I am a Dan Brown novel nerd.  I collect the illustrated copies of his novels and have them on display on a table in my living room.  Not all of his books have gotten the illustrated treatment (and I have read them all), but I have no doubt that The Secret of Secrets will eventually get it due to Brown’s dedication to placing his protagonist, Robert Langdon, in the Czech Republic (is that what they call Czechoslovakia these days?).  And that is a new location for him to be.  All of the places described in the story are real locations.

I’ve never been to Prague so the visuals in that future illustrated incarnation of the novel will be a welcome addition.

I borrowed my copy from the public library – and allow me to give a shout out of gratitude to the East Syracuse Free Library for having a “large print” copy of said text.  Easy peasy, that, to read in daylight, lamp light and near Christmas tree lights.  It took me a week to read the almost nine hundred page thing but only because I read in short bursts due to juggling a bunch of other activities in my life, including road trips and immersing myself in a six dozen strong new series of encaustic paintings.

The entire story of The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown takes place in the course of a day, mainly, with a bit of exposition regarding the night before and a relatively quick two-day wrap up.

I think I was reading it like an editor.  There were some things that bugged me, like early on when Katherine makes a joke about George Clooney, who was already married two years before Brown started writing the story.  Another thing – the pacing:  later, a lot of dialogue takes place before a catastrophic event that is supposed to happen within fifteen minutes and it took me more than fifteen to read what they are saying to each other, that sort of thing.  Do I not read fast enough or did time slow down?  In that particular case, the guy holding the gun is giving information to people he plans to kill – such a James Bond/Dr. Who/villainesque diatribe.  And of course, the worst offense, the bit where Robert Langdon is in love with a woman he doesn’t know well.  They call each other Robert and Katherine – not Rob or Bobby, not Kathy or Katie?  They are actually having their first hotel tryst and there is no sex.  No sexy either – no romantic banter that would be considered private joke shorthand, you know?  I’m guessing that Dan Brown’s fans are mostly a geriatric crowd but we are all still vibrant, attractive people who fuck.

Additionally, these two people don’t think alike.  She believes in consciousness as it moves around the universe like energy and connects us to one another, with the additional fiction that it can be monitored and accessed  into a conventional science.  He – not so much, but he admires her ideas.  Oh, and then there are a couple jabs that she is an older woman (by four years) after she teases his fitness level, and later, his fashion choices.  She also teases his history lesson offerings.  I don’t know – it is…awkward.

Lastly, and this is the biggest, the whole thing is about the greatest secret to being successful in life, and that is to be fearless about death – spoilers – that what happens after death is the big secret.  And yet, there is no mention of emotion guiding one’s gut.  No stay positive message, which to me is always the correct path and takeaway.  Unfortunately, provoking fears is the whole secret to writing a good thriller.

So those were my criticisms.

I do applaud Brown for taking his beloved character, aging him (Langdon is in his fifties now), and creating another adventure that is different than the plots of the other books.  Yes, there is a creepy shadowy character like there was in The DaVinci Code, but there is an unexpected climax to that.  A lot of the story is told in exposition via several different perspectives and we get only enough to move the story forward.

Now, if these voices told us everything at once, meaning, like, if we were privy to everything in their mind during their tenure as point of view character, there would have been no story.   Why didn’t you just tell me that when you had the chance? – sort of thing.

The book would have still worked if Robert and Katherine had spent the day sightseeing instead of becoming embroiled in a quest for information, IMO.  That would have been a great twist to Brown’s writing.

Overall, I enjoyed the read.  There is a thrill at the end when you put a giant book down akin to having successfully climbed a mountain.  And there is also a satisfaction in coming away from an immersion in another, shall I say alternate universe?  In Brown’s novel, it is referred to as non-local consciousness and being able to harness it into a virtual reality in some way.  Perhaps one could lose oneself so unwittingly, that one becomes someone else by changing one’s neural plasticity.  I think I’m saying that right.  And by one I mean me.

Every piece of The Secret of Secrets’ puzzle left me wanting to get to the conclusion – I’ll give Brown that.  He’s good at that.

I was held hostage reading about an exhausting twelve hour rollercoaster ride of dangerous maneuvers where characters didn’t have time to go to the bathroom or change their wet shoes.  I kept thinking, Langdon is supposed to be a rational thinker who stumbles into New Age ideologies.  Instead, he adopts irrationally provoked decisions, which almost get him killed.

None of that seems fun in real life.  I thought he and Katherine were finally going to have sex but then he falls asleep.  Then, a couple hours later he is awakened by a phone call – there is more to the story that needs to be wrapped up and the couple must reenter the drama – no quickies, no kissing, nothing.

Brown does a good job sticking to his outline in order to drive the book to a tidy conclusion.  None of these characters are good vs. evil, and there are a lot of characters, all just people doing their jobs or rather, making loose cannon decisions masked as duties.

Robert Langdon is the only fish out of water here.  He’s only there to be Katherine Solomon’s sexless plus one, lol, and he ends up using his symbolic expertise and historical factoids to save the day.  What a nerd.