“That Dan Brown,” I thought to myself several times as I read this book. “What an imagination.”
Credit where it is due. Dan Brown has a singular ability to take a great many likely very unrelated things and use them to authoritatively build a construct where none should exist. He managed to create a cute little Path of Illumination in “Angels and Demons” and a Grail conspiracy in “The da Vinci Code” (where he somehow never got around to mentioning that Grail stories don’t appear until the 12th century).
Now in his latest book, he creates a bizarre Masonic conspiracy that involves a McGuffin so great it could Change The Whole World. The CIA is also involved, for some reason. Also, a man gets his hand cut off, and Robert Langdon runs around staring, at various times, in wonder, in awe, in stunned silence and bewilderment.
The book carries Langdon on a chase around Washington, DC, on one rather memorable Sunday night during the football playoffs. A mysterious call, apparently on behalf of a friend of his, sends him on his mission to apparently uncover some great Masonic secret or, depending on what’s happening at any given moment in the story, not uncover some great Masonic secret.
This book was pretty insufferable, really. I rather liked “Angels and Demons” and “The da Vinci Code” had it’s moments, but this book didn’t really. From the moment the concept of “noetic sciences” was introduced (you ever hear of “The Secret”? It’s that), my eyes began rolling and didn’t stop until the end, and then that was only because I think whatever muscle controls the rolling had gotten tired.
There’s so much of this book that just doesn’t make sense. Take the involvement of the CIA. What appears to be their internal affairs office spends much time running around DC, sending black ops people to do things and generally pushing around folks from other departments (hilariously the director of this office tells someone else, employed by an entirely different branch of the government, that she outranks him. This is like the Chicago PD’s internal affairs department saying they outrank an NYC police officer). Of course the CIA isn’t allowed to operate on American soil, but since we all “know” they do anyhow, Brown has them do so in this book. There’s no real reason for them to. He could’ve had it be the FBI, and that would’ve made a lot more sense and not strained credibility, but whatever.
And then there’s the noetic sciences nonsense. Did you know thoughts have mass? I didn’t, and I’m willing to bet this is news to most physicists, too. Brown likes to spout off a bunch of “scientific” theories in the book as though they are fact, which gets really irritating after a bit.
Also laughable is someone sustaining a very, very serious injury for which they have had no medical treatment, as well as dealing with the after affects of torture, and a serious psychological jolt… and a couple hours later this same person is traipsing about Washington without a care in the world or any real medical attention. Right.
There’s one line towards the very end of the book where someone says, “I have witnessed human minds affecting the physical world in myriad ways.” You know what? I have, too. Those minds power hands, for example. I suggest you use your hands to not pick up this book…
… ok, that’s a little strained, but you get the idea.
The book gets two stars because it held my attention (when my eyes weren’t a spinnin’), but it gets one star for everything else. Not worth buying.
No comments:
Post a Comment