Dan Brown Pushes the Envelope of Believability
It’s not quite fair to say readers of The Secret of Secrets should approach Dan Brown’s new novel with a willing suspension of disbelief.
No, they’ll need nothing less than a mandatory suspension of disbelief for this one.
That’s not to say the sixth novel in Brown’s insanely successful Robert Langdon series is a bad novel. It’s not. It’s just that Brown asks – nay, demands – his readers buy into a central premise that is kind of hard to swallow. That’s on top of the sundry improbabilities that litter the plot and again force the reader to go along with what the author is proposing.
That said, if you just set your gullibility threshold to maximum then The Secret of Secrets is a fun and interesting technothriller, thoroughly researched and rich in the lore of one of Europe’s great cities, Prague.
Brown approaches the Langdon series much like a college kid backpacking in Europe, with a list of the places he wants to visit – he’s covered France, Italy, England, Switzerland and Spain in previous novels and now he’s moving on to the Czech Republic.
Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbology, finds himself in Prague with his new girlfriend Katherine Solomon. A noetic scientist (a specialist in mental activity) from California, Solomon is delivering a lecture at Prague Castle on human consciousness. Solomon has just completed and submitted a book whose hypothesis is that consciousness does not reside in the human brain, nor even within an individual. Consciousness exists as this sort of universal streaming service and each human brain is like a radio receiver, programmed to select certain channels but not others. As well as being Solomon’s cornerstone thesis, it’s the central theme of The Secret of Secrets.
In the wee hours on the night after the lecture, Solomon awakes screaming and tells Langdon she’s had a nightmare in which the hotel they’re staying in blows up. The dream features a woman dressed in black and a radiating crown, carrying a spear and smelling of death.
The next morning, Langdon is crossing Charles Bridge in Prague and sees a woman dressed in black with a radiating crown and spear and – you guessed it – “smelling of death”. So he charges back to the hotel and pulls the fire alarm believing this supposed apparition from Solomon’s dream has just planted a bomb.
Yes, you may read those last two paragraphs again. It’s an accurate summation of an early chapter in the book. And the reader has to accept that (a) Langdon saw a woman who just had a cameo role in his girlfriend’s nightmare and (b) Langdon therefore concludes that his hotel is about to be blown up. Brown later explains this woman’s bizarre appearance, but his explanation is weak and simply compounds the idiocy of the scene on Charles Bridge.
In the finest tradition of Dan Brown novels, this incident leads to Langdon and Solomon on the run in Prague, being chased by the local cops and the CIA and crossing paths with a mysterious figure called the Golěm (another unbelievable character). Their odyssey takes them through magnificent settings, in and out of dire peril, and at its best The Secret of Secrets rewards readers by welcoming them along on his wild romp through one of the world’s great cities.
As Brown showed in his previous book, Origin, the detail of his exposition is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness. As you can tell, I didn’t buy the central premise of The Secret of Secrets. But Brown does an admirable job of explaining it in understandable terms and structuring a cogent argument. But reader beware – you’re going to get clobbered with facts and details about neuroscience and Solomon’s research. Brown just can’t help himself. He doesn’t know when to stop. It’s one reason (another is envy) that so many reviewers go out of their way to ridicule his work.
One of the ironies of this novel is one main character is a loveable editor at Penguin Random House, Jonas Faukman, who works with both Solomon and Langdon. It’s a good bet that Dan Brown himself has a loveable editor, which is a shame. What he needed was an old grouch who would have told him, “Get rid of the unbelievable plot points and cut 200 pages, then we’ll publish it.” If that had happened, a pretty good book would have been really good.
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Peter Moreira’s latest novel is the technothriller Presidio Biotech. He is also the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to my home page to join my mailing list and receive a free prequel novella.
