The Second Coming of Dan Brown

Among the deciphered parts is the sentence on the Code cover: WW is William Webster, former CIA director, to whom Sanborn handed an envelope with the solution. Sort of, that is: “I wasn’t completely truthful with the man,” a laughing Sanborn told Wired magazine. “I mean that’s part of tradecraft, isn’t it? Deception is everywhere—I definitely didn’t give him the last section.” If Langdon can make progress on Kryptos’s stubborn fourth part—and if Brown manages to entangle the Catholic Church in his hero’s affairs once again—The Lost Symbol seems likely to stay on bestseller lists a long, long time.

That’s good news for him and his publisher, but matters are less straightforward for the rest of the book trade. Only a portion of The Lost Symbol’s five million copies will land in actual bookshops. Online realtors, department stores, drugstores and even supermarkets will take their share, almost all of them selling it at steep discounts. Already, Amazon.ca is offering pre-orders at 50 per cent off the $36.95 cover price. Independent bookstores, which need every slice of profit margin they can get, typically sell books at full price, and Richard Bachmann, owner of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ont., doesn’t expect to sell many. He thinks he’s well out of what he calls “a race to the bottom—here’s a book people know they can sell, and what’s their first instinct? Sell it below cost.”

Worse, other publishers may rethink their launch dates in order to put some breathing space between their titles and Brown’s juggernaut. The Hachette Book group—whose prominent authors include Stephenie Meyer and Michael Connelly—has already announced it’s doing just that. So independent shops, which could otherwise look to other big-name writers to fill their Brown-less void, may have less to offer than in past fall seasons. Far from saving the day, The Lost Symbol’s initial surge could prove to be another blow to the most vulnerable sector in a beleaguered industry.

The Angels & Demons film, on the other hand, has a better chance of providing a happy ending for all involved, always excluding the Catholic Church. Again directed by Ron Howard, it once more features Tom Hanks as Langdon, racing against time to prevent the Illuminati from destroying Rome with antimatter while the Church’s cardinals are gathered there to elect a new pope.

The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, where the antimatter was developed, calls in symbolist Langdon because a quarter gram of it has gone missing. And one of its physicists—who was also a priest—was found murdered, his eye gouged out and his chest branded with the ambigram “Illuminati.” (An ambigram is an “ambiguous anagram,” a typographical design that spells out a word or words from more than one perspective. American graphic designer John Langdon is one of their foremost popularizers; he provided ambigrams for the Angels & Demons cover, and a name for Brown’s hero.)

Langdon heads to Vatican City after he learns that’s where the Illuminati have hidden the antimatter, enough to blow up the city state, and finds that the four leading candidates for pope are missing. He attempts to find them and the antimatter by following the “Path of Illumination,” riddles hidden in plain sight at Roman landmarks. Armed with his occult expertise, he sets off on the path, only to find one dead cardinal after another, each killed in suitably symbolic fashion.

In other words, Angels & Demons is more of what made The Da Vinci Code tick, albeit without the enticing bride-of-Christ backdrop: more intricate puzzles (including ambigrams by the job lot) and more bizarre murders, all set in art-rich, religiously significant sites. Best of all, the Church hates the film every bit as much as it loathed its predecessor. The Vatican refused permission for filming in Roman churches—a ban Howard got around by sending in cameramen posing as tourists—but it has yet to call for a boycott. But the film’s marketers can still dream. P.G. Wodehouse liked to say that a bishop’s denunciation from the pulpit was “worth 50,000 in sales,” so a cardinal’s censure should be box-office gold. If the Vatican doesn’t play its usual role in The Lost Symbol, Doubleday can only pray that the Masons have the same Midas touch.