"Do we learn more about Langdon? Not much. He is still so world-renowned that, as doesn't happen for most academics, fancy hotels monogram his slippers for him. His password for most things is Dolphin123, because he's good at swimming. He is too old-fashioned to like texting or videogames, and just a little prudish. He has never seen When Harry Met Sally, but has heard about the famous sex scene'."
"Fear not: he's still hopeless. It may be counted as a metafictional joke that in a novel where a favoured adjective like elegant can appear in two consecutive sentences, where bells are said to blare, and where we're asked to parse The elevator doors rumbled open, and Langdon felt an instantaneous surge of relief to see open air, but that emotion was instantly dampened by disappointment."
"Because he's doing something right. Chiefly, he puts the um into harum-scarum. Here's a plot that starts thick and gets thicker. Every few pages brings a cliffhanger, introduced by a fusillade of dot-dot-dots or a wide-eyed run of italics. The opening sentences describe a dead woman's spirit floating above Prague (With her eyes, if she still had eyes, she traced the gentle slope of Castle Hill down into the heart of the Bohemian capital)."
Robert Langdon returns after nearly a decade, defined by trademark quirks: loafer-and-turtleneck, Mickey Mouse wristwatch, monogrammed slippers, Dolphin123 password, dislike of texting, and prudishness. Language often features awkward phrasing, repeated adjectives, and clunky constructions, producing frequent jolts of unintended humor. A metafictional moment links the dedicatee and a minor character as editors at Penguin Random House. Plotting moves relentlessly with cliffhanger after cliffhanger, using ellipses and italics. The opening evokes a dead woman's spirit above Prague, and Langdon's new girlfriend, a noeticist, claims a consciousness discovery that could upend current understanding.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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