Full disclosure: I have never previously read a book by Dan Brown. I am aware, of course, of The Da Vinci Code and his successor novels, and also of the, er, difficult reviews the writer attracts.
So I was intrigued to learn what all the fuss was about regarding his first novel for eight years, The Secret of Secrets.
Once again, the main protagonist is Robert Langdon, a Harvard “symbologist” – a genius puzzle-solver to you and me.
This time the setting is Prague, and it isn’t long before we meet the Golem – although this time the legendary creature is having a shower to wash off all the mud and clay on his body and face.
That’s certainly not the Golem with whom we are familiar from his creation by Rabbi Loew in the 16th century – though he does have the requisite Hebrew letters on his forehead, reading “truth” or “death” where necessary.
He can’t resist over-egging the information pudding amid all the bangs
I had been warned that all too often, reading Brown is like reading a Wikipedia entry. How true that is.
Here’s how he introduces a villain: “At 73 years old, Everett Finch carried a chess master FIDE rating of 2374, rowed 9,000 metres daily on his erg machine, and finished breakfast by popping 300 milligrams of Nuvigil, a nootropic mind-enhancing drug that turned his mind into a Formula One race car on a highway of minivans.”
Wow. You wouldn’t want to mess with him after breakfast.
Brown can’t resist over-egging the information pudding amid all the shooty bangs, murders, bombings and explosions and terrifying near misses for Langdon and his love interest, the equally genius scientist Katherine Solomon.
There’s plenty of product placement, too. Katherine has a handbag, but Brown needs to tell us it is a Cuyana handbag, which apparently is some flash designer make.
Every gun or item of equipment gets its own descriptive plug.
And his only believable character is the formidable American ambassador in Prague, Heide Nagel, who may have been based on the late US academic/diplomat Madeleine Albright.
So what, you might be wondering, is the Secret of Secrets? I am still not sure, though I am with Langdon when Katherine “explains” something to him and he replies that “I have to admit, the mere idea of retrocausality gives me cognitive dissonance”. Quite.
I slightly warmed to Langdon at this point, even more so after he admits he “wasn’t following much of this” – me neither, Dan – and begs his beloved to “explain to me, in simple English, what’s going on?”
Sadly, Brown can’t help himself, and fills the last 200 pages with interminable pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
By the time I made it to the 671st page I no longer cared what the Secret was.
Yet, thanks to Hollywood, Brown’s audience is huge and its appetite for this sort of tosh is unabated.
Hand on heart, I can’t recommend this – but his fans will ignore all the criticism and buy it in their millions.
The Secret of Secrets
By Dan Brown
Bantam
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