Saga more boneheaded than original
Dan Brown is back with another thriller so moronic that you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff.
“Origin” marks the fifth outing for Harvard professor Robert Langdon, the symbologist who uncovered stunning secrets and shocking conspiracies in “The Da Vinci Code” and other phenomenally best-selling novels.
Brown drags out all the elements of those books again and hyperventilates over them like a grifter fencing fake antiques.
This time around, the earth-shattering secret is a discovery made by Edmond Kirsch, a computer genius. Kirsch has called the world’s intelligentsia to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where he plans to reveal his findings to the world (because that’s the way complex scientific ■ discoveries are announced by quirky billionaires).
We don’t hear anything specific about Kirsch’s discovery except that it “boldly contradicted almost every established religious doctrine, and it did so in a distressingly simple and persuasive manner.” This displeases the distressingly simple-minded leaders of the world’s religions.
For 100 pages, Brown talks like a pilot on a grounded airplane, assuring us that we’ll take off any minute now. But then, as Kirsch finally begins to reveal his secret, some zealot shoots him in the head.
Fortunately, Robert Langdon is in the audience, and he’s determined to unlock Kirsch’s PowerPoint presentation and post his discovery online. But Kirsch’s shadowy assassin will stop at nothing to keep that from happening.
For the next 300 pages, Langdon dodges death while racing around tourist hot spots in Spain. He gets help from Kirsch’s computerized personal assistant, a disembodied voice that reads like the love child of Spock and Jeeves, and the Guggenheim’s beautiful director.
Brown might not have discovered a secret that threatens humanity’s faith, but he has located every cliche in the world. Some sentences are constructed entirely of them, such as “Edmond was walking a thin line and covering his bases.”
An unholy trinity of words —
All this might be worth enduring if the story’s infinitely hyped revelations didn’t finally end up sounding like an old TED Talk. Kirsch’s answers to the big questions — Where did we come from? Where are we going? — will surprise no one savvy enough to operate a cellphone.