The Lost Symbol (2009)

If the mystery at the center of "The Lost Symbol" never quite gets solved, it's still surrounded with exactly the kind of feel-good folderol that readers love in a bestseller... Pseudoscience could turn out to be even more profitable for Dan Brown than pseudohistory. It may not make for as good a story, but then again, that may be just one more thing that nobody cares about anymore.

The Lost Symbol works, albeit with reservations. It works because whatever mental alchemy Dan Brown needed to turn away from the noise and ramp up his creative signal, to stay away from distractions and focus on the story, takes hold with the opening utterance that "the secret is how to die."

Writers envious of Brown's sales (who wouldn't be?) have devoted much ink to his deficiencies as a stylist. These are still in place. ("He could feel his entire world teetering precariously on the brink of disaster. . . . It hit him like a bolt from above. . . . In a flash he understood.") So is Brown's habit of turning characters into docents. But so, too, is his knack for packing huge amounts of information (spurious or no) into an ever-accelerating narrative. Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of short paragraphs, short chapters, beautifully spaced reveals and, in the case of "The Lost Symbol," a socko unveiling of the killer's true identity.

The Washington setting may not be as alluring as the Vatican or the Louvre, but Brown extracts enough history out of his landscape to make this a fascinating ride.

And he squeezes in plenty of contemporary references too: characters run Google searches on their BlackBerrys, text on their iPhones and one jokes about the "Twitterati".

Such is Brown's visual writing style, the feeling as you close the last page is not that you've read only the novel, but that you've also just watched the film.

It's hard to imagine anyone, after reading "The Lost Symbol," debating about Freemasonry in Washington, D.C., the way people did Brown's radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in "Code." That book hit a deep cultural nerve for obvious reasons; "The Lost Symbol" is more like the experience on any roller coaster -- thrilling, entertaining and then it's over.

Too many popular authors (Thomas Harris) have followed huge hits (“The Silence of the Lambs”) with terrible embarrassments (“Hannibal”). Mr. Brown hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead.

Den Braun je ovog puta odabrao da svog junaka, profesora simbologije sa Harvarda Roberta Lengdona, pošalje u Vašington. Tamo bi on trebalo da održi predavanje na poziv svog mentora, direktora centralne americke naucne institucije Smitsonijan instituta, visokog funkcionera vašingtonske masonske lože Pitera Solomona (masona 33 stepena). Narednih 12 sati, koliko traje radnja romana, Lengdon otkriva da je Solomon kidnapovan, pošto je u sali gde je trebalo da se održi predavanje našao ruku nabijenu na kolac. Na ruci su istetovirani odredeni simboli, a tek na osnovu prstena on prepoznaje da je pripadala Solomonu. Stiže mu poruka da ce njegov mentor biti ubijen ako ne pronade gde se nalazi tajna masonska piramida u Vašingtonu. On, takode, mora da sazna kljucnu rec koja daje neslucenu moc.

Has it been worth the wait? Overall, yes. But that’s not to say that the book is without its shortcomings.

Den Braun je ovog puta odabrao da svog junaka, profesora simbologije sa Harvarda Roberta Lengdona, pošalje u Vašington. Tamo bi on trebalo da održi predavanje na poziv svog mentora, direktora centralne americke naucne institucije Smitsonijan instituta, visokog funkcionera vašingtonske masonske lože Pitera Solomona (masona 33 stepena). Narednih 12 sati, koliko traje radnja romana, Lengdon otkriva da je Solomon kidnapovan, pošto je u sali gde je trebalo da se održi predavanje našao ruku nabijenu na kolac. Na ruci su istetovirani odredeni simboli, a tek na osnovu prstena on prepoznaje da je pripadala Solomonu. Stiže mu poruka da ce njegov mentor biti ubijen ako ne pronade gde se nalazi tajna masonska piramida u Vašingtonu. On, takode, mora da sazna kljucnu rec koja daje neslucenu moc.