The Lost Symbol

I had recently returned from a visit to Washington, and one of my friends suggested I might like Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. It was to Washington DC what Da Vinci Code was to Paris.

Now, I am always a sucker for thrillers that are geographically centered, as it satisfies both my love of mysteries and traveling. So I gave it a shot.

The Lost Symbol has the usual Dan Brown trademarks — Robert Langdon and random female companion, heavy use of symbolism, megalomaniacal villain, free mason philosophy and  some deeply disturbing information that has to be deciphered, protected and understood as it can transfer human intelligence as we know it.

All the above has been tried not in one but 4 books earlier and now really has no charm left. And to add to this , this book has none of the pace of Brown’s earlier works. It’s excruciatingly long, over-informative and just clunky. Chapters break frequently and that gets so annoying that at a point you don’t care about cliffhangers any more.

The great universal secret that everyone is trying to protect, including the top brass of the US government, is really stupid. When I say stupid, I don’t refer to the secret, which is not really a secret. As a reader, one already knows it. The big reveal moment is more like–“This is it!! This is what I have wasted precious hours of my life getting to?!!”

The only thing I liked about the book was the bits and pieces of history that I picked up about Washington and the people who built it. Everything else was meh.

I liked exactly one sentence in the book which I will now quote–“If our ancestors could see us today, surely they would think us gods,”

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