He’s back, baby! Dan Brown’s first novel in nearly a decade reunites readers with the world’s only professor of symbology, Robert Langdon – a man whose most distinctive quality of character is teaming a loafer-and-turtleneck combo with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Do we learn more about Langdon? Not much. He is still so world-renowned that, as doesn’t happen for most academics, fancy hotels monogram his slippers for him. His password for most things is Dolphin123, because he’s good at swimming. He is too old-fashioned to like texting or videogames, and just a little prudish. He has never seen When Harry Met Sally, but has “heard about the famous ‘sex scene’”.
At this stage, everything that needs to be said about Brown’s sentence-by-sentence ineptitude as a prose writer has been said. Fear not: he’s still hopeless. It may be counted as a metafictional joke that in a novel where a favoured adjective like “elegant” can appear in two consecutive sentences, where bells are said to “blare”, and where we’re asked to parse “The elevator doors rumbled open, and Langdon felt an instantaneous surge of relief to see open air, but that emotion was instantly dampened by disappointment”, both the dedicatee and a minor protagonist are editors at Penguin Random House.
The interesting question to ask about him is not what Brown is doing wrong as a writer, but what he is doing right. Because he’s doing something right. Chiefly, he puts the “um” into harum-scarum. Here’s a plot that starts thick and gets thicker. Every few pages brings a cliffhanger, introduced by a fusillade of dot-dot-dots or a wide-eyed run of italics. The opening sentences describe a dead woman’s spirit floating above Prague (“With her eyes, if she still had eyes, she traced the gentle slope of Castle Hill down into the heart of the Bohemian capital”). A few pages later we discover that Langdon’s new girlfriend – she’s a noeticist – has made a discovery about the nature of consciousness that will upend everything we know about the universe.
Someone’s forever being shot at, bundled into the back of a van, double-crossed, or cracking a code in the nick of time
Before you know it Langdon himself is subject to arrest or worse by the Czech secret police for the somewhat bathetic crime of setting off a hotel fire alarm and then jumping, some will think foolishly, into a freezing river. Meanwhile there’s someone who thinks they are an actual golem – complete with clumpy boots, dramatic black cloak and clay-covered noggin – wandering around the place bumping people off. There’s even a well-appointed secret underground laboratory with an honest-to-goodness monorail.
And as usual, there’s a highfalutin MacGuffin – this time, it’s the consciousness thing; is death really the end? – and powerful and sinister entities trying to keep a lid on it. (A slight weakness, I should say, is that the main villain is a very dull figure – no murderous albino monks or tattooed lunatics this time.) Someone is hellbent on destroying the love interest’s soon-to-be-published book (servers are hacked, printed manuscripts are snaffled), and the oh-my-god-this-changes-everything moments are endearingly larded with gobbledegook: “triadic dimensional vortical paradigm”; “benzimidazobenzophenanthroline”; “I suggested modifying conductance by adding three millimolars of glutamine to the electrolyte solution – and that’s exactly what they are doing!”
The odd thing is that Brown’s love of digressions and flashbacks and Wikipedia-style infodumps (we learn of Prague that “mysterious Jewish writer Franz Kafka was born and worked here, penning his darkly surreal The Metamorphosis”, and that the US embassy was “built in 1656 by a one-legged count” and now “housed 23 onsite personnel tasked with working on behalf of US interests in the region”) doesn’t really interrupt the pace. Someone’s forever being shot at, bundled into the back of a van, double-crossed, or cracking a code in the nick of time. And if we discover along the way that Langdon wears Vanquisher swimming goggles or that the coffee machine in PRH’s children’s division is “a Franke A1000 with FoamMaster technology”, that’s all gravy.
This is, in other words, a Dan Brown novel. It’s weapons-grade bollocks from beginning to end, none of it makes a lick of sense, and you’ll roar through it with entire enjoyment if you like this sort of thing. Welcome back, big fella.
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The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown is published by Bantam (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.