“Accompanying celebrated academic, Katherine Solomon, to a lecture she’s been invited to give in Prague, Robert Langdon’s world spirals out of control when she disappears without trace from their hotel room. Far from home and well out of his comfort zone, Langdon must pit his wits against forces unknown to recover the woman he loves. But Prague is an old and dangerous city, steeped in folklore and mystery. For over two thousand years, the tides of history have washed back and forth over it, leaving behind echoes of everything that has gone before. Little can Langdon know that he is being stalked by a specter from that dark past. He must use all of his arcane knowledge to decipher the world around him before he too is consumed by the rings of treachery and deception that have swallowed Katherine. Against a backdrop of vast castles, towering churches, graveyards buried twelve deep and labyrinthine underground passages, Langdon must navigate a shadow city hiding in plain sight, a city which has successfully kept its secrets for centuries and will not readily deliver them. This is a battlefield unlike any he has previously experienced, one on which he must fight not for his only life, but for the future of humanity itself.”
After an 8-year hiatus, Dan Brown returns with the sixth novel featuring Robert Langdon. As with the previous five, this one features his sometimes-difficult to read pulpy prose style, in a book that could be easily turned into a screenplay. However, the endless monologue-like TED Talks and the frequent use of the words “brilliant” and “stunning” would need to be altered.
Brown sets up another “what if” scenario that borrows heavily from the real world study of neuroscience and turns it into some sort metaphor on hidden realities. He uses real people and locations, including delving into the Project Stargate (which involved the CIA and the military, and explored the potential use of extrasensory perception {ESP} and remote viewing for intelligence gathering during the Cold War) and other secret CIA projects that tip this novel more into science fiction, and try to make these experiments sound plausible.
There is some interesting stuff here, though, including the parts about the subconscious mind and what happens to human consciousness after death. That was neat reading, because it is the undiscovered country, as Shakespeare once said, and it haunts everyone. However, much of the metaphysics that this book tries to WOW you with is not fully explained; it seems mostly there to force the reader into doing his or her own investigations.
Like a broken record with a lot of today’s writers, at 677 pages, it’s overlong and it got annoying that was mostly due to Brown’s choice of reminding the reader of the plot of the book again and again (also the TED Talks). It’s not a total bloated mess, by far, and these books are fun (I’ve read them all and generally have the same opinion on them), but the pacing is a bit off here from the previous books. And I sometimes think Brown takes himself too seriously. I think he might actually believe in what he writes – no matter how wild the idea.
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