Technology is all over The Lost Symbol, the follow-up to The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. It ranges from portable gadgets like the hostage’s iPhone to the advanced laboratory where a scientist does research in the Noetic Sciences. This last term required a consultation with that archive of esoteric knowledge Google, but since the characters themselves are not above googling this was allowed. (If they googled more often, The Lost Symbol would be a much shorter book.)
According to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, “Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the “inner cosmos” of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the “outer cosmos” of the physical world.” In other words it is the study of paranormal phenomena such as telekinesis. “Thoughts have mass!” declares Brown’s scientist Katherine Solomon. It’s supposed to be a staggering moment, like Albert Einstein writing E equals M C squared for the first time, except that it calls to mind people bending spoons on TV.
In one of Solomon’s most amazing experiments—which may be mentioned because it’s more a digression than a plot point—she establishes the existence of the human soul. This is achieved by placing a dying man inside “a long, airtight, clear plastic capsule, like some kind of futuristic sleeping pod…. atop a large piece of electronic gear,” then recording his weight before and immediately after his death. The small decrease in weight is supposed to be conclusive evidence that there is a soul. A lot of effort and expense would’ve been saved if the scientist had gone to see that movie 21 Grams, where Naomi Watts’ husband was run over by Benicio Del Toro and his heart went to transplant patient Sean Penn. However, there is a potentially lucrative commercial application for the soul-weighing experiment: The Death Diet. Lose weight instantly. Forever.
By the way, the use of a movie as an expository shortcut, though lazy, is also acceptable since Dan Brown does it himself. He explains the application of a new technology by name-checking a James Cameron movie.
If The Da Vinci Code incurred the ire of the Catholic Church en route to blockbuster sales, The Lost Symbol might well incur the ire of scientists. As a marketing stratagem this is not very good: we all know that scientists don’t have much money or influence. They can’t threaten anyone with excommunication, and ignorance is not nearly as scary as eternal damnation.
Brown’s devotees may be disappointed to find that after the “shocking” revelations of the earlier book, he has chosen not to dwell on their ramifications. He abandons Paris for Washington DC, which turns out to be crawling with ancient mysterious symbols — all of which require a mini-lecture from the hero, Robert Langdon. No circumstance is so dire, no task so urgent that Langdon can’t pause to demonstrate how he got to be a tenured professor at the Department of Symbology at Harvard. Unless Harvard has given in to popular demand or received a percentage of Da Vinci Code’s sales, there is no department of symbology at that university or at any university, nor is symbology a recognized academic discipline. Every field of knowledge has it symbols, from pi to the periodic table to the alphabet, so one might say all fields are symbologies.
Readers will be thrilled to know that the rest of the Dan Brown formula is intact. A race against time, check. Hero hunted by the legal authorities, check. Attractive female partner in his Amazing Race team, check. A lone pursuer, way more menacing than the legal authorities, check. Secret societies, check. Commonplace objects and images turning out to have hidden significance, check. Long chases, check. Cliffhanger endings in each chapter, check. Displays of Langdon’s erudition, check. Possibility of apocalypse, check. Involvement of Renaissance artists and other historical figures, check.
We are assured that the protagonists are blindingly intelligent, then they offer evidence to the contrary. A scientist in a super-secret facility is worried at her brother’s long silence, but is quickly reassured by a text message from his phone — even if he’s never sent text before. On the basis of this unverified text, she invites a stranger into the lab. A scholar gets a call from someone who drops a friend’s name, and he immediately does as he is told. Intelligence operatives believe information from an unchecked source just because it’s from the right phone number. The keeper of a sealed package is asked to bring it to a meeting, and it takes him ages to figure out that whoever summoned him really wants that package.
A facility so hidden that one must go through a door with a keycard and PIN and then walk for over a hundred yards in total darkness... has a retractable wall with just a security rod. You know, the kind inserted into a hole in the floor. And so on.
One gadget that might’ve been useful is an alarm that goes off whenever the author states the obvious: “He’s pumping air in for me. He doesn’t want me to suffocate.” Or “Something was very, very wrong.”
On the plus side, Dan Brown reminds the audience that a lot of what is considered new knowledge was actually posited by the ancients, and that the most ordinary objects have intriguing histories. He warns against very literal interpretations of scripture. He goes into rhapsodies about the untapped potential of the human mind.
None of these are new ideas, but now that they’ve been stated in the most-anticipated book of the year by one of the bestselling authors of all time, maybe people will listen. If there is a cryptic coded message in The Lost Symbol, it is this: “READ.”
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