Dan Brown Is Still Chasing the <em>Da Vinci Code</em> Thrill. Only Now, Everything Else Has Changed.
While it's impossible to pity a man who's sold upwards of 80 million copies of a single book, it must be acknowledged that Dan Brown has found it challenging to follow his own breakthrough act, 2003's The Da Vinci Code . Brown's latest attempt, The Secret of Secrets , follows the pattern of his previous novels featuring Robert Langdon, the hero of The Da Vinci Code and four other thrillers that have followed the Harvard professor of religious symbology (a nonexistent academic discipline, as many, many critics have pointed out) as he races across the world, decoding secret messages embedded in Renaissance artworks alluding to world-changing secrets that have been covered up for centuries. Sooner or later, though, a guy runs out of ancient secrets to unearth, and so, this time around, eight years after his previous Langdon installment, Brown has made the big secret both ancient and futuristic.
“It really makes you think,” a man told me 22 years ago at a barbecue, explaining that he'd just read The Da Vinci Code . At the time, I scoffed. Brown's novel takes as its premise a conspiracy theory most fully outlined in another bestseller, 1982's Holy Blood, Holy Grail , by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, a work of pseudohistory claiming to prove that Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene, whose descendants became the Merovingian dynasty in what is now France. The dynasty's enduring, divine claim to the throne in France, this narrative maintains, has been championed by a secret society called the Priory of Sion, dating back to 1099, whose members have included such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. In fact, the priority was the invention of a French crank who deposited a cache of fake documents supporting these claims in the Bibliothèque nationale de France during the 1960s . (Perhaps the most genuine mystery in all of this is how it was so easy for these nuts to plant fabricated parchments in France's national library.)
In 2006 Baigent and Leigh sued Brown for copyright infringement , arguing that The Da Vinci Code “appropriated the architecture” of Holy Blood, Holy Grail —a tricky claim, given that Holy Blood, Holy Grail purports to be nonfiction, and therefore composed of material any writer could research and legally incorporate into a novel. (They lost their suit on these grounds.) Brown himself is prone to assertions of facticity. He opens The Secret of Secrets with a notice much like the one that prefaces The Da Vinci Code , promising readers that all the “artwork, artifacts, symbols, and documents in this novel are real,” and that all the science and organisms depicted in The Secret of Secrets exist and are “true to life.” It wasn't Brown's wafer-thin characters and cheesy thriller tropes that made The Da Vinci Code such a hit; it was the illusion that novel created of nonfiction, of dialing readers into a trove of epochal truths, with clues hiding in plain sight in such familiar images as The Last Supper . A quarter century into the Robert Langdon books, Brown knows better than to venture too far from this winning formula.
Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support.
The Da Vinci Code really did make people think, though—just not very well. Along with other pop-culture sensations like The X-Files , Brown's novel helped foster the now-rampant notion that the world's institutions are all fronts for sinister conspiracies and—most notably—that the virtuous forces arrayed against them must also be secretive. The QAnon fantasia of Donald Trump and his allies as covertly battling a cabal of wealthy pedophiles survives, despite Trump's obvious lack of interest in pursuing the cause, because of this particular double-conspiracy twist. Why the Priory of Sion felt obliged to hide its history-shattering truths was never fully explained in either Holy Blood, Holy Grail or The Da Vinci Code , but all the fun of decoding the symbols on Newton's tomb would be lost without that extra dollop of secrecy.
Both sides are secretive in The Secret of Secrets too, but there's nothing in Brown's new novel to rival the century-spanning Eurocentric conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code . The Secret of Secrets opens with the nefarious doings of another classic Brown trope: a freakish madman. In The Da Vinci Code , it was the demented albino monk murderously pursuing the goals of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei. In the new novel, it's another lunatic, this one disguised as the Golem (a clay statue that, according to Jewish folklore, was animated by a rabbi) of Prague, where the novel is set, who abuses ether while naked and using a ball gag. The action quickly shifts—as it always does in Brown's fiction, the kingdom of brief chapters—to Langdon and his new girlfriend, Katherine Solomon, a neurologist turned “noetic scientist,” who is working on a book that everyone seems to think will be a sensation, although no one but Katherine has read it yet, and the only copy resides in an encrypted digital vault owned by her publisher, Penguin Random House (also Brown's publisher).
Katherine describes noetic science as “the study of human consciousness,” a definition that skirts the field's customary focus on an assortment of paranormal phenomena like ESP, precognition, and telepathy. The “secret of secrets” in Brown's novel is Katherine's assertion that the human mind does not reside entirely in the physical brain, but rather taps into a universal pool of consciousness that is a property of the universe existing from the beginning of time.
In any historical period, the prevailing metaphor of the mind and how it works tends to be drawn from the dominant technology of that time. In Freud's day, the mind was thought to perform like a steam engine, powered by ungratified (and typically sexual) urges that, if allowed to build up too much, could lead to malfunctions. Not long ago, it was common to speak of people as being “hardwired” for one trait or another, like a personal computer running an operating system. Katherine's theory is clearly drawn from the internet, and at one point she compares a human brain to a smartphone that obviously can't contain all the known information in the world but can tap into an immaterial exterior source that feels infinite.
All this boils down to “Everything is connected,” a new age motto so commonplace it's unfathomable that shadowy forces extending into the upper echelons of the US government conspire to destroy Katherine's manuscript. I won't spoil it, but the usual suspects are deployed in the scheme. Brown must come up with a fairly convoluted rationale that requires these forces to be fearful of a scandal involving patent violations (among other things)—a notion that seems preposterous, given the current administration's much more extreme and overt transgressions on a near-daily basis.
This gets to the heart of Brown's dilemma: There's little room for his old-fashioned conspiracy plots in the new world they helped create. Everything in The Secret of Secrets feels a bit stale, from the hoary middle-aged male-thriller-writer Mary Sue tropes—action heroes are invariably fiftysomethings who work out every day—to the ham-fisted attempts at generating atmosphere with descriptions that read as if they're lifted from a travel guide. (“The Old Town neighborhood was a labyrinth of passageways known for its vibrant nightlife and distinctive pubs.”) The novel's premise also sports some huge holes. Katherine claims that her work is “backed up with plenty of hard science,” but no scientist would initially publish her findings with a trade publisher rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, and if Katherine had published in such a journal first, she could hardly keep her work a secret.
When Brown came out with The Da Vinci Code , conspiracy theories were far from new, of course, but their prevalence has multiplied exponentially since then, thanks to the internet. Conspiracy now seems to be the default approach to thinking about almost any event. School shooting victims are accused of being crisis actors, assassination attempts are assumed to be faked, and every election is suspected of being rigged. The baroque, salacious imaginings of QAnon rival the elaborate mythology of Holy Blood, Holy Grail —only instead of ballotizing the paintings of European masters for hidden clues, they read the most improbable messages into the stuff of contemporary politics. Brown is even obliged to mention Elon Musk in The Secret of Secrets (for reasons I won't disclose), and the absence of any reference to Musk's recent political depredations and toddlerlike meltdowns is glaring. Maybe that stuff felt like a distracting sidetrack to Brown, but their absence leaves the impression that he just can't keep up.
For all we know, Katherine is right about human consciousness, although I doubt she has any “hard science” to prove it. But if the universal consciousness we all supposedly tap into is really like the internet, well, that explains a lot about history, and none of it is very pretty. Perhaps the most dated aspect of The Secret of Secrets is Katherine's starry-eyed notion of what her theory implies, its whiff of the techno-utopianism of the 1990s, which promised an internet delivering global enlightenment and genuine democracy. We all know how that turned out. Maybe we are connected by some universal consciousness, but given what we've learned about our fellow human beings over the past 20 years from the digital version of that connection, I'm not sure that's such a good thing.
