THE SECRET OF SECRETS, by Dan Brown
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. For a work of fiction, this novel is demonstratively proud of its facts:
In 1889, after Prague city officials visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris and saw Gustave Eiffel’s showstopping tower, they decided soon after to build their own ‘miniature’ Eiffel Tower in Prague.
Companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink had been working since 2016 to develop what was known as an H2M interface — human to machine — a device that could convert data obtained from the brain into understandable binary code.
The George Washington Bridge is the busiest motor bridge in the world.
These, too, are quintessential Dan Brown sentences, briskly didactic and easily checkable, if sometimes of questionable relevance. It’s nice to encounter a writer willing to do some of your Googling for you.
But back to Penguin Random House, which happens to be, through its Doubleday imprint, the publisher of this very book. In the real world, Brown himself is responsible for a non-trivial fraction of that $5 billion. In the Dan Brown universe, PRH is responsible for several books by Robert Langdon (who counts as “one of his favorite novels” “Digital Fortress,” by none other than Dan Brown). Most germane, the company has signed up a potential blockbuster by one Katherine Solomon, a noetic scientist whose decades-long research into human consciousness has proved beyond all doubt that …
Stop. Withholding vital information is one of Brown’s favorite tricks, so before we unpack more plot, I should say that, “The Secret of Secrets” worked for me less as an idea-driven whodunit or an exercise in soft-core travel porn than as a wistful testament to the power of the printed word.
A book, this book invites us to believe, has the potential to change the world. And also to get people killed. At a time when reading sometimes seems to be in terminal decline and books have ceded influence to listicles, podcasts and video, it’s heartening to pick up a fat volume that dares to insist otherwise.
Katherine, a Langdon sidekick in “The Lost Symbol” (2009), now promoted to full-fledged love interest, has delivered a manuscript that promises to upend our fundamental assumptions about consciousness, death and reality itself. Our brains, she argues, are not self-contained cognitive entities, but rather portals to a universal mind. Grounded in neurochemistry, her theory touches on out-of-body experiences, life after death, precognition, multiple personalities, parapsychology and all kinds of related phenomena that a skeptic might dismiss as mumbo-jumbo.
Langdon, in Prague as Katherine’s plus-one for a lecture teasing her big theory (they’re staying in a suite at the Four Seasons), has overcome his skepticism. He’s not the only one. Katherine’s upcoming book is at the center of a conspiratorial whirlwind that involves a rival scientist, a criminal mastermind and his thuggish minions, duplicitous government officials, a rogue Prague cop and a golem.
Or rather, The Golěm, as the character’s proper name is rendered. The care that went into maintaining that diacritical mark is itself a tribute to the old print values.
The Golěm is a familiar Brown heavy — a damaged, quasi-monstrous avenger both pitiable and vicious, an irrational wild card in a story dominated by the cold reasoning of scientists and bureaucrats. The Golěm also tethers the narrative to the weird history of pre-modern Europe, which for Brown has long been a fertile (and profitable) trove of mystery and meaning.
This time, unfortunately, the emphasis is less on the murk of the past — Masons or the Knights Templar, da Vinci or Dante, pagans or popes — than on a hazy future of awakened universal consciousness. Katherine’s inquiry into the nature of the mind is so consequential that powerful people are determined to destroy every physical and digital copy of her manuscript. But the more we learn about the content of her book, the more it all seems like hype. And as Brown’s book races toward its elaborate climax, his (and Langdon’s) breathless effusions about the neuro-technological progress that awaits us sound jarringly out of sync with the anxious, doomy present.
And yet I find myself unable to argue very strenuously against a book that believes so ardently in the importance of books — and, for that matter, in scientific research, academic prestige and luxury hotels. It may be best to read “The Secret of Secrets” as an artifact of a lost civilization, a misty evocation of vanished literary glory. It made me nostalgic for a golden age when a single written work could not only sell millions of copies, but also galvanize public opinion, spark furious debate and rotate history a few degrees on its axis. In other words, it made me nostalgic for “The Da Vinci Code.”
THE SECRET OF SECRETS | By Dan Brown | Doubleday | 675 pp. | $38
A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023.
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