Ahh, Dan Brown. Is there anyone better at the contemporary, hyper-educated thriller? While this wasn't my favorite of his books, it was certainly an entertaining read. Everything you've come to expect in a Robert Langdon book is there: mystery and misdirection, prominent places, secret societies. What I felt was missing, however, was a strong sense of character development. Especially given the precedent set in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, I expected much more from this novel.
In his third work featuring symbology professor Robert Langdon, Brown has included all the tropes readers have come to know and love in his stories. Langdon finds himself unexpectedly summoned to Washington D.C. and ends up making a startling, slightly gory, discovery. This sends him running, often literally, into an adventure filled with ancient clues and symbols. One of things which has always drawn me to Brown's books is his use of old stories in an extremely modern context. In this case, the myths surrounding the Freemasons are brought into the D.C. night and thoroughly blended with a psychopathic killer.
His use of the archaic creates an immediate air of mystery, while the inclusion of icons like the Capitol, Library of Congress, and Washington Monument give the reader a contemporary point of access. I also appreciated the role text messages played in this story. They weren't added as a sort of "well everyone's doing it, so let's get them somewhere" device; it wasn't like they were using Twitter. Instead, texting was deliberately used to advance the story and alter the reader's perception. In this respect, Brown has always struck me as a masterful modern novelist.
My biggest hang-up with this novel involved what I perceived as a disjuncture between the quality of charter development in The Lost Symbol and Brown's other books, especially as regards Robert Langdon himself. Let's not kid ourselves, this isn't Dickens we're reading. That said, I always appreciated the time Brown took with his characters, even in the middle of all the clue solving and death defying. In his first two stories, Langdon struck me as an interesting, sensitive Renaissance man who learned from his experiences. In his most recent adventure, however, much of that seems to be lost.
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