Dan Brown novel number five and I bought it within just a couple of days of it being published. I read it quickly and basically enjoyed it. However, was The Lost Symbol a blockbuster to end all blockbusters? No, I'm afraid not.

The start of this story is good and clever as our hero, Robert Langdon, is lured into a trap in, let's say, a 90% credible way. He makes his way into the spider's web very readily. Once he's in the web he cannot leave and almost immediately the plot not only thickens but hardens too!

Unlike The da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, this Robert Langdon story is set in the USA although I thought at one point we were about to be whisked off to Europe. Although I read Angels and Demons and vowed that I would follow the trail woven through Rome by the book, I have not yet done so. I am not sure I have been similarly enticed to Washington DC where The Lost Symbol is based. I haven't been to Washington DC yet and I might go there one day and if I do I'd like to think I would visit the Capitol Building and the other areas and monuments that are mentioned in this story. Those elements, I think, are largely based on fact.

As for the consipiracy theories and symbolism built into this story, I'm afraid it left me stone cold. I know people who read Brown's previous two books and gorged on The Illuminati, the sumbols, the Holy Grail, the Last Supper, the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican. Not me: I read it all and accepted everything as a story. Albeit I liked the previous two books and I generally left them as stories.

So I read about Mal'akh, some kind of utter lunatic by my reckoning for whom the symbols and the Masons built into the story were real and redemptive. Far too fanciful for me. The fact that Mal'akh was tattoed apparently almost from head to foot and behaved in a most extraordinary way serves to build up the tension and there is an element of the story that binds the man whom Langdon thought he had gone to Washington DC to meet and Mal'akh that I cannot reveal here. For me this is a weak element of the story: told with a web woven carefully but not entirely credibly for me.

The rest of the story comprises CIA involvemenet, incredible escapes and escapades together with various gory moments. The cast list is short and it includes the CIA's Chief of Security Inoue Sato who is a chain smoking but physically handicapped woman who seems to me to be something of a sociopath.

Langdon survives what is built up to be his certain death at the hands of Mal'akh. The truth of what happens to him is interesting and it uses a technique that I heard about many years ago and was pleased to read about it here for some reason.

Overall, not a book to die for and of the three in the Robert Langdon series, the weaker of the three. I read it though and was happy to do so but for the next in the series I might wait for the reviews first before buying it!

Duncan Williamson
21^st October 2009