Dan Brown swaps pseudohistory for pseudoscience

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:15:00 +0000

Let's face it, who really cares about Robert Langdon, professor of the (imaginary) discipline of symbology at a fictionalized (and apparently woefully indiscriminate) version of Harvard University? Who cares about those unfortunate patriarchs of the confidential class, one of whom always turns up dead or mutilated or both -- a martyr to his own secrets! -- at the beginnings of Dan Brown's breathless, treasure-hunt thrillers? Who cares about the academic babe, invariably a blood relative of the stricken patriarch, who inevitably materializes to accompany Langdon on the hunt and to play the admiring audience to his lectures on the aforementioned secrets? Sure, there's something kinda Oedipal going on in all this, in the way Langdon (40-something, but with a "toned physique"!) swoops in to rescue the academic babe along with Western civilization itself after the close-mouthed elitism of her dad/grandfather/big brother has failed, and in the way he demonstrates his enlightened, democratic, woman-positive attitudes in the process. But who even cares enough about the psyche of Dan Brown to contemplate the significance of that?

Salon.com > The Lost Symbol

Dan Brown swaps pseudohistory for pseudoscience