Dan Brown is one of the greatest literature discoveries in the recent years. His most famous book is Angels & Demons, which led him to international stardom. Much of the book criticism is based on Dan Brown not being the first one: a number of guys raised the same topic of religious symbolism before Brown, including Umberto Eco. Well, those books passed unnoticed by the general public because they are damn boring, while Angels & Demons is a page-turner.
Dan Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol, also focuses on religious symbolism.
The books starts with a scene involving an amputated hand of the protagonist friend, prepared and shaped in a very special symbolic way. The friend himself is found alive later on. To much disappointment, the author doesn’t speculate much of how the wound was treated by the captor, or how did the man managed to survive with such severe injure. Neither says the book anything on the possibility of the palm being stitched back.
Common guess would be: the hand is beyond repair. The severed off palm spent too much time in the open, without any special treatment, it was not even iced. So most probably, the tissues are dead.
The Lost Symbol features another interesting scene on human body. The characters use a carpet runner to navigate their way in a completely dark hangar. That’s another interesting observation on how quickly our body adapts in sense deprivation environment. Sensory deprivation chambers play a major role in the sory, however, Dan Brown described a chamber where the user breathes air saturated liquid, which probably doesn’t exist. In modern sensory deprivation cameras, the user breathes air, not water.
The author spent so many pages on Noetic science, that the Institute for Noetic Sciences had to hastily upgrade their server capacities to handle the unprecedented rise in site visits.
In general, the book is great. Dan Brown is as thrilling as before, and the plot is unpredictable as in the rest of his books.