Dan Brown is once again taking on the big questions.
“Will God survive science?” asks the author of the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code and other philosophical-religious thrillers during a recent interview. “All the gods of our past have fallen. So the question now is: Are we naive to think the gods of today won’t suffer the same fate?”
His new novel is Origin, already a chart-topper on Amazon.com, and for Brown fans a familiar blend of travelogue, history, conspiracies and whodunit, with asides on everything from the poetry of William Blake to the rise and fall of fascism in Spain.
Brown’s protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, is in Spain and back in danger. A former student, Edmond Kirsch, has been assassinated just as he’s ready to unveil a scientific-technological breakthrough that he promises will bring about the downfall of Western religion and revolutionise how people think of life and death. Langdon, with the help of a prince’s wayward lover and a voice of artificial intelligence named Winston, attempts to find out what Kirsch had planned.
The Da Vinci Code outraged church officials and scholars with such suggestions as Jesus and Mary married and had children. Brown acknowledged that the controversy led him to avoid larger religious questions in his follow-up novel, The Lost Symbol, but his skepticism remains. A native and longtime resident of New Hampshire, he remembered visiting Boston’s Museum of Science as a boy and being confused by the theory of evolution and how it contradicted the story of Adam and Eve. Back home, Brown asked a priest about the differences.
“This guy said, ‘Nice boys don’t ask that question.’ I did what every little boy does, I started asking the questions,” he says. “I gravitated towards science. Faith became difficult for me.”
Brown has the time and money to research his settings firsthand and spent extensive time in Spain over the past few years. The country appeals to him, he said, because of its blend of old and new, of supercomputers and deep roots in Western religion. The violent police actions against Catalans voting on independence were “heartbreaking” but didn’t shock him; the “fault lines” of Spanish culture were the reason he wanted to write about it.
Speaking from a sky-high floor of a midtown Manhattan hotel, looking out on the city on a sunny fall afternoon, the 53-year-old Brown also discussed what he thought about technology, the response to his books and the future of Robert Langdon.
On why he’s never written about Eastern religion
On what his friends in the clergy think of his book
“(They) would fall into three categories: Those that essentially say, ‘We’re going to have to agree to disagree.’ Those who would say, ‘Hey, this is actually a really interesting dialogue. It’s making me think about religion in a new and exciting way. Thank you.’ And those who essentially say, ‘We can’t be friends anymore.’ You know what — those are outliers. The primary reaction I get, from atheists to the deeply devout, is that the dialogue is critical.”
