The Dan Brown Enigma (23 page)

I wanted to write a thrilling book set in a city that I love that has a lot secrets and great architecture.

D
AN
B
ROWN

T
he pressure to produce a success that came even close to that of
The Da Vinci Code
was intense. Brown wanted to make it as perfect as possible and while it took him a long time to understand and digest the facts he was researching, he was nervous about how well the book would be received. ‘There is a moment in everyone’s life when they’ve had some success when they realise what I am doing now is no longer on the small stage,’ Brown said. ‘This is the big deal and you become self-aware and before when you just wrote for yourself and thought, “This sounds good,” now you write a word and think, “Wow, millions of people around the world are going to read this.”’
[245]

‘I always think of novels [as] they come together like galaxies, like giant clouds of dust and planet and start to form and we are sort of in the dustcloud at the moment,’ he said to Matt Lauer during an interview on the
Today Show
. ‘Nature abhors a vacuum and sadly if you are looking to take a vacation and you are a writer it doesn’t happen, the voices are there.’

Brown decided he would crack on and write a book that he – and others who shared his tastes – would want to read. But the pressure was still there and still as intense.

On 15 September 2009, six years after
The Da Vinci Code,
Brown’s fifth novel hit the streets. The book was called
The Lost Symbol
and was set in and around Washington DC
.
This time Robert Langdon found himself embroiled with the Freemasons and he didn’t have to leave the country.

By one minute past midnight the book had sold more than half a million copies in the UK alone, making it the fastest-selling adult fiction book ever, according to
The Guardian
. In its first two days the book did sell more than a million copies in the UK, Canada and the US, breaking every first-day sales record for adult books. In the UK the Waterstone’s chain reported it was their fastest-selling eBook and hardback of all time, and their highest-selling audio book ever. And that’s for 17 hours of listening! Only J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book has sold more (over two million) in the adult and children’s markets combined within its first 24 hours. Harry Potter may remain unbeatable, but no one can get close to Dan Brown in adult fiction sales.
[246]

A lot of this success was down to the publishers, Doubleday, who launched the book simultaneously worldwide. So confident were they of success that their UK imprint Transworld alone printed a million copies. Tight security surrounded the release, with only four people in the UK having a copy, and they were sworn to silence.

But Brown and his publishers went much further than just secrecy for the launch – they created a remarkable campaign of disinformation around the book. In April 2009 the publication date was announced as 15 September. Prior to this virtually nothing had been given out by Brown or by the publishers as to what the novel was all about. Over the next five months, intense and hysterical speculation would flood the internet as clues and hints were given out about the new book.

The title was to be
The Solomon Key
. ‘This was an interesting title, hinting at a medieval book on magic,
The Key of Solomon
, supposedly written around the 14th century in Renaissance Italy,’ wrote Simon Cox – a respected historian of ‘obscure and hidden subjects’ in
Decoding The Lost Symbol
.
[247]
This man is also author of
Cracking The Da Vinci Code
,
Illuminating Angels & Demons
, and
The Dan Brown Companion
.

The years between 2003 and April 2009 had been filled with rumours about
The Solomon Key
. Some believed Brown had scrapped the book or that the court case brought by Baigent and Leigh had taken such a toll on the author that he’d decided to take a long break from writing. ‘It was even claimed that the movie
National Treasure
had stolen so much of the new book’s thunder that a complete rewrite was called for,’ said Cox.

‘A lot of people were trying to figure out what I was writing about,’ Brown said. ‘There were all sorts of people posturing as to what this book was about. I couldn’t very easily walk in and ask all the key questions I needed to know and have somebody send an email “This is what he’s writing about.”’
[248]

The publication date was announced at the London Book Fair. Doubleday (Transworld in the UK) sent out press releases saying that the new Dan Brown book would now be called
The Lost Symbol
, sparking even more speculation and rumour. Shortly after this announcement Brown’s publishers set up a website,
thelostsymbol.com
, that had links to Twitter and Facebook pages for Dan Brown. ‘Excitement grew to a fever pitch as overnight thousands of people became Facebook and Twitter followers of Brown.’
[249]

Clues and hints flooded from the Twitter and Facebook pages, some actually providing co-ordinates to specific places. Cox set to work to puzzle out the answers to these clues, one of which was the co-ordinates to Bimini Road. ‘This unusual underwater structure off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas is believed by some to be a man-made edifice and a remnant of Atlantis,’ he said
.

More clues were given out, some pointing to the Great Pyramid of Giza while others indicated Newgrange, the rite-of-passage tomb in Ireland known for its alignment to the rising sun on the winter solstice. ‘Possible adversaries and secret societies were hinted at,’ Cox said. Hundreds of internet sites were examining in great detail the places, people and groups being mentioned on the Twitter and Facebook pages. ‘It was an internet feeding frenzy.’

Suddenly Cox realised that the publishers were playing a game. He remembered that one of the characters in
The Da Vinci Code
was Bishop Aringarosa and he realised that
aringa
was Italian for herring and
rosa
in Italian meant red, so the clues on the Twitter and Facebook pages were probably red herrings.

He also spotted that the publication date was a clue – 15 September 2009 or 15/09/09, which together added up to 33, the highest numbered rank of the Scottish Rite Freemasons. ‘The Freemasons would be a central theme of the book – something that had been hinted at on the dust jacket of
The Da Vinci Code
all those years ago.’
[250]

Once the book had been published, Cox soon discovered that most of the clues had indeed been red herrings. ‘There was no Morgan affair, no Aaron Burr, no William Wirrt (and the strange story of his skull), no Knights of the Golden Circle, no substantial mention of Albert Pike, no Benedict Arnold, no Confederate gold, no Babington Plot.’ The Sons of Liberty, Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and other people and places that Cox had noted on the Twitter and Facebook pages were also absent. Neither was there any mention of Bimini Road or Newgrange, nor anything about the ancient book,
The Key of Solomon.
The Great Pyramid was mentioned, but in a completely different context
.

Brown and Doubleday had pulled off a hugely effective campaign of misinformation, pushing interest away from the real plot while stimulating massive interest and intrigue so people would rush to the shops to buy the book when it came out. ‘This was something of a coup,’ Cox said. ‘They successfully kept the plot of
The Lost Symbol
pretty well hidden until the day of publication.’

The secrecy surrounding the novel had been so complete that virtually no leaks appeared on any internet sites about the real nature of the novel’s plot. Instead, Brown and Doubleday managed to get people focused on subjects ‘that at best were only on the fringes of the novel. It was an incredible undertaking that guaranteed a huge amount of media and public attention on launch day.’
[251]

More than five million copies had been printed, which was a massive gamble. Packing crates of
The Lost Symbol
had been wrapped in protective and legal seals to ensure that no one opened them before the allotted release time. E-books and audio books were also readied at the same time and under a strict veil of secrecy. ‘It was all to safeguard a marketing campaign which some believe could come close to achieving sales on a par with Rowling’s last Harry Potter book, which sold 3.5m copies in its first eight days.’
[252]

On publication day the mayhem began. In the UK, Tesco, the UK supermarket giant was selling 19 copies a minute of
The Lost Symbol
while Asda had sold 18,000 copies by 4pm, taking it from just another publishing activity to an event of phenomenal proportions. Then a price war started with Asda and Tesco dropping the price of the hardback edition to £5 per copy. Waterstone’s followed up by slashing the price of the book in half and other booksellers did the same. Tim Godfray, chief executive of the Booksellers Association, said that a huge price war always comes after the release of a massive-selling title,
The Guardian
reported. The result of this price war is that ‘the trade as a whole makes very little money on its most valued assets.’
[253]

In an article by Richard Booth, writing in
The Guardian
, it was stated that the first announced title of the book was
The Solomon Key
, and the biblical story of the building of King Solomon’s Temple in 1000 BC is central to Freemasonry’s ritual ceremonies and mythical origins.

While some of Freemasons may be unhappy with Brown’s novel, it did not generate the widespread condemnation that
The Da Vinci Code
did. Indeed, the Freemasons’ reaction was largely one of nervousness ‘that I might focus on the macabre side of their rituals,’ Brown said. ‘There is some very potent philosophical material and some amazing science that I am hoping will spark debate.’
[254]

Debate was exactly what happened across the internet, with some people seeing the Freemasons as the antagonists. ‘This is not the case,’ said Cox. ‘Brown makes a good case for Freemasonry being a tolerant and enlightened movement with some interesting and forward-thinking ideas.’
[255]

Does he? Since the publication of
The Lost Symbol
, the Masons have had to respond to some of the book’s claims by creating a website to address them. ‘For three centuries, almost immediately after its modern formation in 1717 in London, the fraternity of Freemasonry has been the subject of wild accusations and disinformation,’ the website states. It goes on to say that the site has been created ‘in cooperation with the Masonic Service Association of North America, and the George Washington Masonic Memorial as an ongoing project to address the subjects concerning Freemasonry that are found in Brown’s
The Lost Symbol
, as well as to explain its references to the history, practices, ceremonies, philosophy and symbolism of Masonry.’
[256]

Brown’s great gift is his ability to blend fact and fiction, and he has gone on record to say that the science, societies and organisations in his books are real. In both
The Da Vinci Code
and
The Lost Symbol
he has put in a Fact page at the beginning. ‘While groups like the 18th-century Bavarian Illuminati and the modern Catholic organisation Opus Dei have indeed existed in fact, they bear little resemblance to Brown’s fictional universe,’ the Masonic website states. ‘Unfortunately, readers are not always aware of the difference between fact and fiction.’

The Masonic Society’s web pages devoted to Brown’s novel state that he has treated Freemasonry in ‘an overwhelmingly positive’ light. However, ‘he does engage in some dramatic licence for the sake of his plot.’ The ritual of drinking from a skull is one of those areas. The skull has appeared in Masonic rituals over the centuries but it is not unique to Freemasonry. It represents mortality and can be found in many other organisations, ‘The Latin term,
memento mori
, means “remember, you will die” and is often accompanied by a depiction of a skull as a reminder of the end of physical life. Such specific images have appeared as early as Pompeii in the first century AD.’

The Masons’ web pages say that the ceremony in the beginning of the book, where the initiate drinks blood red wine from a hollow skull, is an adaptation from a ‘sensationalised exposé,
Scotch Rite Masonry Illustrated
, published in 1887 by the Reverend John Blanchard. Blanchard’s description of the 33rd degree has been repeated by many anti-Masonic authors over the years, even though it is not accurate.’

Brown also includes a pyramid that Langdon carries around with him as he searches for clues that will free his friend Peter Solomon. While the pyramid is central to the book, it is not a Masonic symbol, according to the website. ‘The pyramid does not appear in the symbolism of regular, accepted Freemasonry or its appendant groups, the Scottish Rite or the York Rite. This is a longstanding myth,’ it states. ‘Neither is the “unfinished pyramid” topped by the “all-seeing eye” – found in the Great Seal of the United States as seen on the reverse of the dollar bill – a Masonic symbol.’

The website goes on to say that the all-seeing eye inside a triangle first appeared in the 1500s in the Catholic Renaissance art, where the eye represented God and the triangle represented the trinity. The symbol is not exclusive to one organisation but has been used by many over the centuries to represent God.

One thing that is very Masonic, however, is secrecy. ‘It is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the fraternity,’ the website states. ‘Freemasonry teaches its philosophy to its members through symbolism, and secrecy is actually a symbol of honour.’

The website explains this by saying that the original medieval stonemasons kept their skills and practices secret so that their livelihood would be protected and no Tom, Dick or Harry could set themselves up as a stonemason without being a member of the fraternity. This was to ensure only qualified men were employed. ‘Likewise, passwords and secret signs were developed so members of the guild in different parts of the country could recognise each other, even if they had never met.’