The secret of the secrets of Dan Brown Review – a nonsense of arms quality from start to finish | Fiction

HIt is back, baby! Dan Brown’s first novel in almost a decade brings together readers with the only teacher of symbology in the world, Robert Langdon – a man whose most distinctive quality of character teams up a mobile and Turtleneck combo with a Mickey Mouse bracelet. Do we learn more about Langdon? Not much. It is always so renamed in the world that, as it does not occur for most academics, fancy hotels monographing its slippers for it. His password for most things is Dolphin123 because it is good to swim. It is too old to love SMS or video games, and just a little prude. He has never seen when Harry met Sally, But “heard of the famous” sex scene “”.

At this stage, everything that must be said about the ineptic phrase by Brown as a prose writer has been said. Do not be afraid: he is always hopeless. It can be considered as a meta -fictional joke according to which in a novel where an adjective favored as “elegant” can appear in two consecutive sentences, where the bells are supposed to “release”, and where we are asked to analyze “the doors of the elevator which have been opened, and Langdon felt an instant explosion of relief to see open air, but that emotion was instantly Attenuated by disappointment, “both devote and emotion to emotion are instantly modeled” Penguin Random House.

The interesting question to ask about it is not what Brown hurts as a writer, but what he does well. Because he does something good. Above all, he puts the “UM” in Harum-Scarum. Here is a plot that starts and becomes thicker. All the few pages bring a cliffhanger, introduced by a point shooting or a series of italics with a wide eyes. The opening sentences describe the mind of a dead woman floating above Prague (“with her eyes, if she still had eyes, she drew the sweet slope of Castle Hill in the heart of the bohemian capital”). A few pages later, we discover that the new girlfriend of Langdon – she is a Notician – has made a discovery about the nature of the consciousness that will upset everything we know about the universe.

Before knowing, Langdon himself is subject to an arrest or worse by the Czech secret police for somewhat built crime to trigger a fire alarm from the hotel and then jump, some will stroke stupidly, in an icy river. Meanwhile, there is someone who thinks that it is a real golem – with lumpy boots, dramatic black coat and noggin covered with clay – wandering around the place to bang people. There is even a well -appointed secret underground laboratory with an honest monorail to the good.

And as usual, there is a Highfalutin MacGuffin – this time, it is the thing of consciousness; Is death really the end? – and powerful and sinister entities trying to keep a lid on it. (A slight weakness, I must say, is that the main villain is a very dull figure-no murderous albino monks or tattooed madmen this time.) Someone is hell on the destruction of the book of future love in love (the servers are hacked, the printed manuscripts are loved), and the sabotage oh-my-goge. “Triadic dimensional vortical paradigm”; “Benzimidazobenzophenthroline”; “I suggested modifying the conductance by adding three millimolons of glutamine to the electrolyte solution – and that’s exactly what they do!”

The Odd Thing is that Brown’s Love of Digressions and Flashbacks and Wikipedia-Style Infodumps (We Learn of Prague that “Mysterious Jewish Writer Franz Kafka was bound and worning his darkly surreal the metamorphosis”, and that the use 1656 by a One-Legged Count “and now“ Housed 23 Onsite Tasked with Working on Behalf of US Interests in the Region ”) does not really interrupt the pace. of winner or the coffee machine in the PRH children’s division is “a Franke A1000 with Foammaster technology” is the whole sauce.

It is, in other words, a novel by Dan Brown. They are bullshit of weapons quality from start to finish, none of this makes sense, and you roar with whole pleasure if you like this kind of thing. Welcome, Big Fella.