Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

I just finished The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, one of those writers who keep your interest. I have enjoyed his first four books immensely.

I had a bad feeling about the fifth book before it was published. It took a long time to write. This often indicates that the book was laborious to write. When I write something about a subject, I like it to flow like a stream bolstered by major rainfall. The Lost Symbol did not flow out of Dan Brown's mind easily and smoothly. Its gestation was more like a tough pregnancy ending with severe labor pains. The results were all the worse for the stretching and pushing to bring it to term and deliver it.

After a mega-masterpiece like The Da Vinci Code, the next book would have to meet very high standards to be favorably compared with its predecessor. Pressure and great art sometimes do not go together. While purely fictional books like Digital Fortress, Deception Point and Angels & Demons were excellent, his success with The Da Vinci Code, a book that blends credible and controversial historical events and "what ifs" together with fiction, meant that his editors and his public would be looking for more of the same. This was apparently not a realistic expectation. The Da Vinci Code was a one-time breakout novel with popularity matching or exceeding the masterpiece Gone with The Wind by Margaret Mitchell, the only novel she ever published. Ms. Mitchell knew publishing anything after that novel would just dim her historical achievement. Dan Brown probably felt the same pressure but financially found it an irresistible feat he would have to attempt.

The Lost Code was over five hundred pages. The excellent writing style of Dan Brown compelled me to read the first four hundred pages with great excitement. These pages flew by in a two evening session. Even at this point I felt there was no credible end game for his plot to top off the previous, intense action. Unfortunately I was right. The last hundred pages were a chore to read. The last fifty pages were truly painful.

The ending was disappointing. No revelations, no glorious wonderment, no historical impact was forthcoming. It lingered and died failing to take the reader to the same level as its predecessor. The attempt fell way short.

It was not without some interesting moments. It did have its share of historical factoids. There will be some readers walking around Washington DC to trace the monuments where the action took place.

Kudos to Dan Brown for the moments which made me want to hop aboard the Washington Metro and visit these places which I have ignored too long, living only five miles from the Capital. At the end I was ready slip my Metro Pass into the "maybe one day department" on my to-do list. The excitement vanished with the end of the novel.