You will find many astonishing sentences in The Secret of Secrets... The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose ... But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel ... 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 ... 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 ... Made me nostalgic for a golden age when a single written work could not only sell millions of copies, but also galvanize public opinion.
At this stage, everything that needs to be said about Brown’s sentence-by-sentence ineptitude as a prose writer has been said ... The interesting question to ask about him is not what Brown is doing wrong as a writer, but what he is doing right. Because he’s doing something right ... A plot that starts thick and gets thicker. Every few pages brings a cliffhanger ... It’s weapons-grade bollocks from beginning to end, none of it makes a lick of sense, and you’ll roar through it with entire enjoyment if you like this sort of thing.
Through some occult alchemy, [Brown's] New Coke is better than the old brew ... Katherine’s intellectual posturing about universal consciousness, precognition, remote viewing and other psychic feats puffs so high that it collapses into parody ... A great symphony of murder, mayhem and New Age murmuring. Brown’s dialogue is still cringingly corny ... Zippy ... There are terrifically exciting moments ... All this exciting action tends, ironically, to mute Langdon’s role as hero ... The few times [Langdon] has to solve a puzzle to move the plot along, it’s not much more suspenseful than watching my mom do the Wordle.
While the prose in The Secret of Secrets is not as compellingly bad as it is in Brown’s previous books, he is still just as fond of cliché, hyperbole, mixed metaphors, endless repetition and manic bursts of alliteration ... Brown accelerates his mission to link one remarkable phenomenon to another, creating a chain of conspiracy theories that scores pretty high on the crank-o-meter ... The first half of the novel is fun enough ... However, once Katherine starts bending his ear about 'the nonlocality of consciousness,' it feels as if you’ve walked into a conference of New Age nuts ... There is no need to read this book: we’re all living in a Dan Brown world already.
Few bestselling novelists...possess less of a sense of humour ... You can fill in the rest by running your Dan Brown Plot Generator ... we come away certain that he has read the TripAdvisor entry for 'Prague' ... Still: though he isn’t reinventing the wheel here, or even bothering to polish it, there’s still fun to be had in reading Brown ... I’ve never come across such absurd pictures of the life of the mind ... Brown’s novels are fantasies, like fan-fiction, and if you read them in that spirit, they’re fun. Unfortunately, the prose does its best to keep you grounded.
A quarter century into the Robert Langdon books, Brown knows better than to venture too far from this winning formula ... There’s nothing in Brown’s new novel to rival the century-spanning Eurocentric conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code ... Everything in The Secret of Secrets feels a bit stale ... Ham-fisted attempts at generating atmosphere ... The novel’s premise also sports some huge holes.
