Y Safle

I have just received an email from Amazon telling me they have recommendations for me. The email title and top recommendation is Dan Brown’s turgid “The Lost Symbol”. I cannot for the life of me think why Amazon’s algorithms would recommend this when I have never bought a Dan Brown book or even anything much like a Dan Brown book.

My best guess is it is based on my browsing history because I have looked at all the Dan Brown books on Amazon. What Amazon failed to spot is that I did not just look at the books – I reviewed them. If only they had incorporated my star rating into their recommendation algorithm!

Here is my review:

1.0 out of 5 stars

More Boring than this Review,

12 July 2010

This review is from: The Lost Symbol (Hardcover)
I am proud to say I have never bought a Dan Brown novel. I always read other people’s copies, and in short – I suggest you do the same with this book.

A friend borrowed this from the library so I read his borrowed copy quickly before it was due back. In that way there is no official record I read it at all.

And a good thing too. The research in this novel is as bad as ever, the plot preposterous and formulaic (All Dan Brown books have the same plot structure – I guess he feels “why change a winning formula?”). The characters are wooden and lifeless and the action soars across a blank page – a world in which no one but the main characters seem to really exist.

Dan Brown sets this novel in Washington DC – which he ought to be more familiar with than the European cities he visited on his bus tour before basing his novels on those (Note to Dan: Next bus tour, remember to look out of the windows and stop chatting with the person next to you). Sadly citizens of Washington suggest otherwise. Seems that Washington geography gets the Dan Brown treatment.

A new twist for this book though is the sheer dullness of the story. It is tedious.

Brown managed in his earlier books to keep people turning the pages – not entirely legitimately! He is a past master at the cliff hanger chapter end, and the shortest chapters known to man! Those are not really chapters so much as breathing spaces. But in this story the paging turning was a distinct chore. This is really not a fun book to read even for the reader looking for something mindless.

The plot ending is in the “obvious” category. I guessed correctly within the first few chapters (AKA pages), and thereafter was just thinking “get on with it”. The plot is also full of holes (like why Langdon is even necessary in this story – he clearly isn’t) or why people would not recognise…well I had better not mention that one in case you want to avoid plot spoilers.

I have found a huge list of factual errors, and there are going to be hundreds more if I could be bothered to google them. But how sad would that be? As usual the biggest piece of fiction in this book is the standard boilerplate statement that it contains some fact in it!

As something of an expert in Internet Protocols, the “funky format” IP address had me cringing like this was Digital Fortress all over again.

If Brown cannot get technical details (and he cannot), he should just gloss over the details rather than write cringeworthy wrong ones. In essence, if the Internet Protocol address is not in the format of a released protocol, then its not Interent Protocol, is it?! In which case you would not route to the address in the first place!! And as for the description of traceroute – what he calls some mysterious behaviour is in fact the normal behavior of traceroute when traversing routers that filter ICMP messages. Oh and a serious firewall is just blocked ports – you don’t get to see the coding! I could go on but I would get very boring!

All this could have been avoided if the narrative had not tried to linger on all these errant details. Just show the hacker working into the night and drinking a lot of coffee and the story would run faster and not be so obviously wrong.

He also repeats his folk etymology of “sincere”, using it in the plot – which is sad as the etymology is wrong. Not even disputed – just plain wrong. He also uses a dubious etymology of abracadbra (in this case it is disputed and has no evidence, but could possibly be right – although not the way he spells it. J K Rowling fans will know a better spelling).

The ending of the story wraps up with some mystical nonsense which manages to misread and reverse the words he quotes from the Bible. The “meat for men” passage must be understood in the context of paul *opposing* a mystical interpretation of Christianity. The Corinthians were the ones proposing a mystical interpretation, and Paul says it is wrong!

Still it makes a good story …well no, it doesn’t…but I guess he hoped it would.

Elsewhere the “you are the temple” quote in 1 Cor 3.16 refers to the church, not individuals.

His history is naff too. The Christian cross was a symbol for Christianity from the earliest times – certainly before the 4th century he asserts. We know it was attested as being a standard symbol for Christianity in the second century, and a reading of Corinthians should leave us in no doubt that it was so in the first century too.

The hydrogen explosion suggests he does not understand chemistry either, and the noetics quackery suggests he has some general issues with science.

But perhaps the most annoying error of all – for me – was his repeating the old cannard about Columbus proving the world was round! If people had thought the world was flat in the 15th century the portuguese would not have been navigating with the astrolabe to get around Africa would they!

And indeed, no one thought it was flat. They did not agree entirely on how large the world was, even though Erastothenes had succesfully measured it nearly 2000 years earlier. Columbus was wrong (but lucky). His estimates for the circumference of the earth were wildly understated, based on a misunderstaning of Marco Polo and other such issues, but perhaps mostly because he believed the story of a shipwrecked Portuguese sailor who claimed to have been blown to land in the west (probably Brazil), and the finding of two dead men of “oriental” origin in a Kayak in Ireland (probably Inuit who were swept there).

A Harvard professor probably should have known this rather than repeating the misinformation of a 19th century French atheist (Letronne) who made up the alternate history for his own antireligious reasons. Dan Brown should really spend a bit more time researching his books if he is going to put in all these educated sounding asides in his stories.

On the plus side, I think he got a couple of things right. The history of Cravats was correct (although the folk etymology he puts in the mouth of a past headmaster appears to be his invention. The Croation derivation of Cravat appears to be uncontroversial). Some other fact was correct I think…which is an improvement for Brown as usually the facts are 100% wrong.

Anyhow, anyone thinking of reading this – don’t unless you do what I did and read a copy that someone else borrowed from the library! The book is even more boring than this meandering review!

Better luck next time Amazon (I am not holding my breath. I do not think I ever bought a book off an Amazon recommendation).

Be Sociable, Share!

•