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The Lost Symbol

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The Lost Symbol
The Lost Symbol
AuthorDan Brown
LanguageEnglish
GenreCrime, Mystery, Thriller novel
PublisherDoubleday (US)
Transworld (UK)
Publication dateSeptember 15, 2009
Publication placeUnited States
United Kingdom
Media typePrint (hardcover), eBook, audio book
Pages528
ISBN9780385504225 (US) 9780593054277 (UK) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character
Preceded byThe Da Vinci Code 

The Lost Symbol is a 2009 novel by American writer Dan Brown. It is a thriller set in Washington, D.C., after the events of The Da Vinci Code.

Released on September 15, 2009, it is the third Brown novel to involve the character of Harvard University symbologist Robert Langdon, following 2000's Angels & Demons and 2003's The Da Vinci Code. It had a first printing of 6.5 million (5 million in North America, 1.5 million in the UK), the largest in Doubleday history. On its first day the book sold one million in hardcover and e-book versions in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, making it the fastest selling adult novel in history. By September 25 the book topped the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction.

Plot

The story takes place over a period of 12 hours in Washington, D.C., with a focus on Freemasonry. Robert Langdon is summoned to give a lecture in National Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol, with the invitation apparently from his mentor, a 33rd degree Mason named Peter Solomon, who is the head of the Smithsonian Institution. However, when Langdon arrives at the Capitol, instead of an audience for his lecture, he finds the severed right hand of Peter Solomon tattooed into a symbolic Hand of the Mysteries, and pointing straight upwards to the fresco The Apotheosis of Washington on the inside of the Capitol dome. Solomon has been kidnapped by the villain Mal'akh, who demands that Langdon unlock the Ancient Mysteries in return for Solomon's life. This leads to a game of cat and mouse throughout the museums and architecture of Washington, as Langdon and Solomon's sister Katherine are pursued by both Mal'akh, and Inoue Sato, the head of the CIA's Office of Security. Sato's demand is that Langdon solve the mystery as a matter of national security, since Mal'akh is planning to release a clandestine video of Washington powerbrokers engaged in secret Masonic rituals. The chase and the clues to the puzzles lead through the sub-basement of the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Museum Support Center, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Freedom Plaza, the United States Botanical Garden, and Washington National Cathedral. The clues center around a small stone pyramid, entrusted several years ago by Solomon to Langdon. The pyramid and the box which holds it reveal several puzzles, involving a Masonic cipher, a circumpunct, an alchemical formula, and references to the 1514 engraving Melencolia I.

Mal'akh succeeds in capturing both Katherine and Langdon, torturing both of them, and then takes Peter Solomon to the top floor of the Masonic headquarters House of the Temple. Langdon and Katherine Solomon are rescued by the CIA, while in the meantime Mal'akh reveals to Peter Solomon that he is in fact Peter's own son, Zachary. As a young man, he had been unhappy with the way he had been treated by his father, so faked his own death in a Turkish prison. He then experienced a religious epiphany, finding the need to learn the Word and complete his transformation into a godlike being. Trying to re-create the Biblical story of Abraham on the verge of sacrificing his son, Zachary tries to goad his father into killing him with a special sacrificial knife on the altar of the Freemasons. But Langdon intrudes, and a CIA helicopter disables Zachary's laptop with a targeted EMP pulse to prevent the distribution of the video. Zachary/Mal'akh is fatally injured when the helicopter accidentally shatters a skylight above him, and the falling shards pierce his body.

Peter Solomon then takes Langdon to the Washington Monument, telling him that the Word that Mal'akh was seeking was actually in books such as the Bible, Koran, and Bhagavad Gita, and that the true Ancient Mystery is the realization that people are not God's subjects, but in fact possess the ability to be gods themselves.

Characters

  • Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist
  • Mal'akh, tattoo-covered villain
  • Peter Solomon, Smithsonian secretary, billionaire, and Freemason
  • Zachary Solomon, son of Peter Solomon
  • Katherine Solomon, Noetic scientist, sister of Peter Solomon
  • Isabel Solomon, mother of Peter and Katherine Solomon, grandmother of Zachary Solomon, murdered on Christmas Eve 10 years before the events of the book. First female victim of Mal'akh.
  • Trish Dunne, Katherine Solomon's assistant, and second female victim of Mal'akh
  • Mark Zoubianis, hacker and friend of Trish
  • Warren Bellamy, Architect of the capitol, and Freemason
  • Inoue Sato, diminutive woman who is Director of CIA's Office of Security
  • Nola Kaye, CIA analyst
  • Rick Parrish, CIA security specialist
  • Turner Simkins, CIA field operations leader
  • Reverend Colin Galloway, Dean of Washington National Cathedral, and Freemason
  • Trent Anderson, Capitol police chief
  • Alfonso Nuñez, Capitol security guard
  • Jonas Faukman, New York editor
  • Omar Amirana, DC cab driver
  • Officer Paige Montgomery, an officer from a private security company who finds Peter Solomon at Mal'akh's house and is then killed by Mal'akh.
  • Agent Hartmann, CIA field agent, killed by Mal'akh

Release

The Lost Symbol had been in development for several years; originally expected in 2006, the projected publication date was pushed back multiple times. When officially announced, the hardcopy book was on pre-order lists for months leading up to its release, being heavily ordered both in the United States and Canada. The book was published on September 15, 2009 with an initial print run of 6.5 million copies, the largest first printing in publisher Random House's history. Electronic versions such as eBook and Audible book versions were also made available on the same date.

The book immediately broke sales records, becoming the fastest selling adult-market novel in history, with over one million copies sold on the first day of release. By the end of the first week, a total of two million copies had been sold in the U.S., Canada, and UK. According to the publisher, the rapid sales prompted the printing of an additional 600,000 hardcover copies to the 5 million initially printed for the US market. On its first day the book became the #1 bestseller in amazon.com, and the Amazon Kindle e-reader edition became the top-selling item on Amazon.com, outselling Amazon's sales of the hardback copy of the novel, which is the sixth best selling book of 2009 on pre-publication orders alone. The Lost Symbol also ranked as the #1 bestseller in Amazon's Canadian and British sites. Both Barnes & Noble and Waterstone's reported the book has broken all previous records for adult fiction in the United Kingdom. According to Nielsen BookScan data, 550,946 copies of The Lost Symbol were sold in its first week of sale, taking £4.6 million. By the end of the second sales week, Transworld intended to have 1.25 million copies printed.

By September 25 the book ranked #1 in the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction.

Reception

The New York Times praised the book as being "impossible to put down" and claimed Brown is "bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead". Nevertheless, it noted the overuse of certain phrases and italics, as well as the lack of logic behind characters' motivations. It also likened one of the characters to Jar Jar Binks. Los Angeles Times said, "Brown's narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopedias." Newsweek called the book "contrived", saying that to get through The Lost Symbol, just like The Da Vinci Code, it was necessary to swallow a lot of coincidences, but the book was still a page-turner, and that Brown "is a maze maker who builds a puzzle and then walks you through it. His genius lies in uncovering odd facts and suppressed history, stirring them together into a complicated stew and then saying, what if?" The National Post's review called it a "heavy-handed, clumsy thriller" and that the character of the villain (Mal'akh) "bears an uncomfortably close similarity" to the Francis Dolarhyde character in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon. The Daily Telegraph said the novel was "not quite the literary train-wreck expected." TIME said the plot was fun, if bruising, but "It would be irresponsible not to point out that the general feel, if not all the specifics, of Brown's cultural history is entirely correct. He loves showing us places where our carefully tended cultural boundaries — between Christian and pagan, sacred and secular, ancient and modern — are actually extraordinarily messy." Novelist William Sutcliffe's review in the Financial Times panned the book as "a novel that asks nothing of the reader, and gives the reader nothing back", adding that it "is filled with cliché, bombast, undigested research and pseudo-intellectual codswallop". The digested read by John Crace in The Guardian ends with Robert Langdon begging Dan Brown "Please don't wheel me out again."

Adaptations

The book is expected to be made into a movie by Columbia Pictures, for release in 2012.

See also

References

  1. ^ Italie, Hillel (2009-04-20). "New Dan Brown novel coming in September". Associated Press. Retrieved 2009-04-20. Cite error: The named reference "Bookseller1" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. ^ Carbone, Gina (2009-04-20). "Dan Brown announces new book, 'The Lost Symbol'". Boston Herald. Retrieved 2009-04-20.
  3. "ET Breaks News: Dan Brown Has Finished New Book" ETonline, February 12, 2009
  4. ^ "Dan Brown's 'Lost Symbol' Sells 1 Million Copies in the First Day". The New York Times. 2009-09-16. Retrieved 2009-09-16.
  5. ^ "Best Selles: Hardcover Fiction". New York Times. 2009-09-25. Retrieved 2009-09-26.
  6. "Keys to Dan Brown's Solomon Key". Retrieved 2008-12-20.
  7. De Vera, Ruel S. (September 15, 2009). "Dan Brown's 'Lost' is no 'Da Vinci Code'". Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved September 14, 2009.
  8. "Dan Brown returns with Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol". The Guardian. 2009-01-20. Retrieved 2009-04-20.
  9. "New Dan Brown book offers industry hope". The Sydney Morning Herald. 2009-04-21. Retrieved 2009-04-21.
  10. "A New World: Scheduling E-Books". New York Times. 2009-07-15. Retrieved 2009-07-15.
  11. "Dan Brown moves to Washington for new thriller". Reuters. 2009-07-08. Retrieved 2009-07-15.
  12. "The Lost Symbol eBook (Kindle Version)". Amazon.com. 2009-08-17. Retrieved 2009-08-19.
  13. "Download The Lost Symbol - Preorder". audible.com. 2009-09-12. Retrieved 2009-09-12.
  14. Irvine, Chris (September 14, 2009). "Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol 'will be biggest selling adult fiction novel of the decade'". The Telegraph. Retrieved September 14, 2009.
  15. . Associated Press. September 23, 2009 http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2009/09/23/2009-09-23_clinton_book_record_beaten_by_da_vinci_scribe_brown.html. Retrieved September 23, 2009. {{cite news}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. Amazon's Bestsellers in Books (accessdate 2009-09-16)
  17. "Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol on Kindle is Amazon top seller". The Daily Telegraph. 2009-09-16. Retrieved 2009-09-16.
  18. Amazon.ca Bestsellers in Books (accessdate 2009-09-16)
  19. Amazon.co.uk Bestsellers in Books (accessdate 2009-09-16)
  20. "To No One's Surprise, Dan Brown Books Are Flying Off Bookshelves". The New York Times. 2009-09-15. Retrieved 2009-09-17.
  21. "Dan Brown's Lost Symbol sets adult fiction sales record". The Guardian. 2009-09-17. Retrieved 2009-09-17.
  22. Stone, Philip (2009-09-22). "Dan Brown sells 550,000 in first week". theBookseller.com. Retrieved 2009-09-22.
  23. Maslin, Janet (2009-09-13). "Fasten Your Seat Belts, There's Code to Crack". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-09-13.
  24. Owchar, Nick (September 14, 2009). "Book Review: 'The Lost Symbol'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 13, 2009.
  25. Jones, Malcolm (September 15, 2009). "Book Review: Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol'". Newsweek. Retrieved September 18, 2009.
  26. Wiersema, Robert (September 17, 2009). "Review: Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol". National Post. Retrieved September 18, 2009.
  27. Jehu, Jeremy (September 15, 2009). "Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, review". The Telegraph. Retrieved September 18, 2009.
  28. Grossman, Lev (September 15, 2009). "How Good Is Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol?". TIME. Retrieved September 18, 2009.
  29. Sutcliffe, William (September 19, 2009). "The Lost Symbol". Financial Times. Retrieved September 22, 2009.
  30. Crace, John (September 22, 2009). "Digested read: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown". The Guardian. Retrieved September 24, 2009. {{cite news}}: Text "Books" ignored (help); Text "John Crace" ignored (help); Text "The Guardian" ignored (help)
  31. "Columbia moves on 'Symbol'". Variety.com. 2009-04-20. Retrieved 2009-09-01.
  32. "The Mystery of Dan Brown". The Guardian. September 2009. Retrieved September 22, 2009.

Further reading

External links

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