Word: langdon
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...times Angelology is little more than a light scaffolding built around the glittering edifice of its genuinely compelling premise. Trussoni's handling of action is not deft, and the romance between Verlaine and Evangeline makes you long for the raw erotic chemistry between Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu. (See pictures of Hollywood vampires...
...would be irresponsible not to point out that the general feel, if not all the specifics, of Brown's cultural history is entirely correct. He loves showing us places where our carefully tended cultural boundaries - between Christian and pagan, sacred and secular, ancient and modern - are actually extraordinarily messy. Langdon points out, for example, that the U.S. Capitol "was designed as a tribute to one of Rome's most venerated mystical shrines," the Temple of Vesta, and that it prominently features a painting of George Washington in the guise of Zeus. ("That hardly fits with the Christian underpinnings of this...
...plot of The Lost Symbol churns forward with a brutalist energy that makes character but a flesh appendage on its iron machine. It's fun, but you feel a little bruised afterward. Langdon must ransack the Capitol for his missing friend Peter Solomon, the one who lost the hand, and for a hidden Masonic pyramid, which is the key to some mystical wisdom that will turn man into god, which is something that Mal'akh, the tattooed nut job, has a keen interest in. Langdon is joined by the head of the CIA's Office of Security, who for some...
...Along the way Langdon bags all kinds of exotic symbological fauna, decoding his specimens on the fly with an inexhaustible sense of wonderment (No, it can't be! Oh, but it can, Professor Langdon). His inner struggle is between his own native academic skepticism and the ever mounting evidence that the world contains something miraculous that said skepticism can't account for. "You, like many educated people, live trapped between worlds," a wise priest (he's also a Mason!) tells him. "One foot in the spiritual, one foot in the physical. Your heart yearns to believe ... but your intellect refuses...
...Brown has another agenda in The Lost Symbol, which is to rehabilitate Washington, D.C., as one of the great world capitals of gothic mystery, one that can hold its own with Paris or London or Rome. "America has a hidden past," Langdon thinks, italically. "Every time Langdon lectured on the symbology of America, his students were confounded to hear that the true intentions of our nation's forefathers had absolutely nothing to do with what so many politicians now claimed. America's intended destiny has been lost to history...