Return of Dan Brown’s cardboard hero leaves us gasping for breath
ORIGIN
DAN Brown’s latest novel, the fifth featuring his “symbologist” hero Robert Langdon, is a typically breathless pageturner set in Spain, and dealing with issues of the origin and the future of humanity, no less.
As with his previous blockbusters, it is pacy and well researched but written in an utterly leaden style. The characters are cardboard, the dialogue abysmal. Doubtless it will sell millions worldwide, and a Ron Howard blockbuster starring Tom Hanks will duly trundle out of the blocks.
The book opens cinematically with “futurist” Edmond Kirsch, a former student of Langdon’s, scaling a Catalan mountaintop to tell a bishop, a rabbi and an Islamic scholar that he has news that will shake their beliefs.
The next day, as he plans to unveil his discovery at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Kirsch is assassinated.
It’s down to Landon, who is in the audience, to unpick the mystery. He is aided by the “stunningly beautiful” museum director Ambra Vidal, who happens to be engaged to the prince of Spain, and by an artificial intelligence called Winston.
Brown is smart enough to tinker but not to mess too much with a winning formula. The Da Vinci code, which gave him his first huge success even though it wasn’t the first Langdon book, speculated that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child, and rehashed various religious conspiracy theories.
Religion is at the heart of Origin, therefore, but it shares space with royalty, art and science. The endless screeds that Langdon quotes this time around are as likely to come from William Blake or Stephen J Gould as the Bible. Even fake news gets a look in.
The story follows Brown’s trusted scheme of big tracts of explanation punctuated by hectic motion (lots of running, a jaunt to Barcelona by plane and driverless Tesla) and bouts of action. Every chapter ends in a cliffhanger, usually of the he-gasped-atwhat-was-inside variety.
Langdon isn’t any more fleshed out as a character, and remains a mouthpiece for Brown’s research. Ambra is pretty much a dress with a hairdo on top and her emotions shift according to Brown’s whim.
Origin was released at 8am this morning, so I read it quickly and can heartily recommend this as a way to approach it. One can skip a lot of information in the knowledge that Brown will sum it all up a few pages on in preparation for yet another revelation.
Occasionally you run up against a slab of prose so solid and awkward it stops you in your tracks, such as: “This celebrated masterpiece was one of the signature works by French Postimpressionist (sic) Paul Gauguin — a groundbreaking painter who epitomized the Symbolist movement of the late 1800s and helped pave the way for modern art.” At such moments, you despair.
I won’t spoil the ending, as this is the purpose of a Brown book; a series of flourishes leading to “wow” moment. The denouement is clever but also oddly downbeat. Not surprising, perhaps. It must be hard to top your own fictional audacity once you’ve called into question the fundamentals of religion and given Jesus a son.
Origin is published by Bantam Press, £20.