He also complained of the interruption the case had brought to his creative regimen, during which he writes seven days a week, often while wearing gravity boots: “Hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my perspective.” Gravity boots, ankle supports used by fitness buffs since the ’80s, surged in popularity in 2006 after Brown’s endorsement became widely known.
Doubleday agreed with the Browns that the combination of Langdon and Leonardo, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, sex and religion, albino killer monks and the Holy Grail, was a potential money-spinner. Marketing muscle joined with puzzles and fast-paced alt-history to launch a book tailor-made for a post-9/11 world that suddenly saw conspiracies around every corner and which, in the U.S. in particular, offered a roiling marketplace in religious ideas.
At first Brown defended his work as thinly veiled fact, earnestly telling journalists that, “I began the research for The Da Vinci Code as a skeptic. I entirely expected, as I researched the book, to disprove this theory. After numerous trips to Europe, and about two years of research, I really became a believer.” It was all based on real events, he insisted. But as the controversy grew, and experts mercilessly dissected the novel’s cornucopia of errors—without diminishing sales in the slightest—Brown backtracked to a safer it’s-only-a-story position. In 2006, just before the The Da Vinci Code film arrived in theatres, Brown told an audience of fellow writers in Portsmouth, N.H., that people should “let the Biblical scholars and historians battle it out.” The Code was “a book about big ideas. You can love them or hate them, but we’re all talking about them, and that’s really the point.”
That has essentially become his standard defence over the six long years between novels, a delay primarily rooted in commercial considerations. Publication of The Lost Symbol before this year would have put Brown and Doubleday in competition with themselves while the Code kept selling . . . and selling. As one publishing executive put it, “Just when you think everyone who wants to buy it must have already done so, another 20,000 copies are sold.” But it’s likely that a desire to critic-proof the new book has also played a role.
Little is yet known of The Lost Symbol. The original announcement of its coming release included only the title and that the story unfolds over 12 hours. (A change from the 24-hour time span of Langdon’s previous adventures—by the time the last of his dozen plots rolls around, the symbologist may well be a master of the old-time one-minute mystery.) Brown long ago confirmed that Langdon’s third case would be set in the Washington area, box-office gold by the evidence of Nicolas Cage’s two successful National Treasure films (2004 and 2007), which mined the same territory via the Masonic allegiances of America’s founding fathers (including George Washington), and the all-seeing eyeball and pyramid featured on U.S. currency.
The novel would involve Freemasons, another of the Catholic Church’s ancient foes. Like the Knights Templar and the Illuminati, papal foes in Langdon’s first two adventures, the Masons are a staple of alt-history. Langdon, according to Brown’s website, will “find himself embroiled in a mystery on U.S. soil. This new novel explores the hidden history of our nation’s capital.” And Brown, according to some in a position to know, has been working hard to get this one right. “He has toured a number of Masonic temples to get the historical facts correct,” says Akram Elias, grand master of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the District of Columbia.
Sept. 15, 2009, the release day for The Lost Symbol, will be the second Tuesday after Labour Day, a traditional publisher’s favourite for new fall titles. Before that date was made public, however, Doubleday announced that Brown had “a very specific date for the publication of his new book, and when the book is published, his readers will see why.” But no one has yet been able to connect Sept. 15 to a seemingly suitable moment in Masonic history. Then again, perhaps everyone has been looking in the wrong place: The Lost Symbol may not have a purely Masonic backdrop.
The Da Vinci Code’s dust jacket sports, in hard-to-find lettering, the plaintive question, “Is there no help for the widow’s son?” That’s a Masonic plea for aid, all right, an identifying cry meant to bring nearby Masons to the rescue. But those were also the last words spoken by Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, before he was murdered by a mob in 1844. The following year, Brigham Young, Smith’s successor as Mormon leader, led his nascent church beyond the boundaries of the U.S. into what were then Mexican lands. There, the Mormons founded a state they called Deseret, and on Sept. 15, 1857, Young effectively declared its independence from the U.S. It is quite possible that Mormonism, the indigenous American religion—a faith heavily influenced by Masonry—will have a starring role in The Lost Symbol.
So perhaps that’s the mix this time around: Langdon and George Washington, Jesus and Brigham Young, sex and religion, all-seeing eyeballs and an American culture that—in the era of birthers, truthers and death-panel denouncers—is wide open to secret-history explanations of a chaotic world. Maybe lightning will strike twice for Dan Brown.
