Dan Brown sticks to his famous formula while giving out a simple message about the power of positive thought IT makes me nervous when a book carries labels like "blockbuster" and "spellbinding", and newspapers print large articles describing restless hordes of readers banging on bookshop doors at midnight. So I would actually have preferred to sneer at this book and say it was rubbish. The sad truth, however, is that Dan Brown has not got worse. Surprisingly, and unlike almost every other cult writer, he has managed to sustain his powerful eyeball glue. He's stuck to his formula, and it's as effective as before. <img alt="" src="/imagedata/2009/sep/book_5.jpg" align="left" border="2" />The book starts with Robert Langdon being called, in predictably dramatic fashion, to a mysterious assignment. The world of symbols plays its usual integral role. The cult this time is the Freemasons. In this book as in the others, there are graphic descriptions of physical violence ("throat cut from ear to earu00a0... tongue torn out by its rootsu00a0... bowels taken out and burned ..."). Many of the key characters are caricatures a highhanded, brattish top-cop, a blind but brilliant priest, an overweight but enthusiastic assistant, and a completely whacko villain. The language, too, is half-baked: "Incredibly, one of the keywords was a word Trish had never even heard before"; "Dr Abaddon would be arriving momentarily". To evoke excitement in the reader, Dan Brown has his characters desperately over-reacting on every other page poor Langdon is continuously doing "double takes" and there are so many expressions of shock and alarm all round that one matchstick is all it would take for the adrenalin to incinerate the entire location. To create suspense, the author uses a crude but effective echo technique: "Langdon nodded, his pulse quickening. What did I just see?" "Startled, he yanked his hand back. There's an opening?" Langdon himself is still wearing that tweed jacket and Mickey Mouse watch, and we love him even more because he's not perfect remember, he fell into a well when he was a child and floundered overnight before he was rescued? The number of inventive cages Dan Brown sticks the poor man into just to have us palpitate with him! Many of the surprises, rather than being carefully contrived and sprung on the unsuspecting reader, are simply farfetched. This book makes a big deal out of Washington and its monuments, describing their origins, their grandeur, the current security arrangements and so on. (This annoyed me for a while but only because I'd just been reading an excerpt from The Good Soldiers by journalist David Finkel about the war in Iraq which, in Rustamiyah, was about three dead soldiers and a fourth who had lost both legs and a fifth who had lost both legs and an arm and most of his other arm, but was also about President George W Bush arriving in Australia and describing it to the deputy Prime Minister as, "We're kicking ass.") Then I realised that it was a necessary build-up, so that Americans reading this book would feel good about themselves and their country. That was the only way they would be amenable to accepting and following the real message Dan Brown gives in this book: that human thoughts have tremendous power and can alter tangible reality; and that one should always think strong positive thoughts and avoid negative ones.

Dan Brown sticks to his famous formula while giving out a simple message about the power of positive thought

Predictable yet gripping

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Predictable yet gripping

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