Well … we’ve waited eight years for a new Robert Langdon book from Dan Brown, and he certainly didn’t disappoint fans in what he delivered: a hefty hardcover tome of 671 pages – excluding a map, some quotes, illustration credits, info about the author (which is repeated on the dust jacket), and 3 pages of acknowledgments! So, let’s round it off at around 680 pages. While there’s definitely quantity here, I’m sorry to say that for me, the quality found within these pages was severely lacking (unpopular opinion, I know). I was left wondering who this has been written for, because I’m pretty sure that if the average fiction reader is the intended target audience, then it’s not quite going to hit the mark.
Apart from the obvious fact of there being a lot of pages to get through, the book takes its time deciding what it wants to be and where it wants to go. It meanders in various directions:
- A guide book of Prague – both from a tourist and historical perspective;
- A mystery – as in, a real whodunnit/where-are-they type mystery;
- An extensive investigation into psychological conditions;
- A complex deep-dive into academic neuroscience;
- A political controversy over what the inevitable next world war will be about;
- An opportunity to introduce some mysticism, in the form of a legend from Jewish folklore.
Basically, from what I did actually understand … Robert Langdon finds himself in Prague with noetic scientist, Katherine Solomon who has been given the prestigious honour of being invited to give a lecture. But then Katerine goes missing. There’s a secret, rather lavish, underground lab, an unscrupulous CIA puppet-master with various crazed henchmen running amok in several cities around the globe, an ambassador who could be good … or bad … or good at being bad (or both, depending which chapter I was on), a young Russian woman who’s gone missing and who everyone fears will be manipulated and taken advantage of, a publisher (in New York), and a geeky tech guy, having some major issues with some system glitches, and a shadowy figure who roams the streets of Prague meting out his own form of justice.
See what I mean? A bit of a mish-mash. I guess there were a lot of pages to play with!
The central theme of consciousness and the many (many, many) lengthy discourses that were included just lost me. They seemed to be lost on Robert Langdon too because every time Katherine starts to ramble on about this, her subject of choice and area of expertise, he suddenly becomes a dumbed down version of himself and fails to understand much of what she says. Why Dan Brown would do this is beyond me!
I did like the dip into Jewish mysticism, with the telling of the legend of the Golem of Prague. The background and meaning of this folktale has always fascinated me. But the constant repetition of certain elements of the Golem story felt unnecessary.
I also enjoyed how Brown used his own publisher, Penguin Random House, and its building as an integral part of the story, manipulating his own real-life editor’s name, making him Langdon and Katherine’s fictional editor, and inserting his own tech guru, Alex, into the action too. It added a quirky edge which worked really well.
So overall, this one gets a big NO from me (and if you follow my reviews, you’ll know that’s it’s rare for me to write such a negative one). Honestly, has Dan Brown ever quite reached the lofty heights of The Da Vinci Code? I’m not sure he has. Will The Secret of Secrets make a fabulous film? Probably … if the producers keep things ticking along nicely and don’t feel the need to drag things out as long as the book does!
Thanks go to Penguin Books South Africa for providing me with my review copy, for which I am most appreciative.
jansbookbuzz.com 
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