Lost Symbol ....
Dan Brown ... and then comes Robert Langdon ... LOST SYMBOL .. that is what this is all about ...
Da Vinci Code .. and then Lost Symbol .... the thrillers are fundamentally the same - and with The Lost Symbol he has delivered the marketing department's dream, a straightforward knock-off of The Da Vinci Code, the world's all-time bestselling work of adult fiction, the book that reached people who don't normally bother with books.
Like The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol takes place over only a few hours. Like The Da Vinci Code, it kicks off with the discovery of a grotesque sign - here a severed hand carefully arranged to send a message, rather than a whole corpse - and proceeds via a series of ancient knick-knacks, inscribed with messages to be solved and fitted together.
Instead of Leonardo himself, there's a cameo role for Albrecht Durer, "the ultimate Renaissance mind To this day, nobody fully understands the messages hidden in Durer's art".
Most importantly, Dan Brown has preserved his own special brand of moronic narration. His characters ceaselessly explain all this esoteric cack to one another in long passages of information dumping, broken up by the printed equivalent of noddy shots from the recipients, always amazed by what they are hearing - "Katherine's heart was pounding Katherine almost choked on her tea Katherine's jaw fell open".
Brown has a unique gift for making even the briefest such physical description sound mechanistic and wrong.
His characters also endlessly recap what they've just been told, to make sure everybody has understood.
Without the word "so", Brown would be lost. His use of italics for emphasis, several times on every page, is perhaps most charitably to be understood as a form of highlighting for those who have mislaid their own Magic Markers.
The full book is available here ....
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