The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Peter Conrad www.theguardian.com
<p>Dan Brown's latest blockbuster is the literary equivalent of Coca-Cola and will no doubt sell as well, says <strong>Peter Conrad </strong></p>
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the Guardian
Dan Brown traffics in arcana. His novels speculate about the suppressed details of Christ's sex life and the location of the Holy Grail, the hermetic experiments of alchemy and the etymological riddles of biblical scholarship – oh, and I shouldn't forget the most highly prized secret of all: the formula for whatever mixture of syrups, caffeine and sodium benzoate makes up Coca-Cola.

At the beginning of The Lost Symbol, Brown's "symbologist" Robert Langdon, about to start a frantic quest for the priestly lore hidden beneath the monuments of Washington DC, likens "the recipe for classic Coke" to the occult rites of the Freemasons. Forget about Brown's hints of a closely guarded wisdom that can lead us hierarchically from earth to heaven, like base metals transmuted into gold. His new novel might scavenge for remnants of what he calls "the Ancient Mysteries", but the mystery that really excites him is a modern one, a trade secret known to only two members of a corporate brotherhood at the Coca-Cola headquarters: the magic spell that turns water not into wine, which is all Christ could manage, but into bubbles and money.

Brown, like Coke, is a global brand. What he promises consumers is more of the same, and in The Lost Symbol he has stirred up again his formulaic blend of motorised chase and mystical mumbo-jumbo. Langdon, having saved the Vatican from a nuclear blast in Angels & Demons, now comes home to give another dreary academic lecture, after which he sprints off to preserve the US government from a revelation that could destabilise the world.

New names are assigned to players familiar from The Da Vinci Code. Saunière, the murdered Louvre curator, becomes Peter Solomon, the kidnapped and mutilated CEO of the Smithsonian Institution; Saunière's granddaughter is matched by Solomon's sister, recruited as Langdon's sidekick. The avenging angel who tracks them is not Silas, the self-flagellating albino monk, but a self-gelding bodybuilder who nicknames himself Moloch, after one of the devils in Paradise Lost.

The Last Supper is replaced as a repository of forbidden knowledge by Dürer's Melencolia I, and the cryptex designed by Leonardo recurs as an impenetrable granite cube which only spells out the secret it contains when boiled in a pasta pan. Westminster Abbey cedes its role as a sacred site of illumination to Washington National Cathedral, whose sublimity inspires Brown to take inventory of the bells in its carillon and the pipes in its organ (53 and 10,647 respectively). IM Pei's pyramid in the Louvre courtyard, beneath which Langdon surmises that Mary Magdalen lies buried, is here up-ended as the pyramidal Washington Monument, whose tip contains the paltry solution to the panic that convulses the city.

The writing is as bad as Brown's admirers have come to expect: imagine Coke gone flat. Characters – "systems security specialist Mark Zoubianis" and "sys-sec Rick Parrish", for instance – come with occupational tags, since they're only memorable as the plot's functionaries. They converse with a lack of idiomatic verve that would embarrass an automaton. "Are you familiar with the private air terminal at Boston's Logan Airport?" someone asks Langdon. (He replies: "I am", though I was hoping he'd say: '"Affirmative".)

In descriptive mode, Brown composes real estate listings. The villain inhabits a "sprawling mansion", which in an elegant variation 300 pages later is called a "spectacular mansion". Neighbourhoods are "upscale", an office building is "prestigious". No opportunity for product placement is missed. The heroine drives a '"white Volvo", while Langdon more snazzily cruises in a "Falcon 2000EX corporate jet" with "dual Pratt & Whitney engines". Minor characters brandish a BlackBerry, an iPhone and a Browning Citori shotgun.

Every few pages, the plot arrives at a precipice, with a vertiginous drop of a few feet in prospect. '"We've got a serious problem," says someone. "What's in that case?!" asks someone else, with a flurry of superfluous punctuation to denote alarm. When Brown gets excited, he emits telegrams. A woman being stalked by the maniacal Moloch feels fear of a new kind: it is "Visceral. Primal". She needn't have worried, because he only wants her Pin number. At moments of supreme intensity, Brown relies on italics to carbonate his limp language. Langdon, drowning (not fatally, I'm sorry to say), sees the face of God, and gasps: "Light!" The fallen archangel, returning to Hell in a weird supernatural sally, reports: "I am screaming in infinite terror." I cocked my ear but despite the italics I couldn't hear a thing.

Though Brown is repeating himself, there is perhaps an added urgency to the enterprise this time because Langdon, after his excursions to Paris and Rome in previous novels, is on home ground, careening through what he informatively calls "our nation's capital city". Rather than researching esoterica in European museums, Brown now confronts his own country, with its neoclassical angels and rabid, fire-breathing demons. To the first class belongs the sainted figure of George Washington, who undergoes apotheosis in the rotunda of the US Capitol: he represents the enlightened origins of the republic, a product of the secular 18th-century's belief that man was potentially a god. The second class includes the televangelist who broadcasts in the background during a scene late in the book, haranguing his "hypnotised viewers" and alerting them to the imminence of the Apocalypse, when only the reborn will be saved from the flames.

Brown, a New England liberal, is allegorically deploring America's fall into pious paranoia and religious hysteria. In his view, it's religion that is responsible for the fall of man and the corruption of the body politic. He muddles things up, however, by his own flirtation with mystagoguery. A high-tech subplot deals with noetic science, which sets out to calibrate brainwaves and tap cosmic consciousness. This new age endeavour made its "quantum leap forward" after 9/11, when the world's empathy for wounded America allegedly caused "the outputs of 37 Random Event Generators around the globe to suddenly become significantly less random". The Arabs who burnt the Stars and Stripes that day weren't attuned to this warming oneness, so Brown may be fuzzily deluding himself.

He is certainly interested in "the coalescing of millions of minds", but his loftiest aim is to make them coalesce at the cash register as they line up to buy copies of his new book.

There are 81m copies of The Da Vinci Code occupying space in our crowded world, joined now by 6.5m copies of his new book. In the realm of printed matter, Brown defers to only one piece of paper, which happens to be emblazoned with the pyramid that is the enciphered enigma at the centre of The Lost Symbol. This, he concedes through the mouth of one of his characters, is "the most widely published" concatenation of words and images on earth, with "over 20 billion" copies circulating. As you will have guessed, he is referring to the one-dollar bill. The exponential numbers humble even Brown, but they give him something to aim for.

He may not be able to write, but he knows how to print money: he is a one-man Mint.

First reactions: Reviews from the US papers and books blogs

Such was the secrecy surrounding the release of The Lost Symbol that translators are only now at work on foreign language editions. Across the English-speaking world, however, reactions have been fast and wide-ranging.

The New York Times

"Too many popular authors (Thomas Harris) have followed huge hits (The Silence of the Lambs) with terrible embarrassments (Hannibal). Mr Brown hasn't done that. Instead, he's bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead." Janet Maslin

Newsweek

"May be more like working a great crossword puzzle than reading War and Peace, but that doesn't mean it's not a fascinating pleasure." Malcolm Jones

The National Post

"A heavy-handed, clumsy thriller... if it didn't have Brown's name on the cover, it would disappear." Robert Wiersema

The LA Times

"It moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopaedias." Nick Owchar

Twitter

"Dammit, hooked again. Curse you and your intriguing shit based loosely in reality, Dan Brown." @readyfuels

Cracked.com

"Brown's greatest skill is his ability to infuse a sense of tension in all scenes." Chris Bucholz

They also sold - where Brown fits in

The Bible 2.5bn-6bn

The Qur'an 800m

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859) 200m

Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction on Good Citizenship by Robert Baden-Powell (1908) 150m

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (1954-5) 150m

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939) 100m

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003) 81m

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951) 65m