THE SECRET OF SECRETS, by Dan Brown
You will find many astonishing sentences in “The Secret of Secrets,” Dan Brown’s latest TED-Talk travelogue thriller. One that caught my eye arrives early in the book, at the beginning of Chapter 7:
“The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly 20,000 books a year and generates over $5 billion in annual gross revenues.”
This is a purely factual — and, as far as I can determine, accurate — statement, and therefore a particular kind of Dan Brown sentence.
Of course there are other varieties, including ones that start with a breathless adverb (“impossibly,” “remarkably,” “conveniently”); ones that burst into excited italics; ones that are entirely in italics. Brown is above all an action writer, and his hero, Robert Langdon, is continually in hot pursuit of whoever is hotly pursuing him, whether in Florence, Rome, Barcelona or some other popular tourist destination. The nearly 700 pages of “The Secret of Secrets” zigzag across a hectic day, mostly in Prague, during which guns are fired, locks picked, hidden passageways discovered and shocking revelations delivered on the run. The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose.
But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel. Since Langdon is, by profession, a professor (of symbology, at Harvard, in case you need reminding), his adventures are punctuated, or you might say padded, with brief lectures on a great many topics in history, science, philosophy and real estate. For a work of fiction, this novel is demonstratively proud of its facts:
In 1889, after Prague city officials visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris and saw Gustave Eiffel’s showstopping tower, they decided soon after to build their own ‘miniature’ Eiffel Tower in Prague.
Companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink had been working since 2016 to develop what was known as an H2M interface — human to machine — a device that could convert data obtained from the brain into understandable binary code.
The George Washington Bridge is the busiest motor bridge in the world.
These, too, are quintessential Dan Brown sentences, briskly didactic and easily checkable, if sometimes of questionable relevance. It’s nice to encounter a writer willing to do some of your Googling for you.