A common argument used in favor of popular literature is that it caters to a strong public need to relax and escape. Mr. Throckmorton works hard all day at the salt mines, so how can you expect him to read Camus for an hour after dinner when James Patterson probably has a new book out? (Yes, I finally finished that feature.) In theory I should be more receptive to Dan Brown's THE LOST SYMBOL because I happen to be a little stressed at the moment, although I can't exactly create lab conditions with a control Ellen who is merrily skipping through a grassy field without a care in the world.
It took me three hours to read THE LOST SYMBOL, and frankly, my time would have been better spent re-watching "National Treasure" one and a half times. They both have Masons, and heroes who we are supposed to believe are buff as well as brilliant, but I would have laughed a lot more at "National Treasure."
So I'm going to spoil most of this book, or at least the parts I feel like, because I don't want you to waste your time. If you still want to read it unspoiled, turn back.
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Okay then. Nothing I predicted about this book came true, but the plot and its underpinnings were actually not the most annoying thing about this book. Maybe I would have been distracted from Dan Brown's substandard plot if he had managed to make me give a shit about its results.
So Robert Langdon is summoned to D.C. by his old mentor Peter, the director of the Smithsonian and a high-ranking Mason, only to find out when he gets there that Peter has been kidnapped by a lunatic and will die unless Langdon gives him an ancient Masonic secret he believes he needs to obtain by a merry overnight romp through Washington landmarks like the Library of Congress and the National Cathedral. First surprise: The Masons are the good guys! But they want to stay hidden lest people get the wrong idea about how awesome they are.
In a late-stage reveal (I told you I was spoiling!) we find out the lunatic who kidnapped Peter is actually his long-lost son Zachary on a complicated and bizarre quest for vengeance and possible deification. Zachary was a dissolute playboy whose father refused to bail him out when he landed in an Eastern European prison on drug charges, so he faked his own death and reinvented himself as a sort of spiritual body-builder, covering himself with ritual tattoos and believing he would attain some mystical power by infiltrating the Masons and getting their Big Secret, which is God... or Christianity... or something. (The fact that I don't care what the real answer is speaks to this book's problems.) The lunatic Zachary/Andros/Mal'akh (his spiritual bullshit name) combines the weirdest qualities of the priest from ANGELS AND DEMONS and the albino from THE DA VINCI CODE, while also having immense wealth and strength, and a tendency to wear make-up on civilian errands. (For real!)
Langdon's partner in this quest is his mentor's sister Katherine, a "scientist." Peter believed her experiments were so important he built her a multi-billion-dollar secret lab in the Smithsonian to do them. Mmmm, corruption! The only fully explained experiment involves weighing a man right before and after death to determine the weight of the soul, proving that Katherine doesn't see a lot of art house movies. Most of her work from what we see trends towards proving that THE SECRET is real, but we already have a lab for that, it's called "Oprah."
There's a lot of ancillary nonsense, including the fact that Brown saw fit to throw in a chapter in which Langdon calls his "New York editor" for help mid-quest and the editor peevishly reminds him he has a book due. I'm sure everyone at Doubleday and Brown's literary agency wanted him to autograph that page. But my real problem with THE LOST SYMBOL was that Robert Langdon is stupid in this book. Instead of building tension by having him do battle with his intellectual equals, Brown inexplicably has Langdon screw up every time he gets half a step ahead of the lunatic or the CIA, thus forcing him to either get captured or get bailed out by someone smarter. It's not fun watching someone who is supposedly a genius get tripped up by ploys that would be obvious to an ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN reader. Did Peter give up his name under torture because he knew Langdon wouldn't be able to handle it, thus concealing someone who was smarter and better connected? It just doesn't make sense.
Finally, about 380 pages in, Dan Brown finds the perfect solution for the problem of Robert Langdon being a moron: He kills him! Too bad it doesn't stick. Having fallen into the clutches of Zachary/Andros/Mal'akh, Langdon is placed in a tank that begins to fill with water so the baddie can extort some information from him, and then kill him anyway. Langdon drowns. But wait!!!!! The tank is actually full of super-oxygenated water, so Langdon thinks he's drowning but he's really not! Instead he just blacks out and sees weird lights and such until revived by the CIA. Just like in the Great Flood or season 3 of "Grey's Anatomy," the creator forms an opportunity to kill off the most annoying creation by drowning but ultimately doesn't have the balls to go through with it.
After that, it's all a depressing downhill into mystic revelations and daddy issues. The end of the book features Langdon and Katherine watching the sun rise from the top of the Washington Monument, which is cool and all, but did we just go all that way so this guy could have his "Jesus Walks" moment? THE LOST SYMBOL could be read as Dan Brown's apology to Christianity for putting it on the villains' side in his last two books, but I think Brown honestly expected readers to have some kind of spiritual moment along with his hero. I thought my expectations for THE LOST SYMBOL were low; now I realize they weren't low enough.
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