The Lost Symbol
By Dan Brown
Bantam Press, £18.99, 509 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

Rarely can the publication of a novel have excited such high and low expectations as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Expectations are high because Brown is a publishing phenomenon. The Da Vinci Code has sold 81m copies worldwide; Brown’s books are the four bestselling adult paperback novels of all time in the UK. Expectations are low because Brown is also famous for prose so leaden it could roof a church.

The Lost Symbol demonstrates no stylistic improvement on its predecessors. It is filled with cliché, bombast, undigested research and pseudo-intellectual codswallop. Yet complaining about Brown’s prose is a little like reproaching Proust for a lack of car chases. In a Dan Brown novel, plot is everything.

The Lost Symbol is not so much a sequel to The Da Vinci Code as a retread. As with its predecessor, it starts with a gory crime committed in front of a significant work of art, which Professor Robert Langdon then decodes for a baffled investigator, leading to a chase sequence in pursuit of an ancient artefact. As before, the storyline dovetails with the fate of an attractive woman.

The action unfolds in Washington DC, where a mysterious Masonic pyramid is hidden in the basement of the Capitol Building. This object supposedly holds the key to Ancient Mysteries (always capitalised, as if a brand name) which promise “knowledge that lets men acquire godlike powers”. A high-ranking Mason is kidnapped to force the revelation of the pyramid’s location and meaning. Meanwhile, a sub-plot follows an attempt to kill the kidnapped man’s sister, whose work in “noetic science” (aka New Age tosh) will “unveil the nature of all things”.

Plausibility is not a concern for Dan Brown. People buy his novels because they are gripping. He achieves suspense largely through a crude device that he has cranked out again in The Lost Symbol. Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, and each new one usually begins by switching to the sub-plot, which in turn ends with its own cliffhanger. This leapfrogging is effective since there is always an unanswered question, but there is never very long to wait for an answer.

Langdon still has no discernible character. Brief moments that purport to dig into his emotional life (“A childhood accident had left him stranded at the bottom of a deep well overnight, and Langdon now lived with an almost crippling aversion to enclosed spaces”) prove to be just another plot point. A couple of hundred pages later, we find Langdon “in total darkness, trapped in the most confined of spaces ... The space around him was small. Very small”.

But Brown finds his true nadir in dialogue: “‘Peter’, she said, ‘you already told me that the Egyptians understood levers and pulleys long before Newton, and that the early alchemists did work on a par with modern chemistry, but so what? Today’s physics deals with concepts that would have been unimaginable to the ancients.’”

Dan Brown assumes his readers know nothing. He refers not to the Parthenon but to “Athens’s ancient Parthenon”, in case you don’t know where it is or whether it is old or new. He also assumes you need an adrenaline jolt at the end of every chapter to keep you awake.

This is a novel that asks nothing of the reader, and gives the reader nothing back. Random House is printing 6.5m copies.

William Sutcliffe is author of ‘Whatever Makes You Happy’ (Bloomsbury)