Critics' opinion of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

Publisher’s Weekly (starred review): Jealous thriller writers will despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again.

Entertainment Weekly (grade: C+): The codes are intriguing, the settings present often-seen locales in a fresh light, and Brown mostly manages to keep the pages turning — except when one of his know-it-all characters decides to brake the action for another superfluous, if occasionally interesting historical digression.

The New York Times: Within this book’s hermetically sealed universe, characters’ motivations don’t really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes The Lost Symbol impossible to put down.
The Washington Post: Writers envious of Brown’s sales (who wouldn’t be?) have devoted much ink to his deficiencies as a stylist. These are still in place … So is Brown’s habit of turning characters into docents. But so, too, is his knack for packing huge amounts of information into an ever-accelerating narrative. Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of short paragraphs, short chapters, beautifully spaced reveals and, in the case of The Lost Symbol, a socko unveiling of the killer’s true identity.


The Los Angeles Times: All of this is going to feel very familiar to readers of the previous Langdon books, even though Brown has shifted from foreign places to plant his thriller firmly on American soil …. Brown’s narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopedias …. And yet, it’s hard to imagine anyone, after reading The Lost Symbol, debating about Freemasonry in Washington, D.C., the way people did Brown’s radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in Code. That book hit a deep cultural nerve for obvious reasons; The Lost Symbol is more like the experience on any roller coaster — thrilling, entertaining and then it’s over.

The London Telegraph: So the narrative is still lumpen, witless, adjectivally-promiscuous and addicted to using italics to convey excitement where more adept thriller writers generally prefer to use words – it’s just less of all these things than Da Vinci Code survivors might have feared, or even anticipated with malicious glee …. The downside of this not being quite the literary train wreck expected is that there is less distraction from the familiar hokum which, precisely because it is so familiar, looks ever-less like ingenious puzzle-spinning and ever-more like a wearisome party trick.

The Irish Times: The Lost Symbol offers many of the features that made The Da Vinci Code a phenomenal best-seller. The story takes place over a few hours; short chapters and teasing cliff-hangers create a propulsive momentum; the twists and turns are drip-fed in the form of information dumps by the polymath Langdon. Word games, secret societies and global conspiracies all figure …. The prose is clunky, certainly, and Brown has an irritating penchant for italics, while the excessive use of exposition makes a mockery of the dictum, ‘Show, don’t tell’. The storytelling is preposterously melodramatic …. That said, there’s no denying that the story is as addictive the next cigarette.

The New Zealand Herald: As with previous Brown books, The Lost Symbol should be approached as an entertaining and easy read rather than a literary masterpiece, but on those terms it is an exciting and enjoyable book.