Brown loses his way a little (The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown)

Member Name: tommy7

Product:	The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown
Date:	19/09/09 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Decent read

Disadvantages: Not up to standard of other books featuring Langdon

'The Lost Symbol' was always going to be a difficult book to write for Dan Brown. The hype surrounding its predecessor, 'The Da Vinci Code' was incomparable. What concerned me most about this book was that the real reason for the success of that book was the setting and the revelations, all things that Brown hadn't come up with. He just put a very good level of fiction around it. Would he be able to find a similar setting for this book?

In addition the release date being put continually put back did not augur well. Perhaps it was due to his other titles still selling in sufficient quantities but it's seldom a good sign when an author delays releasing new material.

For all that I was optimistic when I started this story. This time the focus is on the Masons and their secrets. As usual, we see Brown's symbologist Robert Langdon getting involved, this time when his friend, the Masonic leader, Peter Solomon is kidnapped. Unless Langdon can get to the bottom of the Masonic secrets and pass them on to Solomon's captor then his friend will be killed. So once again we have Langdon providing the expertise to solve some of histories greatest mysteries.

The first couple of hundred pages will be very similar for anyone who has read any of Brown's previous novels featuring Langdon. The similarities began to annoy me and I kept thinking 'how can it have taken Brown 5 years to write this??'. There is nothing original in this part of the book and the early twist is a fairly obvious one. In this early stage even Langdon is underused. He provides little more than a speaking google would. There is nothing for him to solve, he just explains what the symbols mean. At one point even the CIA officer becomes aware of this and asks him what it is specifically about him that is necessary. That was the feeling I had. It wasn't the usual type of Langdon involvement. This did change as the book progressed but it was a very slow start.

A further early irritation was Brown's use of italics to let you know what almost every character was thinking. However, despite this early irritation I grew to like this method of writing later in the book, when it was used more sparingly.

The story this time is a lot weaker than both Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. This is not helped when being read by a non-American. Where previously you wanted to look up the artwork or statues on the internet, this time a lot of the references were to do with the insides of buildings and I didn't have the same motivation to look them up. Perhaps an American would be a lot more familiar with the sites visited but I felt the book lacked a little of the intrigue that the others offered. Finding hidden meanings in the works of Bernini or Da Vinci held far more appeal than the layout of Washington.

What I liked about the book was that the back stories were exceptionally well written and added a lot to the story. In particular the evolution of the main evil (to put it simply) character of Mal'akh. This was the highlight of the book for me and the twists in this story were actually what made the book rise above mediocrity for me. It added a lot more to the story than the 'secrets' which were revealed. In fact the secrets left me with a feeling of 'is that it?'.

The whole Masonic angle for me was disappointing. Brown seems to have gone out of his way to put this group in a good light. Perhaps stung by his perceived criticism of the Church in previous books he may have been careful not to upset another organisation, or he may even be a member, who knows. I had hoped to read a thriller in which a lot of secrets (personally don't care if they are true or not, as long as they are not claimed to be factually correct) were revealed. But in the end the story boiled down to a conventional thriller with a preachy ending that was about 30 pages too long.

The entire book is set over a 12 hour period which felt too short for my liking. I liked the pacing of the other books but this one seemed too compact. Puzzles which had remained unsolved for centuries were solved in minutes and it just seemed far too compressed. In fact, the story is probably done inside ten hours, the final two just being a bit of padding at the end.

As usual there were numerous symbolic puzzles scattered through the book. Brown did well to present these puzzles and leave a few pages until they were solved. It gave you the chance to try and solve them yourself before the characters did. Unfortunately the puzzles were far too obscure for me to solve and I found that I spent less and less time trying to solve them as I went through the book.

It also annoyed me when Brown wrote about Langdon moaning about having to put up with being recognised now. I remember J K Rowling complaining through her books about similar issues. It was like Brown was getting this gripe out there about his own situation following the successful books. However, it did amuse me when he Langdon solved a puzzle as he had previously read about a similar situation in a 'mediocre thriller', which from memory was Brown's own Digital Fortress.

I can't see how this book will live up to the hype. Having said that, it's a decent read and is just about a worthwhile addition to the Langdon collection. It's definitely the weakest of the three in my opinion. Had this been published a lot closer to the last release then I think there would have been accusations of Brown producing a quick story to ride on the tail of the success. Sadly, it still reads that way.

I picked this up from Tesco for £7 but Amazon has it for £4.99 and I believe Asda are selling it for £5. It is worth reading to satisfy curiosity and to keep up to date with Langdon's story, just don't expect too much from it.

ISBN 978-0-593-05427-7
509 pages (not 307 as reported on a few online stores)

Summary: Only read after the other two and Deception Point.