Dan Brown - The Lost Symbol

Review by Ro Bennett on show 26th Nov.

I enjoyed the book on the whole although I felt it dragged a bit at the end and at times there was too much explanation and description, so it was a bit like a text book. Reading some of the reviews, other readers agree with this. I’ll read one review which sums up what I thought about the book.

Lots of "encyclopedia speak". Dan Brown has clearly done lots of research while writing this book, but do we need to be told ALL of it? Sometimes it felt more like I was reading excerpts from Wikipedia than a novel! The pace does pick up though, and Dan Brown is still the master of the hanging chapters that get you staying up late reading "just one more" - it's a long book, but you tear through it.

As for me, I like books which send me scurrying to Google to look things up and I found several interesting topics. I didn’t know anything about Washington, so I was fascinated by the architectural details and facts he included. I looked up George Washington and found the picture and statue Dan Brown mentions. Then I looked up religious symbols and their meaning and delved into Freemasonary. It was all very interesting!

My main interest was the bit about Noetic Science. I’ve already browsed their website and have read the book Dan Brown mentions called The Intention Experiment by Lynne Mc Taggart - so have started to read that again to refresh my memory. In her book The Field, Lynne Mc Taggart mentions Edgar Mitchell who co-founded the Institute of Noetic Science in 1973. Edgar Mitchell, was an astronaut who was part of the Apollo 14 mission. His experience inspired him to research into human consciousness and intention and it seems that Dan Brown is also intrigued with that sort of thing.

Throughout the Lost Symbol there is code cracking and deciphering and I love that because I’m rubbish at that sort of thing. I googled Durer’s picture Melencolia mentioned in the book and found the magic square in the picture. All the rows add up to 34, the columns add up to 34 and the diagonals add up to 34. On the bottom line of the square, the middle numbers are 15 and14 which reads 1514, that was the year the picture was painted. It’s absolute genius! Apparently, Magic Squares were created 4,000 years ago in Egypt and India and were believed to hold magical powers.

So as you can see there was a lot of meat in the book for me. I found loads to keep me occupied and interested and so I could overlook the weaknesses and flaws in the plot and the dreary unrealistic bits.
by Ro Bennett