Dan Brown clearly had enjoyable writing his new guide. It’s contagious

In 2003, when you made the error of confessing – say, at a barbecue – that you simply reviewed books for a dwelling, the opposite males on the patio would have a look at you piteously till one among them thought to ask, “What did you think of ‘The Da Vinci Code’?”

More than 20 years on, the magnitude of Dan Brown’s success remains to be exhausting to quantify with out utilizing exponential math or to justify with out succumbing to despair. He has sufficient copies in print for each grownup within the United States to personal one, which you’ll affirm by checking the espresso desk in any Airbnb.

Like so many issues which might be insanely widespread – Crocs, Nutella, MrBeast – Brown’s thrillers look straightforward to mimic however aren’t. He shatters dramatic moments into shiny, irresistible shards. He lures us in with a layer of intellectuality as deep because the honey glaze on an Easter ham. And in guide after guide, we’re rushed via perilous crises involving esoteric data that someway threatens your complete world. With Brown, all the things in all places all of sudden is at stake – the church, social order, Western civilization – which makes your clogged gutters really feel momentarily much less pressing.

The final time we noticed Brown’s match, nerdy hero – Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon – was eight years in the past in a mind-bogglingly foolish guide known as “Origin.” In that story, Langdon dashes round Spain making an attempt to trace down a useless billionaire’s PowerPoint presentation that “boldly contradicted almost every established religious doctrine.”

Brown’s newest thriller, “The Secret of Secrets,” tweaks that dependable formulation solely barely, however via some occult alchemy, his New Coke is healthier than the previous brew.

Reader, I drank it.

This time round, we’re in Prague. Brown surveys its Gothic magnificence, medieval historical past and Kafkaesque mystique like Rick Steves on a 24-hour layover. Langdon has come to the City of a Hundred Spires to cheer on his older however stunningly stunning new girlfriend, Dr. Katherine Solomon, final seen in “The Lost Symbol” (2009).The evening earlier than the novel opens, Katherine delivered a mesmerizing lecture about her work in noetics, the science of human consciousness.

Langdon is clearly smitten with this “brilliant” scientist, however she sounds just like the love little one of Carl Jung and Madame Blavatsky. She tells the esteemed students gathered on the Prague Castle, “Your consciousness is not created by your brain. And in fact, your consciousness is not even located inside your head.” While finding out numerous neurological chemical compounds, she “discovered” a brand new mannequin that signifies “consciousness permeates the universe.” She goes on to clarify: “Your brain is just a receiver – an unimaginably complex, superbly advanced receiver – that chooses which specific signals it wants to receive from the existing cloud of global consciousness.”

The viewers is wowed by this metaphysical gibberish, and, as far as I can inform, Brown may consider it, too. He prefaces “The Secret of Secrets” by stating, “All experiments, technologies and scientific results are true to life.” Langdon, a famend professor of world religions, is initially skeptical of those woo-woo declarations, however after just a few hours in Solomon’s mattress, he sees the incontrovertible logic of her findings, which is the way in which main breakthroughs in mind science are sometimes confirmed.

There’s a curious countercurrent, although, to this spirit of credence. Katherine’s mental posturing about common consciousness, precognition, distant viewing and different psychic feats puffs so excessive that it collapses into parody. It’s a form of “Men Who Stare at Goats While Reading Dan Brown.” What’s extra, the creator appears to be having plenty of enjoyable, and it’s contagious.

But very quickly, these characters aren’t having any enjoyable in any respect. Nefarious powers all over the world can’t let Katherine’s revelatory scientific discovery get out. (After all, have a look at how the CIA saved Marianne Williamson from turning into president.) (Everything is beginning to make sense now.) And so, simply hours after Katherine delivers her lecture, lethal schemes are launched to snuff out her analysis and silence her.

What follows over the subsequent 600 hilariously hectic pages is a superb symphony of homicide, mayhem and New Age murmuring. Brown’s dialogue remains to be cringingly corny; Langdon and Katherine’s attractive banter is saltpeter in print. And the narrative is pocked with clichés, however, mercifully, Brown’s tendency to interrupt motion with historic insights from Wikipedia has been largely corralled.

And what a solid – devious spies, doubtful diplomats, unethical docs, unwitting sufferers and zealous patriots! American officers conflict with Czech police, and everyone should take care of a modern-day golem cloaked in mud who slinks across the metropolis searching for revenge. Indeed, a part of the success of this zippy novel is that these characters accomplish extra earlier than brunch than I’ve completed all 12 months.

Even Jonas Faukman – Langdon’s editor again at Penguin Random House in New York – stars in his personal facet story of death-defying derring-do with some genuinely comedian moments of self-referential humor. Late at evening when thugs cart him off behind a van, Faukman thinks, “This is book publishing, for crying out loud … not ‘Die Hard’!”

All this thrilling motion tends, paradoxically, to mute Langdon’s function as hero. Amid the deaths and thefts and disguises, he typically comes off as Dr. Solomon’s arm sweet. Yes, there are terrifically thrilling moments, together with a chase scene in a cavernous laboratory that for some inexplicable cause is as empty as a downtown Macy’s, however even together with his enviable abs, Langdon dangers feeling like an emeritus hero. The few instances he has to resolve a puzzle to maneuver the plot alongside, it’s not rather more suspenseful than watching my mother do the Wordle.

More troubling: The nice professor’s data feels rusty. At the tip of 1 disaster, he takes consolation in a sacred textual content.

“Langdon took a deep breath,” Brown writes, “and hoped that John the Baptist had been correct when he promised ‘the truth will set you free.’”

Except, after all, that well-known phrase was spoken, not by John the Baptist, however by Jesus.

You may suppose that anyone – or one thing – within the “existing cloud of global consciousness” would have caught that error earlier than publication, however possibly it’s simply one other clue.