In Breakfast of Champions, his most childish and perhaps most pointed book, Kurt Vonnegut draws several cartoons to represent facets of post-war American life. He draws the flag and a hamburger, a hypodermic needle and the electric chair. He also draws the inverse of the Great Seal of the United States, the truncated pyramid with a lidded eye floating above it which appears on the dollar bill. If this symbol has a meaning, he explains, it may be that "in nonsense we trust".
For Vonnegut, the motto expresses the tragicomic wretchedness of humanity. If Dan Brown ever read it, it must have rung for him like a heavenly clarion. In fairness, Brown has more reason to trust nonsense than most. His last novel, The Da Vinci Code, was a breathless polemic from the margins of crank Christology bolted onto an effective but uneven thriller about the Knights Templar and Opus Dei. Its argument was, to state the case temperately, unconvincing. An author's note declared: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals are accurate"; in the same breath, and without detectable irony, it claimed a well-known hoax as established historical fact. The plotting was both leaden and chaotic. Worst of all, Brown's prose was so garbled, so witless, it rendered criticism otiose if not actively sadistic.
One can point to the place where a pistol is said to roar, or where "Fache ran a meaty hand through his hair", or sentences such as: "Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop's ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué" - but what can one say about them? To employ the ordinary tools of lit crit would be like taking a jackhammer to a woodlouse. As you probably know, The Da Vinci Code is the most successful novel for adults ever, having sold around 80 million copies worldwide. Here's to nonsense.
Its follow-up, The Lost Symbol, is a bit fatter and a bit more ridiculous than its predecessor. In other respects, Brown has succeeded admirably in writing the same book. The Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon - still an almighty dullard - is once again coaxed from his cloisters by an academic invitation which leads him to a bloody spectacle. Then it was Jacques Sauniere, in the Louvre, with the pistol. Now it's Peter Solomon, billionaire scholar and Masonic grandee, whose severed hand turns up in the rotunda of the capitol building in Washington.
Again, Langdon is thrust among the mysteries of a secret society which he conveniently knows all about: yesterday's Priory of Sion is today's Order of Freemasonry, Washington Branch. As before, Langdon is paired with a plucky female sidekick with a momentous secret. Once more, a homicidal zealot with peculiar skin is working towards some dread purpose (albinism gives way to full-body tattooing here, though there's also a sinister CIA official with vitiligo just to throw you off the scent). Like last time - indeed, like a computer game whose controls you can't quite get the hang of - it takes an eternity to get past the first big location. Et cetera. If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll feel right at home.
This is not to say that there is nothing to choose between the two books, and if pushed, I would confess a slight preference for the new one. Langdon's last adventure might have been better plotted and it certainly had a snappier premise (what if Jesus had a wife and child?) but it degenerated rather too far into misty simpering for my taste. This time around the MacGuffin is nebulous to the point that I kept forgetting what it was meant to be (something about what those eye-and-pyramid emblems really mean; when you find out, you'll want to punch Brown on the nose). And yet a diverting level of high camp is maintained right to the denouement.
"If they only knew my power," the villain muses grandly. "Tonight my transformation will be complete." Unfortunately, this climax occurs about 80 pages before the end of the book. The remainder is taken up with a lot of twaddle about quantum mechanics and the Age of Aquarius, all of which Brown apparently expects to be taken straight. Still, if one regards this as a sort of extended epilogue à la manière de Deepak Chopra - that is, if one skips it - then the bulk of the novel, at least until (spoiler) the baddy cops it, bursts with unintended hilarity.
A large part of this seems to be due to the fact the intrinsic ridiculousness of the Order. As Brown notes: "Perceptions of the modern Masons ranged from their being a group of harmless old men who liked to play dress-up to an underground cabal of power brokers who ran the world." Perhaps so, but wouldn't it also be fair to say that the weight of suspicion falls squarely behind the first option? Masonry is like cruise holidays and Medieval re-enactment: one of those suburban foibles that you hope never to learn your friends go in for in case you accidentally laugh in their faces. "Ah," says the one, "but what about those resounding names - the Franklins and FDRs, Buzz Aldrins and Peter Sellerses?" To which I reply: "If they find it easier to make friends with one trouser leg rolled up, they have my blessing. Alan Partridge would have been a Freemason."
It isn't surprising, then, that things get off to an undignified start when a prologue tries to play a Masonic ritual for macabre chills. There isn't much to work with: an initiate wearing an apron is given a skull filled with wine ("blood red wine", mark you) while a lot of other men in aprons look on. "Around their necks hung ceremonial jewels that glistened like ghostly eyes," we are told, though this sounds less sinister than vulgarly ostentatious. Then comes the oath of secrecy: may your bowels be taken out and burned, may your heart be plucked out and given to the beasts of the field... Someone should tell them about "cross your heart and hope to die", which at least has the merit of brevity.
The prologue sets the tone for the rest of the book, which again and again tries to force drama out of unsuitable ingredients. Langdon's first treasure hunt takes him on a protracted search for a sub-basement in the capitol building, a sequence which is hard to read without thinking of the council plan to knock Arthur Dent's house down in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. All that's missing is a "beware of the leopard" sign on the door. Later, there's a panicky attempt to find a particular address which is meant to be Franklin Square but apparently isn't. Don't laugh; we in the Emirates know how annoying that can be. And Brown can't contain his excitement about a souped-up search-engine that promises to return its results in 15 minutes flat ("So fast?" says one character in wonderment). Brown loves search engines, of course; remember all that gushing over the Kings College London digital theology archive in The Da Vinci Code? It's only got worse. Despite Langdon's admonishment in the new novel that "'Google' is not a synonym for 'research'," he and his colleagues seem to spend about half their time CrackBerrying their way from one Masonic cipher to the next. More than one puzzle is unpicked essentially by entering all its keywords into a search bar.
I hope it won't give too much away to describe how this fascination with garden-variety IT reaches its heady zenith. The time bomb that the novel has been building to, the locomotive hammering towards the damsel on the track, turns out to be an e-mail with a very large attachment. "Relax," the villain whispers. "It's a massive file. It will take a few minutes to go out." He points to the progress bar: "Sending message: 2% complete."
For office drones such as myself, it's hard to recall a thriller with a more relatable finale. In the name of due diligence, I ought to say a few words on the specific brand of juju that Brown is trying to push on this outing. This time it's something called Noetic Science, the brand under which bad old-fashioned psychokinetic research appears to be trading these days. "The idea of universal consciousness is no ethereal New Age concept," says one character, helpfully designated "scientist". "It's a hard-core scientific reality."
Magic and science are "closer than you think", the same mouthpiece remarks elsewhere, and later: "I've read all the Rosicrucian manifestos in my research." "Every scientist should," is Langdon's unspoken response. If ever you want to see a person in pain, try repeating these lines to an actual scientist. Brown, hard as it may be to credit, no more speaks the language of science than he does ancient Aramaic. Or, if one wanted to be unkind, English. "It was a proven fact that human intuition was a more accurate detector of danger than all the electronic gear in the world," he writes. No smoke detectors for him, then.
"Subatomic research had now proven categorically that all matter was interconnected... entangled in a single unified mesh... a kind of universal oneness." Indeed, the notion of quantum entanglement itself goes by names "as old as history itself... man's oldest spiritual quest was to perceive his own entanglement, to sense his own interconnection with all things". Entanglement, for the record, is when separated quantum systems become correlated. It's an interesting, potentially very useful phenomenon which, inter alia, is helping us build more powerful computers. Brown ought to be pleased about that. Imagine the search engines! Sadly for him, it isn't a licence for the kind of mind-body-spirit guff that he's peddling here.
It's traditional at these moments to claim that the biggest mystery about Brown's books is why they sell so well. But it isn't a mystery at all: the eccentric beliefs he propounds are, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, good fun to read about. It would be shameful to carry around the books that he appears to take as his sources - paperback volumes of Grail lore and brochures for new breakthroughs in wishful thinking, by the look of it. Still, sometimes one itches to sneak a glance.
With his dunderheaded action plots and, increasingly, with his status as one of the few landmarks in a disintegrating media landscape, Brown supplies a cover under which we can indulge the credulous sap who lives in all our hearts. He starts a game of "what if?" and it doesn't take much to get us playing along. His sales speak for themselves: in nonsense we revel.
