The Secret Of Secrets By Dan Brown – Fun, Preposterous, And Exciting But More Of The Same

Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets came out a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it. I’ve read all his books and enjoy them, but I still wouldn’t really call myself a fan.

The book sees Langdon finally getting a girlfriend and, as she is due to give a lecture in Prague, he pops over to attend. His girlfriend, Katherine Solomon, is a Noetic scientist, and she has been invited to Prague to give a talk.

But then all hell breaks loose, there are a few murders, conspiracies, hidden secrets, and you know, a pretty standard day in the life of Robert Langdon. At least this time, he is with an attractive, intelligent woman he can actually kiss. Which makes it slightly different.

Katherine seems pretty cool, even if she does have really specific dreams and works in a highly dubious field.

The usual set-up – an ’emerging’ science and a historic city

In the Langdon books, you usually get some fringe science, then a load of fascinating puzzles and history from a city. In The Secret of Secrets, as I mentioned, it is Noetic science and Prague.

Noetic science is essentially pseudoscience. It makes an argument and then tries to prove it is true, and then gets defensive when people point out that its evidence is circumstantial at best. Stuff like ESP and remote viewing is testable and has been tested for decades. And nothing has ever been proven. Which is a shame, as I would LOVE it if psychics existed. There have been numerous offers of considerable sums of money for anyone who can show any kind of power, and the only people who have gotten close are illusionists.

In The Secret of Secrets, the focus is more on non-local consciousness, which is, I mean… ok. I hope it’s true, but suspect it is like the ‘soul weighs 21 grams’ stuff mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. i.e. bollocks.

As for it being set in Prague – great choice. It’s an awesome city. I’ve been there four times and adore the place. I didn’t see lots of people wandering around in fancy dress like Langdon did, but maybe I just missed them.

What I liked about The Secret of Secrets

It is a fun and exciting book, like all of Dan Brown’s Langdon series. A bit daft, but incredibly fun. Langdon is chased for big chunks of the novel, and it takes him to fascinating historic corners of a European city. He solves the odd code. There is a pretty weird assassin wandering around. There is a huge revelation that will rock the world – but then you hear it, and it’s fine, but a bit of a let down. Standard stuff.

Basically, if you like Dan Brown’s other books, you will like this one. I have read some comments online that Langdon didn’t really solve any historical mysteries this time, but it didn’t really bother me.

I generally like his books because they are fun, not to be taken seriously, and generally reveal some interesting tidbits about cities I have visited. I’m not saying they are great or are well written or anything, but if you have read one, expect more of that.

If you haven’t read it yet and are a Brown or Langdon fan, it is a safe bet you’ll like The Secret of Secrets.

You can get it or read more about it here.

You should stop reading now because I am about to drop some spoilers.

What I didn’t like – HERE BE MASSIVE SPOILERS

When it comes to the actual writing, no one is expecting high literature with this series, and that’s fine. But The Secrets of Secrets get really repetitive. The golem is going to destroy everything, I get it – there’s no need to constantly reiterate the fact.

I also got annoyed at the constant need for cliffhangers for everything. In one bit, the Golem goes to the Black Angel bar, which is in a 12th-century building and has secret rooms and hints of magical recipes that had been found there. Brown writes that the golem hopes he can find the information he needs to achieve the impossible – courtesy of the angel of death. Pretty mysterious and a great hook, right? What mysteries lie in the basement? It turns out he just wants to use the internet, and they have an old internet cafe in the basement.

But the main thing that annoyed me was how many weird choices are made so that the story can happen and Langdon can be involved. The ‘mastermind’ Finch wants an advanced copy of Katherine’s book. Rather than hack her (or Penguin’s) writing software or stealing her laptop the moment he learns she is writing a book, he instead decides to get her invited to Prague and have Gessner ask her for a copy. The fact that Prague is where he is building a secret base, and Gessner is the only other person with a key, doesn’t strike him as a risk.

If he hadn’t invited Katherine and her world-famous boyfriend, who is known to be good at cracking codes and conspiracies, to Prague, Threshold would have remained a secret.

But he did invite her, and even then, if he had left her alone, Katherine and Langdon would have just had a nice trip to Prague. They wouldn’t have uncovered anything.

Instead, he has their room bugged and listens in when Katherine describes a really specific dream that involves a set time when a hotel is going to explode. Langdon then panics and massively overreacts and is then chased by the police. The whole sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the story and just seems an excuse for him to lose his phone and be chased for a while. When the policeman is ordered to stop, he does, and that whole plot thread just ends.

I spent the whole book hoping that the weird dream reenactment would be properly explained, but beyond Finch introducing a bit of chaos, it seemed pointless and ultimately led to his downfall.

There are a few other things that annoyed me, like the constant info dumps, Langdon and Katherine having lengthy chats in life and death situations, but I’ll stop. If you are reading this, you have presumably read The Secret of Secrets already. And as I said, I actually enjoyed it, despite it being a bit dumb.

I look forward to writing a very similar review of the next book by Dan Brown. Maybe he will finally mention how the world has changed after the events of Inferno, and fertility has dropped by a third. So far, it is almost like it was irrelevant. See you in five years or so.