Dan Brown’s latest mixes high art and high-tech
Origin by Dan Brown 456 pages available at National Book Store
One could be forgiven for thinking there are few eternal riddles left in human existence for Professor Robert Langdon, Dan Brown’s professor of symbols and Tom Hanks doppelganger, to unravel. After uncovering Papal conspiracies, cracking the Da Vinci Code, looking for biohazards hidden in Florence and unmasking dark cult clues embedded in the Washington Monument, you’d think there were few enigmas left.
But Brown’s latest, Origin, goes for the Big Enchilada, positing answers to two basic questions: “Where did we come from?” and “Where are we going?”
It also taps into today’s buzzword topics, mingling new strains of technology with Brown’s old fixations on art and human history. This time round, Langdon finds himself traipsing noted art sites in Barcelona, which is like going through someone’s Instagram posts of La Sagrada Familia and Park Güell, but with lots more historical information.
Langdon first turns up at the Guggenheim in Bilbao at the invite of his former Harvard student Edmond Kirsch, now a high-tech billionaire with a knack for world-changing predictions. After meeting with top world religious leaders on a mountaintop retreat called Montserrat, He lets slip to Langdon that what he plans to announce to guests at Bilbao — and the millions following his live stream — will Blow. Their. Minds. Like, forever.
Used to mind-blowing revelations by now, Langdon (and Brown, by extension) still apparently retains a sense of wonder about the world around him. He’s a simple guy who still wears a Mickey Mouse watch, after all. He’s not too keen on the Guggenheim’s modern collection — we get glimpses of huge topiary dogs and abstract vistas, while Langdon clearly prefers Renaissance art and Dutch Masters — but the professor is bemused by recent developments such as the British-voiced museum guide named Winston who speaks through his headpiece (and turns out to be a computer), and the emergence of phenomena like Uber.
Our dedicated symbologist is in Spain to hear a game-changing announcement, but Kirsch doesn’t get to make that announcement. Shots ring out, and Langdon is quickly consumed with trying to uncover who wants to stop Kirsch from spilling the beans.
Much as with previous novels, Brown sets up a showdown between organized religions and a long-hidden “truth.” There are shady priests, rabbis being stalked in narrow alleyways, and Muslim clerics who go missing. Who’s behind it all? We are urged to read on. The truth stays hidden through much of Origin, the author more interested in teasing out the mystery and setting in motion a chase: Langdon on the run accompanied by, as usual, an attractive female companion — the “spectacularly beautiful” Ambra Vidal, former assistant of Kirsch and current fiancée of Prince Julian of Spain.
Along the way, Brown gets to contemplate all kinds of newfangled developments in the modern world, such as AI research, with all its thorny questions; the dark web, in which assassins can be hired with a few computer clicks, paid in bitcoin; conspiracy websites, which may have been a dark element in US politics but here are fairly accurate interjections between pulse-racing chapters; then there’s the arrival of driverless cars, with Langdon and Ambra employing a Tesla Model X to escape pursuing Spanish police and special agents of the Spanish palace. It’s all very cloak and dagger, served up with the usual array of about six different character types, max, for Brown to play around with.
Langdon remains an engaging protagonist, though still lacking any dark qualities. Basically, Tom Hanks comes to mind for the movie.
And what a movie! Boasting famous Gaudi-designed locales like the Sagrada Familia and Casa Milà, you can already imagine Ron Howard directing, with maybe Marion Cotillard playing Ambra.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Book first, movie later. Reading Dan Brown is still the equivalent of eating an entire can of Pringles in one sitting: you know, on a gut level, that it’s not entirely nutritional… but you keep mindlessly eating, damn the consequences.
You don’t exactly read Brown’s books, word for word, so much as scan through the center of the page, your eye sweeping up pertinent chunks of dialogue and helpful descriptors such as “Langdon’s heart pounded with loss and rage.” Brown is such a skilled writer that you could actually just read a synopsis of Origin, and feel equally satisfied. This would arguably save plenty of trees and reading hours.
But where’s the fun in that? The debates on the origins of life that emerge here are actually lively and timely, connecting the most esoteric scientific subjects (like Bicameral Mind Theory and quantum computing) and tying them all back to the art theme. The truth remains that, as with Edmond Kirsch’s simulated computer models of human destiny, we may be able to predict the outline of Origin’s story before finishing it, but it’s more enjoyable to connect the dots, page by turning page.
