Robert Langdon, esteemed professor of symbology, travels to Prague to attend a lecture by Katherine Solomon—a prominent noetic scientist with whom he has recently begun a relationship. Katherine is on the verge of publishing a book that contains startling discoveries about the nature of human consciousness and threatens to disrupt centuries of established belief. But a brutal murder catapults the trip into chaos, and Katherine suddenly disappears—along with her manuscript.
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.
