In many ways it would be better to see this book not as novel but as a film script.   As a novel it suffers from a number of faults, the dialogue is often wooden, the descriptive language lacks insight and at times can be almost laughable, and the character development is virtually non-existent.   View it as a film script and you can see that there is a clear movement from one well-defined scene to another. It is noteworthy that the Washington D.C. tourist department, Destination DC, was only a week after its publication, promoting the sites mentioned by Dan Brown in this novel.   If you have seen the film of “Angels & Demons” you can envisage how the novel moves though the landscape of Washington DC, in the way that that film (and the original novel) moves though the landscape of Rome.   The novel often reads like a travel book, “Outside the window the sun had set, but Langdon could still make out the slender silhouette of the world’s largest obelisk, rising on the horizon like the spire of an ancient gnomon.”

It is clear that Dan Brown does a lot of research before writing his books, and I will return to this subject later on, it has been said that he can be inaccurate, however he is writing fiction, not a history book. What is also interesting that Dan Brown does also not criticize any of the American institutions he writes about, in fact you could say that this novel is almost a commercial for Masonry.   To cite one quotation, “Bellamy gave a patient smile. ‘The craft of Freemasonry has given me a deep respect for that which transcends human understanding.’” At the beginning we are however lead to believe that the CIA is acting against the interests of truth and justice, however near the end of the book, in a turn which is not skilfully handled, there is a volte-face, and the CIA becomes one of the good guys.   This is very much an American novel, the action takes place wholly within the United States and all the characters are American. It is also essentially a novel which is not grounded in any particular time, apart from a reference to 2012 being seen as a turning point in the Mayan calendar, there are few references to contemporary individuals, products, events or ideas, notable exceptions being references to the iPhone and noetic science.

This novel is about the opening of a puzzle, like Brown’s earlier books, the reader is asked to witness the solving of a series of problems, or puzzles, and the solving of each problem is then followed by an escape.  The reader is surprised to learn near the end of the book that most of the earlier escapes are rendered pointless by the change in status of the CIA, which is in terms of the structure of the novel a major mistake. This change in perception also applies to the treasure that Robert Langdon, the main figure in the story, finds at the end of the story; it is not quite what most readers will have been expecting.   When we walk out of the cinema in a year, or so, the ending, if Hollywood does not “update” it, will leave, I am afraid, a sense of anti-climax.

Now, you may ask, why are we reviewing this novel, especially as virtually every newspaper on the planet has either reviewed it, or will be doing so shortly?   The reason is the novel’s subject matter.   As you will have gathered I don’t think this can be described as a good novel in a literary sense, although it will sell in numbers to rival the Harry Porter books.   Dan Brown has, however, attempted a really “big” theme, one that touches on the relationship of humanity to the divine, and the development of higher states of awareness by the species as a whole.   Although he does not, in my opinion, succeed in pulling this off, he does introduce the reader to a range of ideas with which most people will have been unfamiliar.   I therefore think that most readers of PS Magazine will actually find something of interest in The Lost Symbol, although they need to remember that this is not a textbook on the development of human consciousness.   It will, nevertheless, serve a useful purpose in making some people aware that there are sets of ideas which do not fit in with their own existing concepts of man and God.   Dan Brown suggests that Free Masonry has been guarding knowledge of such ideas for generations, this is to say the least, a romantic version of the role of the Craft, which is more often associated with male socializing.   In turning the stones during his research Dan Brown has exposed some interesting concepts, but not the “answers” that some readers may imagine.   Dan Brown does, however, make it clear that the book is based on the premise that humanity is in the process of changing. Near the end of the novel Dan Brown has Langdon note that, “Although many people erroneously interpreted apocalypse as a cataclysmic end of the world, the word literally signified an ‘unveiling,’ predicted by the ancients to be that of great wisdom. The coming age of enlightenment.”   One of Dan Brown’s characters also predicts that the findings of noetic science “will affect global consciousness on a massive scale.”

In short we recommend this book as a good and quick read, true it’s over 500 pages, but a normal reader should finish it in a couple of days. Dan Brown raises some interesting issues and most readers will have questions after reading the novel. But, and it’s a big but, don’t expect to find the answers to the big questions of life in a novel, for that you will need a different set of reading matter.

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