A few weeks ago I finished Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. If you don't know, Dan Brown is the author of Angels & Demons, and The DaVinci Code. Because his last two books were bestsellers and converted into some of Tom Hanks worst work on the silver screen, there was a lot of hype about this book. 9 times out of 10 things get over-hyped by the media and fans that there is no way it can stand up to the expectations. Did The Lost Symbol?
Dan Brown brings back the character Robert Langdon, professor and symbologist from Harvard University. This time Professor Langdon is a little bit more popular that in his previous books, he has a little bit more notoriety about him. His work at the Vaticon (Angels & Demons), and at the Louvre (The DaVinci Code) has made him something of a dork's celebrity. I will do my best so as to not spoil much of the plot for you.
Very quickly, as books I enjoyed Angels & Demons much more than The DaVinci Code. I enjoy when fiction delves into character development. I felt that because Angels was the first installment of the "Robert Langdon Series", Brown explained Langdon to the reader in a much fuller sense than DaVinci Code, almost as if he was expecting you to come in with the knowledge of Langdon from the first book. In reading The Lost Symbol, Brown goes back to those kinds of writing techniques and I really felt as though I got to know Langdon all over again. This goes for many of the books other characters as well - Brown does a really fantastic job of putting you inside of each characters head (regardless of whether you WANT to be there at times), and as events unfolded, I personally felt myself going through all the possible options and the possible permutations of what the characters were thinking.
I also enjoy Brown's pace. The book is fairly large, but some chapters are only a page long, others are two, others are three, and others can be twenty. I found that although I was exhausted from reading, or that it was close to 4 o'clock in the morning, it was almost addictive to continue reading because of the pace of Brown's book. One chapter will be from the perspective of one character, and the next will be from the perspective of the person watching the character from the previous chapter, and the next will be from a character in a completely separate location awaiting for a series of events to transpire, and so on an so forth. It is not always this way, but a series of short and thought provoking (cliff hangar-like) chapters will be strung together and for each chapter you will want more answers. Personally, it worked for me.
In talking with people who read the book, they said they enjoyed the book until the end because they thought the ending was "weak". I can't completely disagree with this. For such an interesting beginning, middle and (beginning of the) end, the ending was a little weak. One can argue that a book/show/movie can be ranked almost entirely on the quality of the ending. If the ending is terrible it can ruin your whole experience. This ending was not THIS bad.
That said, I found the "message" of this book to be far more offensive (to Catholic's) than anything in Angels or DaVinci Code. (Spoiler Alert for Angels and Code...) In Angels, a priest manipulates events to kill and maim Cardinals, and to become the Pope himself, only to detonate a bomb high above Vatican City, and in DaVinci Code Jesus is portrayed as not the son of God, but a mortal man who spawns a lineage that dates to the present day. Pretty offensive to those who are "of the faith", so, not me. I'm not going to spoil this book at all, but personally I think it's pretty offensive, more so than Jesus banging out the whore Mary Magdalene.
All in all I really enjoyed this book, even if the end was a little weak. I really like all the protagonists, Langdon and crew, and I really enjoyed the main antagonist. What a bad ass dude. Great story line for him, and the most cohesive with regards to the books overall plot than any of the other "bad asses" from the other books, like the Albino and the Hassassin. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment