Dan Brown's first novel in nearly a decade, The Secret of Secrets, has been met with scathing reviews, with critics describing it as 'weapons-grade nonsense from beginning to end'. The book reunites readers with Robert Langdon, the world's only professor of symbology, who is once again thrust into a conspiracy thriller involving underground laboratories and new theories on consciousness.
The Guardian's review highlights Brown's continued 'sentence-by-sentence ineptitude as a prose writer', noting that the novel features clunky descriptions and repetitive adjectives. The plot, however, is characteristically fast-paced, with cliffhangers every few pages and a narrative that 'starts thick and gets thicker'. Langdon finds himself on the run from Czech secret police after setting off a hotel fire alarm, while a mysterious figure believing themselves to be a golem stalks the streets of Prague.
The central MacGuffin this time is a discovery about the nature of consciousness that could upend everything known about the universe. The love interest, a noeticist, faces attempts to suppress her soon-to-be-published book, with hacked servers and stolen manuscripts. The novel is filled with Brown's trademark digressions and infodumps, including details about Prague's history and the coffee machine in Penguin Random House's children's division.
Despite the criticism, the review concedes that Brown knows what his readers want: 'It's weapons-grade bollocks from beginning to end, none of it makes a lick of sense, and you'll roar through it with entire enjoyment if you like this sort of thing.' The novel is available now.
