Thriller Master Dan Brown is Back with a Secret

I can still recall reading a review of a new and intriguing thriller called The DaVinci Code from a relatively unknown writer, Dan Brown. I'm fairly sure the review was on Salon.com, and I was curious enough to check out what became a true publishing and mass media phenomenon. 

Now, Dan Brown and his alter-ego - globe trotting Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon - are back for another smart thriller exploring history and mystery. I say "smart," and that may leave many readers rolling their eyes, to be sure. For, Brown has been widely criticized for his literary style, or perhaps lack of it. He is truly a great storyteller even though he's not a great writer, per se. But the "smart" descriptor has to do with his topic matter -- history, language, symbols, secret societies, religious texts and iconography. And, of course, the power of the written word.

That's the angle New York Times critic-at-large A.O. Scott takes in her recent review of Brown's latest offering The Secret of Secrets:  Book Review: ‘The Secret of Secrets,’ by Dan Brown - The New York Times. 

You will find many astonishing sentences in “The Secret of Secrets,” Dan Brown’s latest TED-Talk travelogue thriller. One that caught my eye arrives early in the book, at the beginning of Chapter 7: “The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly 20,000 books a year and generates over $5 billion in annual gross revenues.” This is a purely factual — and, as far as I can determine, accurate — statement, and therefore a particular kind of Dan Brown sentence.

Of course there are other varieties, including ones that start with a breathless adverb (“impossibly,” “remarkably,” “conveniently”); ones that burst into excited italics; ones that are entirely in italics. Brown is above all an action writer, and his hero, Robert Langdon, is continually in hot pursuit of whoever is hotly pursuing him, whether in Florence, Rome, Barcelona or some other popular tourist destination. The nearly 700 pages of “The Secret of Secrets” zigzag across a hectic day, mostly in Prague, during which guns are fired, locks picked, hidden passageways discovered and shocking revelations delivered on the run. The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose.

But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel. Since Langdon is, by profession, a professor (of symbology, at Harvard, in case you need reminding), his adventures are punctuated, or you might say padded, with brief lectures on a great many topics in history, science, philosophy and real estate.