Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, is not quite the literary train wreck expected, finds a disappointed Jeremy Jehu. Rating: * *



Publishing one blockbuster which Stephen Fry was moved to call "botty-dribble" might, just, be excusable in an "Honest guv, it was a curiosity. Who'da thought it'd sell 80 million?" sort of way. But knowingly publishing another as execrable would look like rank contempt for even semi-literate readers.

So The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon's big night out scouring the Washington tourist trail for the lost knowledge of the ancients, treads that fine line in cosmetic book surgery between "improving" the author's style and editing it to such heights of competence that conspiracy geeks start to wonder who really wrote the book.

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.

This book's other approximation of a saving grace is that it is set in America, not Europe, a culture whose manners and mechanics Dan Brown utterly and hilariously failed to comprehend in The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons.

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. Like divorce and civil war, The Da Vinci Code famously divided families. The Lost Symbol might well reunite them. They could all find it simply bland.

http://snipurl.com/rxpiu