M R. X. DentithChapter 55 is back at the embassy, where someone signs an NDA. That’s it. It takes 2 pages.
Chapter 36 is all about the Devil’s Bible/Codex Gigas. Most of what Brown writes about the book is exaggerated, but that is what he does; the rubric at the beginning about “Every artefact and organisation is described accurately” is part of the fiction, after all.
36? 55 rather. This is sign that I should go to sleep now
I’m only 38% through the book!
Chapter 56 is ostensibly a Penguin Random House chapter but really it is an excuse for more of Katherine’s theory of consciousness. She’s apparently written a book on nonlocal consciousness, and it all sounds a little like panpsychism, but even more nonsensical
Apologies to the panpsychics out there, but you have to admit the theory does come off badly when described by an inept writer of airport thrillers!
Chapter 57 is just padding
Chapter 58 is also padding. So much of this book is written to get to an arbitrarily high page count
Chapter 59 exists primarily to tell readers that Dan Brown knows that about Kafka…
Chapter 60 is more of Katherine’s theory, which will amount to as much as Langdon finding out that Jesus had children, or that a virus rendered much of the population infertile a few years ago…
Chapter 61 sees Langdon go visit the Devil’s Bible in the Klementinum. Brown also suggests that a native of Praha won’t know the Klementinum well, which I don’t think is true, given the Czechs I know…
Meanwhile, back at Penguin Random House, two men discuss IT security and Brown has the temerity to say one of his characters needs an editor. Actually, not only does Brown have the temerity to write that, but an editor let him…
Katherine has turned up in a secret bookcase. This would be a fascinating event if Brown also hadn’t introduced the idea of secret bookcases and hidden stairwells a paragraph earlier. Chapter 63 is yet another example of a cozy chapter with no actual tension
Chapter 64 is all about lovers reunited.
Chapter 65 gives us more of the Golem’s backstory. Except most of it we have already been told or shown, so we don’t actually learn anything particularly new…
In chapter 66 a member of the UZSI creates a diplomatic incident by moving a display case
Meanwhile, back at Penguin Random House we find out that Q hacked the servers. Chapter 67, everybody!
In chapter 68 Robert Langdon, the noted and famous symbolist of Harvard, burns a book manuscript in a famous Czech library
Not just any book manuscript, the same manuscript people have been killed over. It seems like a weird plot point for the halfway mark of the book
Chapter 69 sees the US cavalry (well, marines) ride in and save the say. This almost feels like the end of the story, except there are 70-ish more chapters to go…
The Golem goes to the Jewish Graveyard in Praha. That is the sum total of chapter 70
I’ve once again missed a chapter number. In chapter 72 Brown, via his characters Langdon and Katherine, mangles both a discussion of the replication crisis and quantum physics whilst arguing that consciousness experiments need not be repeatable. Although apparently the big finding Katherine made is…
Chapter 74 concerns the bliss of post epileptic seizures and how they apparently let you see the world as it is…
No, that last summary was of chapter 73. The real chapter 74 is all about how Katherine’s big discovery is that when we die we connect with the universe… Which sounds a) like new age nonsense and b) the topic of several existing new age nonsense books…
Chapter 75 sees Langdon and Katherine arrive at the ambassador’s resident, where they look at some Nazi chairs
I’m over halfway through this book and I feel it’s a commitment I did not need to make!
Chapter 76 ends with Langdon making a phone call and is mostly about the evils of NDAs
Actually, this chapter is kind of clever. Over the course of the novel all extant copies of Katherine’s forthcoming book on nonlocal consciousness have been destroyed, and the reason why the NDA neither she nor Langdon sign is to prevent her from ever rewriting the book…
Chapter 77 reveals that not only are the villains (well, the non-Golem ones) the CIA, but the US Ambassador was once a member of that “august” agency
Chapter 78 is mostly about how Dan Brown has decided to make Q the real villain in all of this. I’m sure he thought it was very clever to get on the whole Q and QAnon thing, even though it’s pretty old hat by now, but the CIA are running Q!
In chapter 79 the Golem kills an American intelligence officer
Chapter 80 and we have the turncoat character who goes from antagonist to ally. In this case it’s the US Ambassador, who seems to have developed a moral centre post her attaché dying.
Chapter 81 features two women coming up with a clever plan, only for Langdon to decide there is a better option, but that has to wait for the chapter cliffhanger…
Chapter 82 recaps the story so far from the point of the lead villain, head of Q. It’s just more of what we already know repeated back to us in excruciating detail because the author does not trust that his audience might connect really obvious dots
Chapter 83 is my last chapter before bed, and it ends with the editor at Penguin Random House deciding to use an LLM after all!
What to say about chapter 84? It advances the plot by getting the nominal heroes en route to the mystery location the CIA has built under Praha, but it also features product placement for The Chronicles of Narnia and Ted Lasso.
I haven’t even finished chapter 85 but in this chapter metaphysics is said to be the same as parapsychology and. This. Will. Not. Stand!
And the noted symbologist has just stated that a universal constant for every religion is a belief in souls, which just ain’t true
Chapter 86 reveals that the Golem left a note for the US Ambassador when he killed her attache
Chapter 87 claims that countless crimes have been solved by psychics…
Chapter 88 is two pages in length and concerns someone reading a letter
This is a recurring thing in this book: character x reads something or tells someone something, but the narrative skips over the material to create “tension”. It gets more and more predictable as the book goes on
Chapter 89 stalls for time
Oh, chapter 90. A chapter that has Langdon “ingeniously” using ROT13 to encode a secret message, and also features Langdon critiquing particularly overwrought sentences…
Chapter 90 returns us to a location from earlier in the book, in a way that suspiciously reads like the author going “Look, we can save money if we reuse these sets in the third act…”
Sorry, that was chapter 91. Chapter 92 does the “X finds out y but the reader must remain in the dark” again!
Chapter 93: the Golem has a seizure
In chapter 94 a lot happens which is unbelievable but the biggest issue is that it is hard to fathom that two people couldn’t find a single USB-C cable to charge a phone in a science lab…
Chapter 95 sees the US Ambassador blackmail the head of the CIA on the basis of that thing the reader still doesn’t know about yet
In chapter 96 Langdon and Katherine explore a secret facility. The most exciting part of it is the monorail. Everyone loves a monorail!
Chapter 97: the villain gets told off by his boss because of a video neither of them has seen
Chapter 98 seems to suggest that Katherine, who is meant to be of a similar age to Langdon, did VR experiments in her undergraduate or graduate days, which is technically possible but doesn’t match with the tech she describes
Also, on a narrative level, this book has very little code or puzzle solving by the main character, which was kind of the thing that made the other books interesting. Which is to say everything now hinges on the “big idea” of the book, which is not that interesting…
Chapter 99 sees the plot pivot from noetics to fractals
Okay, chapter 100 repeats the canard that playing first person shooters numbs a person’s empathy. You can tell that this book is written by someone who is not only entering their dotage but listens to talkback
Chapter 101 features a cameo by R2D2!
Oh, chapter 102 makes reference to the previous novel!
Chapter 103 mostly consists of a discussion of what happens when liquid helium decides it wants to be a gas again
In chapter 104 we discover that not only are the CIA growing artificial neurons but they stole the idea 20 years ago from Katherine
Chapter 105 stalls for time
I’m back. 74% of the way through. Not really wanting to read more. Or, indeed, read anything again…