”, ideas that have zero scientific support. Page 208 again mentions the “scientific” nature of these ideas and Katherine’s experiments into them:
“Katherine’s work 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. The methods she used were irrefutable. Even the most skeptical of people would be persuaded by the results of their experiments. If this information were published and made known, a fundamental shift would begin in the consciousness of man.
Needless to say, I’d be very interested to know what experiments she conducted to determine if prayers are heard or if there is life after death. But if her data hasn’t yet been published, or even known, then those questions have hardly been answered “scientifically”, much less “conclusively,” since ideas are scientifically confirmed after they have been submitted for Peer Review, vetted, and if confirmed, published in peer review journals after the experimental results have been repeated independently of the scientist or agency that first reported them. This portion of the story continues by explaining that Katherine’s research proved that thought can affect anything—the growth of plants, the direction that fish swim, cell division in a petri dish, and the appearance and disappearance of subatomic particles. Sorry, but this is not “real” science. It’s the sort of fiction one would expect to find in science fiction and fantasy novels, which is what Brown should be satisfied to call it.
Hunting the Lost Symbol, a History Channel special that premiered on October 25, 2009, examines the novel, and whether its various elements are based on fact or are fabricated for the novel. The program went into further detail as to these experiments. It reported that one experiment involved a subject hooked up to an EEG, then placed inside a soundproof, lead-lined room, much like Katherine’s lab, which is sealed from all electronic symbols, while another subject views a monitor that random flashes a real-time closed-circuit video of the first subject. When the target’s image is seen on the monitor, the second participant is supposed to send “good thoughts” to that first subject, who is monitored to see if his health is improve when this happens. The target subject is not allowed to know when his image is shown on the second participant’s monitor. No mention was made in the program of what metric was used to measure the subject’s “health”, or how the electricity along his scalp caused by the firing of his neurons would be used to indicate their health, since that’s what an EEG monitors. Dean Radin, one of the Noetic scientists interviewed, claimed the results repeatedly showed that the second participant could affect the target subject’s health, and that these results were repeated across multiple independent laboratories. Really? Wow! So what were these findings? How was the target subject’s health affected? Were all of these laboratories reputable, and followed proper empirical procedures, including full use of scientific controls, such as double-blind barriers? Have they submitted these findings to reputable scientific journals for peer review? If so, what conclusions were reported? Why does the program never say, particularly if the whole point of it was to report what aspects of the novel were factual, and which were purely fictitious?
Not surprisingly, according to the program, the Institute for Noetic Sciences, the organization spotlighted in the documentary where these scientists work (which Quackwatch places on their list of Questionable Organizations), was created by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who has long had an interest in pseudoscience, such as ESP, and who asserts that the evidence for past contact between humans and extraterrestrials is “very strong”. Marilyn Schultz, the scientist seen as a real-life equivalent of Katherine Solomon, states the attempt on the part of the character Katherine Solomon to “weigh the soul” are based on real-life experiments (yes, and they do not use rigorous, reliable methods), talks about the U.S. Government’s project Stargate, which for twenty years, spent taxpayer money studying remote viewing, and claims that some of the remote viewers studied produced accurate drawings of targets in the Soviet Union. In fact, neither that nor any other study into psychic abilities are real. The drawings produced by remote viewers are always vague, generalized images that can be anything, and made to fit the target after the target is revealed. Both Schultz and Radin claim that studies into these and other experiments that try to gauge the effect of mind over matter, such as prayer studies, prove statistically that psychic phenomena are real. Sorry, Marilyn, but no, they aren’t. The Columbia University prayer study, the most famous recent one, found no such effect. Schultz says that mainstream science (what the narrator of the program calls “traditional” science) does not accept these finding because they do fit into mainstream science’s model or understanding. In fact, there is no “mainstream” or “traditional” science, there is only science, period, done correctly. When not done correctly, it isn’t science. In addition to the fact that psychic phenomena lack any basis in the laws of science, numerous studies conducted with properly scientific methodology show no existence whatsoever of psychic powers. If the INS’s experiments showed otherwise, it is almost certain that they were not conducted with proper experimental controls, and have not been vetted by the Peer Review Process. In other words—it’s pseudoscientific bunk, and Brown’s assertion at the beginning of his book is just as hollow as his assertions about the accurate nature of other elements in his works.
Page 44
When Peter first shows Katherine the Cube, her new lab, in flashback, he tells her that it’s powered by a hydrogen fuel cell that generates “enough clean power to run a small town”. Can hydrogen fuel cells small enough to fit inside a lab really generate that much power?
Page 63
Inoue Sato, the Director of the CIA’s Office of Security, takes over the Peter Solomon investigation. The CIA handles espionage, not domestic matters, over which they have zero authority. If Dan Brown wanted a government agency to take over the investigation, it should’ve been the FBI. If some aspect of the U.S.’ intelligence matters was an inalienable part of the plot, then Brown could’ve simply had the FBI person mention this, and that he got the cooperation of the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security to acquire it. As it turns out, Sato’s concern is that Mal’akh has information that she considers a threat to national security. But the CIA doesn’t protect “national security”, it’s a spy organization. The right organization to have employed in this story would’ve been the National Security Agency, or again, the FBI. Why didn’t Brown know this?
Page 85
When Langdon first points out The Apotheosis of Washington to Sato, the novel mentions that it depicts George Washington dressed in white robes. Um, no, it doesn’t. From the waist up, Washington is wearing what I assume is his military dress uniform, and from the waist down, he is wearing a purple cloth. Didn’t Dan Brown even bother looking up an image of the painting?
Spoiler Nit
Page 189
When Katherine escapes Mal’akh and the SMSC, she gets to her Volvo, and her keys are said to be on the dashboard’s center console. She manages to escape, but Brown does not explain how she got into her car if the keys were inside. Brown should’ve indicated that her car used a touch keypad lock.
Spoiler Nit
Page 432 – 438
Would Mal’akh’s video really threaten National Security? I mean, really, the government would be thrown into upheaval? Isn’t that a bit of an overstatement? The public knows that George Washington and many other Founding Fathers, Presidents, and other historical figures were Masons, and the media would obviously point this out if the video were released. While the video would certainly stir interest, I doubt it would cause much of a scandal, even in this scandal-hungry society. And does Sato really have any legal basis to stop someone from releasing a video of a private gathering? Even if Brown’s rationale on this point was to indicate that she was exploiting her position to protect her boss, even knowing it was not legally justified, didn’t Sato think Langdon could cause problems if he knew of the video’s existence?
Spoiler Nit
Page 458
After Mal’akh places Langdon in the sensory deprivation tank, and fills it with water, he gets Langdon to decipher the pyramid base’s grid. Mal’akh then leaves, telling Langdon, “Enjoy the afterlife”. This makes it fairly obvious that he intended to kill Langdon. But we then find out that the liquid he pumped into the tank wasn’t water, but the same oxygenated breathing liquid seen in the film The Abyss. Furthermore, when Langdon shows up at the House of the Temple to rescue Peter, Mal’akh is surprised to see Langdon, and wonders, “How can this be?” Why is he surprised to see Langdon if he knew the liquid wasn’t water, and used it himself to interrogate/torture Peter? Why did he think he was killing Langdon when he should’ve known otherwise?
Spoiler Nit
Page 466
Shouldn’t Peter go directly to the hospital once he’s rescued, to have his injuries examined, to make sure they’re not infected, and get started on rehabilitation? Can’t giving Langdon another tour of the city wait?
Spoiler Nit
Page 496
I don’t buy the idea that Sato let Bellamy go at the end of the story, after what he did to her. At the very least, Brown could’ve addressed this with a scene in which Sato says something about it.
Page 507-508
Langdon and Katherine are on the mini skywalk outside the Capitol dome, facing west toward the Washington Monument just before sunrise. As the first sunrays of morning appear, Langdon realizes that the first ray of sunlight to hit the nation’s capital each day illuminated the inscription Laus Deo on the Monument’s capstone. But doesn’t the Sun rise in the east, and set in the west?
More info on the idea that thoughts can effective things like water crystals.
Okay, looking through the end of the book again indicates that they were in the Washington Monument looking west, not the Capitol looking east. I don't know how I messed this up.