Dan Brown uncovers Washington's darkest secrets

by Scott R. Garceau of The Philippine Star

In fairness, you don’t “savor” Dan Brown novels, you consume them. They’re not designed for slow sipping, they are made for quick, enjoyable quaffing. Brown writes books to keep you turning pages.

The Lost Symbol, Brown’s long-awaited follow-up to mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code, is finally upon the world, and there is no question that millions of pages are now turning out there. If the wind power from those relentlessly turning pages could be harnessed, it would power a small city.

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Symbologist Dr. Robert Langdon is back, and he’s got another mystery to solve involving ancient meanings imbedded in famous locales and monuments. Last seen trekking through La Louvre in Paris, Langdon is now racing against time in a place you wouldn’t think held a lot of arcane mysteries: Washington, DC.

What’s so mysterious about Washington? Well, it’s full of shady secrets, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found out long ago. But it also has a peculiar history shaped by a secret society, and this is the sort of thing that gets Dan Brown’s digits flying on a keyboard.

A hand shot up. “You mean our Founding Fathers believed in astrology?”

Langdon grinned. “Big-time. What would you say if I told you the city of Washington, D.C. has more astrological signs in its architecture than any other city in the world — zodiacs, star charts, cornerstones laid at precise astrological dates and times? More than half of the framers of our Constitution were Masons, men who strongly believed that the stars and fates were intertwined, men who paid close attention to the layout of the heavens as they structured their new world.”

Just as Langdon teases his Harvard freshmen with tales of Washington’s hidden past, Brown teases readers with bits of arcane knowledge about Masons and their connection to American history. With The Lost Symbol, the turf of inquiry has shifted from long-suppressed Catholic Church secrets to knowledge buried at the heart of the United States, where its Founders first mapped out what it meant to be free (and white and male) in a new, uncharted paradise. And, just as he did with The Da Vinci Code, Brown assures us in his prologue note that “all rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.”

Other factual oddities include a special branch of the CIA called the Office of Security that is headed by a scary bulldog of a director named Inoue Sato; a special warehouse of the Smithsonian Museum called the Support Center that houses hundreds of thousands of priceless artifacts that people never get to see; and a special research lab called the Institute of Noetic Science that strives to find a link between human mental energy and the material world (in other words, ESP).

The whole thing is set in motion when Langdon is requested to give a lecture in the US Capitol Building by an old friend. In no time, he’s being asked to uncover the secrets contained in a severed hand covered with tattoos, decipher cryptograms displayed on golden pyramids, and figure out how to validate his parking…

No, actually he’s being pressured by the CIA to tell them “everything he knows” about bizarre clues left by a demented Freemason who is seeking to amass an incalculable amount of power by connecting arcane symbols strewn all over the American capital. It seems Langdon’s old Harvard mentor, symbologist Peter Solomon, has been taken captive and it’s up to Langdon and Solomon’s sister Katherine to find him — and incidentally, to prevent the collapse of all foundations of human knowledge, just as he did in Da Vinci Code. Needless to say, a little knowledge is a deadly thing in Dan Brown books.

As usual, Langdon (who it’s impossible not to imagine as Tom Hanks while you’re reading) is an “aw, shucks” kind of symbologist; he claims ignorance of every puzzle placed before him, even as he is dragged deeper into danger and mystery, then proceeds to solve everything at the 11th hour. He’s constantly put in harm’s way, which leads to the kind of three- to four-page cliffhanger chapters that Brown manages to whip off so well.

Okay, enough waffling. Is The Lost Symbol as good as The Da Vinci Code? The answer perhaps depends on what kind of mystery you like. And it depends on what you mean by “good.” Though I wasn’t a huge fan, hundreds of millions of readers lapped up Brown’s last book. By that measure, he must be doing something right. The new book’s structure is an almost exact duplicate of Da Vinci Code. Brown’s general ploy is to research historical mysteries, preferably something that incites heated debate, then play connect-the-dots between science, art, history and urban myth. On one hand, he’s an educator who likes to inject controversial ideas into his storylines, things that will spark watercooler discussion and make people think; on the other hand, he’s a writer capable of having his bad guys wave around pistols and say clichéd things like, “Don’t play dumb with me” and “If they only knew my power…” So Brown really serves two masters: the God of Oprah Book Club Discussions and the God of Shameless Potboilers.

At least, in The Lost Symbol, Brown gets to invent a villain even more impressively two-dimensional than his cilice-wielding Opus Dei baddie in Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, the would-be Freemason is buffed up and covered in tattoos, recalling Thomas Harris’s transformative serial killer in Red Dragon. Oh well, good villains don’t come out of thin air.

Will The Lost Symbol spark the same level of interest and/or furor as The Da Vinci Code? That’s a tough one. Challenging people’s religious beliefs is a much more reliable way of getting your work discussed (or fatwa-ed, as newspaper cartoonists and Salman Rushdie found out) than questioning American History lessons. Brown seems convinced that readers worldwide will be ravenously curious about Freemasonry and America’s past, enough to take a dive into these less-controversial waters. Naturally, people are going to buy it and read it no matter what: it’s as anticipated a book event as the final Harry Potter installment.

But is it a page-turner, you ask? Yes, indeed, it is.

Though Brown has been reviled as a hack writer by people like Stephen King, he clearly has a talent for tapping into popular pop psychology. Much of The Lost Symbol concerns mankind’s quest to “remember” lost knowledge that can bring us closer to God, stuff long ago known by Egyptians, Ancient Greek, Kabalistic priests and Christians, but since forgotten. This has a decidedly New Age cast to it. There’s even stuff about our ability to materialize reality and command the Universe to deliver what we want that sounds like it was taken straight from The Secret.

And yes, even the Internet features in this Dan Brown thriller, capitalizing on our “one world” nature thanks to Twitter and video streaming sites. It’s hard not to raise an eyebrow, though, when the ultimate threat to mankind in the book comes, not from deadly plagues or economic meltdown or nuclear war, but from a malicious YouTube moment.

And what of these Masons who occupy so much of the novel? Oddly, considering the skewering that Brown gave Opus Dei and the Catholic hierarchy in Da Vinci Code, he goes pretty easy on Masons. He notes that the Scottish rituals of Freemasonry have been practiced since the 1600s by people as diverse as Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin, down to American presidents such as George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Harry S. Truman. Those civic-minded Shriners who hold conventions and wear fezes are, in fact, Masons. (Further research on my part uncovers more bizarre Masons throughout history: Bud Abbott, the straight guy from Abbott and Costello; Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny; and noted Christmas crooner Nat King Cole. All of them Freemasons! Shocking! Now, how can an organization that has Mel Blanc as a member be sinister?)

The Masons, Brown labors to point out, have been unjustly maligned through history, though these days they are “less a secret society and more a society of secrets,” as one character puts it. What he means is Masons are everywhere, even in places of power, still conducting secret rituals of initiation, admitting their members by strict degrees of knowledge — up to the 33rd degree, the highest level of Masonry. Sometimes those initiations involve sipping blood from human skulls. But hey, nobody’s perfect. Not coincidentally, Brown’s publishers timed the release of the book on an auspicious date — 9/15/9 (today) — the numerals of which, my superior mathematical powers quickly detected, add up to 33. Take from that what you will.