ORIGIN BY DAN BROWN.

ORIGIN BY DAN BROWN.

If you enjoy solving mysteries and puzzles, if you like seeing lots of weird symbols, formulas, ciphers in a novel, then Dan Brown is definitely an author whose books you will peruse with pleasure. No, they are not for the feeble-hearted, nor are they designed to be swallowed at a single sitting. Beach read? No. Look at the dates: it takes the famous writer three-four years to release a new installment in his celebrated Robert Langdon series. Thanks to Tom Hanks who created this plausible and charismatic character in “The Da Vinci Code” (which received a lot of criticism from official reviewers and also inspired millions of viewers to feverishly explore that structure known as “Mitterand’s Folly”, the little glass pyramid in the Louvre Museum yard) each new book gives us a ready-made portrait of the series protagonist. True, Tom Hanks is now over 60 and his character is roughly 45, but who cares? It’s TOM HANKS, he is a genius. If he plays a twenty-year-old, I’m sure he won’t even need any make-up. We’ll believe him. So there’s Robert Langdon, an American professor, a well-known symbologist. If anybody can solve a riddle, a problem using a few obscure clues, it’s him. And as per the conventions of the genre he regularly finds himself in a situation where he has not only to figure out the multiple, often misleading ciphers but ultimately to save the world too. Ah, the genre. All the novels caused a lot of controversy; the previous one, “Inferno”, evoked a lot of discussion and criticism. This time I think the author took a few simple precautions, like labeling the book “science-fiction-mystery”. And fiction as we all know is not fact, it is built on the familiar premise, “What if…” Dan Brown makes a bow to his science-fiction predecessors including Sir Arthur Charles Clark and his creation, HAL the computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. By the way the modest story achieved huge popularity after Stanley Kubrick  turned it into an extremely successful film released in 1964. Rather like Ron Howard did with “The Da Vinci Code” in 2006. Take a group of very talented people, let them work together, and we readers and movie fans receive something to enjoy. What is more, Dan Brown makes us sit up, take notice and think about the problems he investigates.

This time he takes us to Spain, specifically to Catalonia, Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia cathedral, and the other chef-d’oeuvres of Antonio Gaudi. Naturally there must be a beautiful woman who is caught in the intrigue and needs to accompany the intrepid professor in his quest for the Truth. This time it is the “staggeringly beautiful” (quite a new one among the descriptions of beauties) Ambra Vidal, the future queen of Spain and the head of the Guggenheim Museum in Spain. She is 39, still young by modern standards. What is amazing is the way Dan Brown manages to involve the reader in his plot and yet stay away from sex. Aha, so sex is not the only thing that helps sell books! In “Origin”, as in all the other novels of this series, the main interest lies in the story itself, in the mysteries, the rush, in the human cooperation. To help the unlikely pair of fearless investigators is the super-computer named Winston, after Winston Churchill. He is the AI (artificial intelligence) which plots, directs, scatters clues and extricates the humans from every difficulty.

The Origin stated in the title is the origin of the human species and Life in general. No, there are no finite answers, no real revelations. OK, one can state that all life originated due to energy, so what? This is a question which can be debated ad infinitum. Dan Brown explores the issue from many angles and makes a startling conclusion: science and religion, human and artificial intelligence may fuse together in the future and create eternal universal harmony. Who knows… I enjoyed puzzling out the mysteries, I liked all the symbols, pictures, schemes. Yes, I could see Tom Hanks playing Robert Langdon throughout the book. I wondered a bit about that “staggeringly beautiful” Spanish woman, like, which modern actress could play her? Well, hopefully we’ll soon know! Dan Brown does his research really well. If you wish to know anything about Catalonia, Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi, read all those pages carefully. He creates that rare thing, the effect of actually being present, of seeing those places he describes so well.

Dan Brown’s books are not for everyone. But if you start reading and get hooked, just go on.