‘Origin’ by Dan Brown review – fun in its own galumphing way

In his fifth blockbuster outing, professor of symbology Robert Langdon takes on the battle between science and religion Origin is the fifth of Dan Brown’s gazillion-selling books starring Robert Langdon. As fans of 2003’s The Da Vinci Code will remember, Langdon is professor of religious symbology at Harvard. But, like renowned academic archaeologist Indiana Jones, […]

In his fifth blockbuster outing, professor of symbology Robert Langdon takes on the battle between science and religion

Origin is the fifth of Dan Brown’s gazillion-selling books starring Robert Langdon. As fans of 2003’s The Da Vinci Code will remember, Langdon is professor of religious symbology at Harvard. But, like renowned academic archaeologist Indiana Jones, you seldom see him marking term papers or preparing lectures.

Instead – in this case dressed in a tailcoat throughout – he spends his time careering between renowned buildings (the Bilbao Guggenheim, Barcelona’s Sagrada Família and so on) solving Crystal Maze-style puzzles, being chased by baddies and uncovering world-changing secrets.

It’s all very reassuring. As usual our hero has a “vivacious, strong-minded beauty” chastely in tow (despite being the future Queen of Spain, Ambra gets called by her first name; our hero is always “Langdon”). And the four aspects of his personality are all present and correct: the claustrophobia, the eidetic memory, the tendency to think in italics (“What secret had Edmond unveiled?”), and of course the Mickey Mouse watch, which I at first thought had been retired for, say, a Tissot – but there it is on page 376.

So: the story. This one’s all set in Spain. Langdon’s friend, an Elon Muskish playboy tech genius called Edmond Kirsch, is giving a talk at the Guggenheim at which he promises to reveal the secret to life, the universe and everything – and which he promises will make all the world’s religions redundant at a stroke. But just as he’s giving his little PowerPoint presentation, an assassin shoots him and within the hour Langdon is on the run with Ambra (the aforementioned future Queen of Spain) in “a deadly game of cat-and-mouse”.

Langdon is essentially after Edmond’s password so that they can get the PowerPoint up and running again and change the world. But, of course, he doesn’t know whom to trust (apart from Winston, Edmond’s quantum-computer AI assistant, and the renowned future Queen of Spain) and the whole place is seething with sinister conservative archbishops, mysterious puppetmasters and Franco-fetishising schismatic sects. There’s even brief mention of an eyeless Anti-Pope, which lifts the spirits. After the baddies in the previous novels (one of whom boasted a “massive double-headed phoenix on his chest [which] glared … through nipple eyes like some kind of ravenous vulture”), the morose retired admiral who serves as the muscle in this one seems a bit beige.

I’m marginally below average at tumbling to where thrillers are going, and I guessed what was really going on – who was pulling the strings – by (actually, on) page 241, but that didn’t much hamper my enjoyment. And at the end, we get the secret of life, the universe and everything: the presentation unfolds over 30 cod-sciencey pages, and we learn how human life came to be (something to do with entropy) and what the future holds (something to do with technology). Yay!

Obviously, Brown hasn’t got any better at writing since his last outing. If there were an antonym for “unerring” – something that captured the way that over more than 400 pages he avoids producing a good sentence even by accident – it would be the one for Brown. He still lobs modifiers about like an out-of-control tennis machine. He still drops in Wikipedia-style paragraphs of factual boilerplate: “The Holy seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Madrid – Catedral de la Almudena – is a robust neoclassical cathedral situated adjacent to Madrid’s Royal Palace …” “Uber’s ubiquitous ‘on-demand driver’ service had taken the world by storm over the past few years. Via a smartphone, anyone requiring a ride could instantly connect with a growing army of Uber drivers who made extra money by hiring out their cars as improvised taxis …”

Everything is “renowned”, “famed”, “famous”, “celebrated” or “well known”, such as “the well-known American professor Robert Langdon”, the “celebrated masterpiece … by French Postimpressionist Paul Gauguin”, “the renowned 19th-century German philosopher” Nietzsche, or “the museum’s most famous work – El [sic] Guernica”.

But complaining that Brown can’t write is like complaining that crisps are crunchy. And you know what? It doesn’t really matter at all. The book is fun in its galumphing way. And the longer he keeps earnestly plugging away, the more the reader warms to him. There’s a winning innocence to Brown’s work, especially as rather than just produce a chase thriller with added sudoku, he is determined to take on the most fundamental issues of human existence. Dan Brown: novelist of ideas.

Source: The Guardian UK