Dan Brown’s information overload

Amid the rubble and dust of that gleefully dynamited fourth wall, I think you can hear the chuckle of a multi-gazillion-selling author able to pull just about whatever cheesy move he pleases. One chapter ends with a breathtakingly blatant plug for Starbucks, whose logo is printed on the page during a passage ostensibly constructed to poke fun at Langdon as an academic fusspot (he’s irked that “the Starbucks mermaid” is actually a siren), but which handily affords a pretext for another character to relish his “first heavenly sip of the creamiest flat white” in New York.

The main action unfolds in present-day Prague, where Langdon wakes up in bed after a night of passion with Princeton neuroscientist Katherine Solomon. He is her plus-one on a lecture junket, but when he returns to their hotel after a morning swim, she has vanished, along with the single hard copy of her manuscript, which has also been lost from the servers of her prospective publisher. Meanwhile, a mysteriously vengeful serial killer stalks the city, and the CIA – brewing a riposte to “brain-control technologies embedded in social media apps from overseas” – is hellbent on hiding the existence of an underground lab.

Cue chases, murders, geopolitical skulduggery and bedroom hanky-panky, all described in a tone pitched between Wikipedia and an in-flight magazine. The pace is terrific, at least until a mid-book trudge when Langdon and Katherine are reunited to talk their way through the rest of the action in unrelenting salvos of exposition about a psy-ops project codenamed Threshold. Not to say it’s unenjoyable:

“Threshold is using synthesised BBL as an organic electrochemical transistor! They cast it into a thin film and dissolved it in methanesulfonic–”

“Slow down ... what is BBL?”

“Benzimidazobenzophenanthroline. It’s a highly conductive polymer that is uniquely tough and also elastic.”

Inopportune delivery of information – Brown’s calling card as a stylist – fuels not only plot but comedy, always latent. Here’s Prague: “For centuries, this city had been Europe’s nexus for the occult ... Mysterious Jewish writer Franz Kafka was born and worked here, penning his darkly surreal The Metamorphosis.” Here’s peak tension: “Langdon found himself in the throes of the quintessential archetypal battle – the Apollonian-Dionysian conflict, as it was known in mythology – the ultimate internal struggle. Brain versus Heart.”

Who could dislike prose as funny as this? It isn’t even always inadvertent. The spiralling demands of author care lead Katherine’s editor to use AI, something he had publicly sworn never to do: “An existential threat to the noble craft of writing! ... Screw ethical fortitude, he decided, sitting down at his machine. This is war.” Later, when Katherine complains about being plagiarised, the narrative demurs: “While the coincidence was stunning, Langdon knew the cliche ‘Great minds work alike’ had been borne out countless times”, a message unlikely to need decrypting for the various writers who have filed unsuccessful plagiarism suits against Brown over the years.

Clive James once said Brown “makes you want to turn the pages even though every page you turn demonstrates abundantly his complete lack of talent as a writer”; in other words, he’s doing something right. His success was always in part down to timing: between Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003) came 9/11, and an appetite (or need) for stories about finding answers. Despite the grisly plot, the new novel – feeding on digital-era fears, from the effect of online pornography to big tech’s potential to turbocharge warfare – ultimately pitches itself as balm for uncertain times. Katherine’s brain research shows how humanity can face adversity without “increased nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance”; the story ends with Langdon gazing at the Statue of Liberty and picturing the US “pulling in disparate souls from around the world, all of them flowing inward toward a shared experience”. It speaks of the moment, not the book, that the passage feels as fantastical as anything in the previous 650 pages.

The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown is published by Bantam (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply

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Photograph of Prague courtesy of Alamy