The Lost Symbol:

THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown. Doubleday, 2009, 509 pp., $29.95.
ISBN 978-0-385-50422-5

In 1993, in hopes of representing TRUE REVIEW at Disclave, the annual SF convention near, around, or some years inside Washington, D.C., I found myself driving erroneously, every which way, in the big, brawling, spacious downtown district of our nation’s Capitol. Oh, what memories I have. Such as:

Where am I?

And where does THIS road go?

And who designed this place, anyway?

Just down the road from where we live in Chocolatetown, USA, is the splendid city of Lancaster, Pa. with streets created by James Hamilton, a Pennsylvania politician and landowner. Circa 1733, Hamilton designed a city of such eminent traveler friendliness that the very nature borders on high art. If common sense is genius, then Hamilton was post-doctorate material. It would be almost incomprehensible to somehow get lost in Lancaster – from any street corner, you can be pretty sure of where you are, geographically.
           
Not so in D.C.

In D.C., you have to know EXACTLY where you are at any given moment. The streets are almost whimsical in design, woefully haphazard to the traveler, seemingly constructed by a distracted 4-year-old child playing with a broken crayon. Then again, perhaps the streets were purposely designed this way, by madmen, in hopes of thwarting any invading army, or perhaps, if THIS bad, by a darker plan to conceal something. You always feel like some deeper secrets lie in waiting in D.C. if you could just figure out how to get around.
           
So I knew what inspired Dan Brown to bring back his hero, Robert Langdon, from commercial obscurity (or under Papal watch) to maneuver in D.C.
           
Langdon knows the history of the very Masonic Washington, D.C. The founding fathers were many a Mason who wanted to make their imprint on a brand-new country. They wanted to be as unlike mother England as possible. They wanted to imbibe the very architecture of the Capitol with Freemasonry, symbols that would puzzle, mesmerize, and perplex us for generations. The captured images in our nation’s currency -- of floating eyes, pyramids that sit incomplete, Latin phrases unknown to most, and the Masonic Ideal that God is in all of us (and we can only try to aspire to be like Him) – remind us of our country’s Masonic heritage.
           
One deranged character takes all of these beliefs to heart, and it isn’t Langdon in THE LOST SYMBOL. The man who calls himself Mal’akh, formerly Inmate 37 of Soganlik Prison outside of Istanbul, Turkey, finds important information to transform his life. In prison, his cellmate is Zachary Solomon, an imprisoned drug dealer. Zachary is supposedly murdered in a deal with the warden, and Mal’akh deals his way out of prison, embarking on a quest to find the answers to the mysteries that Zachary presented him: the way to immortal power, the power that his aunt, Katherine Solomon, brother to Peter Solomon, is working on. Katherine is poised to make several breakthroughs in Noetic Science – the ability of thought to transport or transform matter.
           
Peter Solomon is head of the Smithsonian Institute and one day calls on his good friend Robert Langdon, professor of religious studies at Harvard. Solomon wants Robert to give a last-minute talk in D.C. about the Masons. However, when Langdon arrives, there is no audience. When Langdon phones Peter, guess who is standing by the phone? None other than Inmate 37, who holds Peter hostage.
           
And Langdon knows when he encounters the horror of Peter’s disembodied hand, pointing up in the Capitol Rotunda, with the golden ring on the fourth finger. That is Peter’s hand. Who has bludgeoned Peter and is holding him captive, and why?
           
Apparently Langdon has an object wrapped in his backpack. Mal’akh’s mission: recover the object and interrogate Langdon to decipher encoded symbols that will lead them to the hiding place of the one true symbol that will grant Mal’akh untold power. But first, destroy the work of Katharine Solomon and preserve the secrets of the Masons that have lasted for centuries. Then murder Katharine. And Langdon’s mission: recover Peter from the madman.
           
In April 2000, in True Review 44, I reviewed, in a galley form that I gave to a good friend, a novel called ANGELS AND DEMONS, published by Pocket Books, by an unknown-at-the-time-author named Dan Brown. Who WAS this guy? I was impressed! Then in October 2003 in True Review 54 I reviewed another fabulous novel, THE DA VINCI CODE, published by Doubleday. Impressed again!
           
Those novels seem to progress at their own pace from some incredible ideas. But something seems somehow – I don’t know, FORCED – about THE LOST SYMBOL. Hurried. Almost as if Brown was under a tight deadline to structure a story that had enough action to make it into a potential movie and at the same time meet sales expectations. The characters felt more real in THE DA VINCI CODE and ANGELS AND DEMONS, and Langdon played a crucial role in the development of those stories.
           
But in SYMBOL, Langdon feels like a chess piece, being pushed unwillingly, willy-nilly, about some board, as spear carriers of all sorts appear and die. Many of the characters are awkward clichés and the situations are predictable. If you read SYMBOL too critically, you will be disappointed about how much is simply forced.
           
In subsequent books, as an avid Robert Langdon reader, I expected more about him as a person, about his past. If we could have learned more about how Peter has become Langdon’s best friend . . . if we could understand (or let it be revealed) that Langdon, surprise-surprise! is some kind of Mason at heart, if there was someplace we could believe he had gone (perhaps gone back to the time of the founding, I don’t know) – it would have made a great book. Those things just aren’t in SYMBOL, folks, and that’s just too bad.
           
As an action thriller, it is passé. Like the streets of Washington, it lacks helpful direction. Though it moves at a pace that makes it very light reading, it also has a light story – imbued with fantastic periods of pure philosophy – but those are the good parts, and any study about the characters has been left at the wayside. Too bad. I enjoy the character that is Langdon, and I hope his story is told someday.