The Lost Symbol

Well that was an expensive two days activities then... book is now finished which hopefully means that this time tomorrow I will have done some actual work but never mind. I'm no literary expert but if you want to read my opinion then you are more than welcome and I shall begin below. Warning, this is a review and WILL contain spoilers!

As I said yesterday, the whole thing got off to a bit of a slow start which was disappointing because the biggest attraction of the Dan Brown books so far - especially the Robert Langdon series - has been that it immediately engaged the reader and kept their interest until the very end. Once the story had got going, it quickly descended into gaga land, introducing the concept of noetic science as a main part of the plot. I'm quite happy to go along with symbols and I can extend to understanding religion but introducing something as far fetched as this and then going on to give it a basis in fact is a little bit too far fetched for me. I didn't believe it from the beginning but was willing to give it a chance for a short while, I've heard people talking about the fact that we only use about 10% of the brains capacity at any one time and other such stories suggesting that we are no where near to reaching our full potentials. I can also go along with it thinking that some people have exceptional memories, or a special talent for maths and arithmetic or music. Scientifically proving the existence of a soul by weighing it however is something that I simply cannot comprehend and the fact that this strain of science doesn't actually seem to extend into the real world, the information about it on Wikipedia is virtually non existent and further googling reveals nothing of any major breakthroughs in the field. Moving on then, the clever bits start to creep in and the plot begins to gradually unfold. The hand, the pyramids and of course, the symbols all start to make their appearances and the mystery is set. Queue the running around in chaos and trying to decrypt a puzzle. The compulsory female lead character is introduced and paired up with Professor Langdon so that we get the damsel in distress moment in the book. On a plus point, I think that the capture sequence was much better thought out than the previous ones although of course as with all good villains, they get cocky and rather than just killing everyone, prefer to torture them - ultimately giving them a much better chance of escaping. I was actually convinced that he had killed off Robert at one point, when he is apparently drowned by his captor and even reading the text describing the process you go through when suffering from asphyxiation was enough to make my skin crawl. That is pretty much my only fear in life and I can cope quite happily with heights and spiders etc. Not being able to breathe however, terrifies me and whilst I'm not especially claustrophobic, if I was being held underwater for example, I would begin to panic almost immediately. Anyway, back to the book. So the main character is dead, the lead female is being rapidly drained of her blood and the evil guy is on the hunt for a word to tattoo on his head so that he can become a God. Does that seem plausible to you? I can understand that some people have beliefs that are not based in reality but surely that pushes the boundaries a bit too far, no?

So in come the cavalry who manage to find the secret passageway thanks to their amazing state of the art technology, wheel tracks on the floor leading up to a brick wall... and they go to investigate. They save the girl, they save the Professor and they go on the hunt for the killer. I don't know how popular this mason thing is over in the USA but I haven't really heard much about it in the UK. Supposedly it started in Scotland although from the other confusing place references in the book that could well be in America, Cambridge seems to be and it even seems to have a fairly reputable university. Either way, I can't see it being that much of a threat in modern times if their secrets got out, it also strikes me as odd that the current administration would allow the president of the USA to dress up in funny clothes and attend these masonic meetings and rituals without the whole place being heavily guarded by his personal security detail. Wouldn't that sort of defeat the point of it being a secret society? I can see how this would have worked fifty or a hundred years ago but it seems to be an unusual mix of the ultra modern and the super old and whilst I can imagine people of old having to resort to secret rituals and meetings for their evenings entertainment, nowadays we have TV and the internet, come on people - embrace the 21st century.

As was to be expected, everything ends with a happily every after (except the guy who lost his arm and his son), it might have been nice to see everything turn bad for once - at least then he could have had a follow up about the end of the world as we know it although that's a bit of a slip from his usual genre.

As you might be able to tell, I wasn't that impressed by this book, its certainly very readable and it has the usual effect of making it almost impossible to put the damn thing down but its a long way away from the other books he has written and quite severely over-hyped.