Word: langdon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Probably not. But this is the name of the game in the Browniverse: at its most basic level the Brownian fantasy is that coincidences aren't just chance, and things are not just things: they mean something. Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, is after all a symbologist (following a branch of human intellectual inquiry that - it cannot be stated enough times - doesn't exist, at Harvard or anywhere else). Beneath his learned, oddly asexual caress, objects come to life and become symbols. A V isn't just a V, it's a chalice, a symbol of the eternal feminine. Chaos...
...Unlike the first two Langdon novels, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday; 509 pages) doesn't deal with the history of the Christian church. The mythology Langdon is decoding is that of the Freemasons (whose motto ordo ab chao, order out of chaos, could be Brown's). Langdon is summoned - dude is always getting summoned - to Washington, D.C., by a mysterious phone call that he thinks is coming from his old friend and mentor Peter Solomon, head of the Smithsonian. Langdon thinks he's going to give a speech at a Smithsonian fundraiser at the Capitol building. But when he shows...
...this point we've already been given several pleasantly familiar Brownian treats. Langdon has already flashed us his trademark Mickey Mouse watch ("I wear it to remind me to slow down and take life less seriously"), and we've gotten a taste of his freakish memory, his crippling claustrophobia and his rueful skepticism. We've been reminded of Brown's taste for ritual violence - there's a touch of Thomas Harris about his writing. We've even been introduced to a lonely, violent fanatic with weird skin. His name is Mal'akh instead of Silas, and instead of being...
...Hanks is bad; there's just no person for him to play. Given that it's the only role the actor has returned to in his live-action film work (he's repeated as the voice of Woody in Pixar's Toy Story franchise), it's a shame that Langdon doesn't play to his strengths: the fretful and impatience that rise to heroism. Here he's a simple conduit for information, the docent on our tour of Roman churches...
...lead the tour is a thornier question. The essentially reverent Angels, which portrays the Catholic hierarchy as the victim, not the perpetrator, of a grandly evil plot, was written before The Da Vinci Code. So in the order of publishing, it made sense that the church would initially allow Langdon to pursue his doctrinal theories. In the order of the movies, though, it beggars belief that Langdon, having exposed a truth the Vatican has suppressed for millennia, would be asked to consult on the kidnapped-Cardinals caper. Yet apparently L'Osservatore Romano doesn't hold a grudge. After...