Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is called to Washington, D.C. to give a lecture at the Capitol Building, but when he arrives at the indicated location it's empty. There are no chairs, no lecturn, and no people. Things are not so empty in the nearby rotunda. A man's hand, severed at the wrist, is discovered pointing upward. Langdon recognizes the ring on its finger - and the symbols tattooed on its fingers. The hand belongs to his mentor and friend, Smithsonian head Peter Solomon, the man who supposedly invited Langdon down to give the non-existent lecture. Langdon is soon contacted with an ultimatum - figure out the secrets of the Masonic pyramid before midnight or Solomon will die.
Meanwhile, Solomon's sister, Katherine, is waiting for her brother in the top secret lab he built her in the gigantic Smithsonian storage warehouse. She's exploring noetics, the power of thought, and making inroads into proving that human thought really can affect physical matter. Although the specifics are still very much on the hush-hush, her research is starting to rattle some cages and those in the know don't want it to see the light of day.
The two threads rush toward each other fairly quickly and soon Katherine and Langdon are racing around Washington, sometimes working with and sometimes against the CIA who seem to be in charge of the formal investigation into the incident in the rotunda. Working from the clues left on the hand and a secret package Solomon left in Langdon's care years before, their search leads them through the bowels of the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and several other landmarks as they try to save Solomon, solve the puzzle, and thwart the bad guy.
I deliberately didn't read The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons again before reading The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's newest installment in the adventures of Robert Langdon. Like many people, I read the first two books out of order - first The Da Vinci Code rapidly followed by Angels & Demons. The books were so similar that the second one felt completely flat. I firmly believe that would have happened regardless of the order I read the two books, so I wanted to come to this new book fresh to avoid a similar fate. Since I didn't feel like I was reading either of the other books with a few name and location changes, I guess that strategy worked. I was, however, often strongly reminded of specific incidents in the two National Treasure movies, movies that themselves seemed designed to cash in on the furor surrounding Brown's earlier book. I think some of that is inherent in the setting. If you're going to make Washington a featured player in a story that requires hints be left in the open on historically important buildings and monuments, chances are fairly high that many of those locations will overlap.
That said, this book seemed more focused on action and on the involvement of the CIA in the matter than on figuring out the big secret. There are a handful of puzzles, but they're interrelated and often require exactly the same key to solve. The first several hints and clues are not real puzzles, but items or symbols recognized by Langdon and imparted to the reader, so it takes some time before there's anything to solve at all. One of the things I liked about The Da Vinci Code was how there were a wide variety of puzzles and riddles to solve. That's definitely not the case in this book.
The involvement of the CIA is also odd, especially as it's not really clear why they got involved. The villain in the piece did try to cause a scandal involving several prominent government officials, but that didn't happen until fairly late in the book and it didn't feel like sufficient motivation to explain the CIA's role. Their goals weren't always clear, either, and I kept expecting their role in the book to morph in ways it never did.
The bad guy in the book is a nasty piece of work, but his motivations and identity were crystal clear from almost the very start. It took the characters forever to figure it out, though, and by the time the big reveal scene rolled around I was so used to the idea of his identity that I was totally underwhelmed. I was also a bit disgusted that none of the characters had figured it out for themselves, although some of the information that gave away his identity came in sections of the book where he was the viewpoint character. I still think there was more than enough information available to them to figure things out well before they did.
I have no problem with fiction taking liberties with history or legends or bringing additional motivations or ideas into play beyond those we can prove. I like playing around with the ideas of different religions and being asked to think about them and how they evolved. The Lost Symbol doesn't have the same level of overt ties to Christianity as The Da Vinci Code but in my mind it examines spirituality and some core religious issues (across different religions) in more depth. I felt more religious theory imposed on me in this book. It definitely examines the idea of the human soul and what happens after death and does so in ways that try to intertwine science and religion. If that's going to bother you, stay far away.
The science in the book is a pseudo-science that explores the physical properties of human thought. Katherine Solomon proposes that human thought has gravity and grows exponentionally as more people think the same thoughts. It essentially takes the philosophical ideas of noetics and turns it into a serious science with actual laboratory experimentation. The latter portions of the book get a bit carried away with the intermingling of this idea with religious concepts and can be a bit much to take, but the idea of attempting scientific experiments to examine such esoteric ideas is interesting. I view it in much the same light as some of the the religious and cult elements of these books - nice stuff to think about in the realm of fiction.
All of that said, neither the puzzles nor the religious elements nor the science are the real focus of the book. The Lost Symbol felt like a fairly generic thriller with these other elements overlaid on the story. It was a good example of the generic thriller and an enjoyable read if you like that sort of thing, but it doesn't have the extra zip of really good integrated puzzles and I didn't really care much if the mysteries of the pyramid were ever solved. The main thrust seemed to be rescuing Peter Solomon and stopping the bad guy. Everything else was somewhat extraneous.
I enjoyed The Lost Symbol but I was also somewhat disappointed and underwhelmed by it. It felt like it would have worked just as well as a generic thriller featuring someone other than Robert Langdon and the puzzles included in the book were somewhat generic and repeated. If you like thrillers and won't freak out about exploring spirituality in non-traditional ways or about the inclusion of noetics as a serious science, go ahead and read the book. If you want to solve lots of puzzles on your way to uncovering a historical mystery, this book won't work for you.
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