Robert Langdon is back, and this time the story takes us to Prague, where he is accompanying Katherine Solomon. Katherine is about to present research that could fundamentally change the way we understand human consciousness. And, as you would expect in a Dan Brown novel, things don't quite go according to plan.
What follows is the familiar Dan Brown combination of science, history, mystery, secret organisations, codes, symbols and a race against time. But what made this book particularly interesting to me was the subject at the centre of it all – consciousness.
Can consciousness exist independently of our physical body?
What happens to consciousness when the body dies?
Can our consciousness have a non-local experience – something that cannot be explained by the physical location of our brain or body?
These are questions that have fascinated people for centuries, but they also resonate with something I personally believe in – that there is an afterlife and that when consciousness leaves the body, it can have a non-local experience.
So, unlike some of Dan Brown's earlier books where I was mainly following Langdon through the mystery, in this book I found myself connecting with the underlying idea as well.
And that made the book a very enjoyable read for me. I enjoyed practically every page.
Of course, this is still Dan Brown, so philosophical questions alone aren't enough. There has to be a conspiracy somewhere!
One particular construct in the story surprised me – the idea of taking this understanding of consciousness and turning it into a technology that could potentially be used to spy on enemy nations.
I certainly didn't expect the story to go in that direction.
At first, the jump from consciousness and the afterlife to espionage sounds rather far-fetched. But within the world Dan Brown creates, the storyline worked surprisingly well for me. He manages to take an idea that is philosophical, spiritual and scientific and ask a very different question:
What if someone discovered that it could actually be weaponised?
That twist adds another dimension to the book. A discovery about the nature of human existence would not remain merely an academic or spiritual discovery. Governments, intelligence agencies and powerful organisations would immediately start thinking about what else it could be used for.
And perhaps that is not so far-fetched after all!
Dan Brown's books have always lived somewhere at the intersection of fact, speculation and imagination. You know while reading them that you shouldn't necessarily accept everything as fact, but he gives you just enough history and science to make you wonder, "What if?"
The Secret of Secrets did that for me.
It gave me the usual Robert Langdon adventure that I expected, but it also dealt with a subject that I already find fascinating. More importantly, it left me thinking about consciousness, death and what might exist beyond our physical bodies even after I had finished the book.
And that, for me, is what makes a good Dan Brown novel.
A thoroughly enjoyable read – and one that resonated with me at a very personal level.
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