RYE BEACH, New Hampshire: Anyone who has read Dan Brown’s work — and with 200 million copies of his books in print, you know who you are — is familiar with his signature technique of inserting little chunks of expository information into the narrative. Among the topics addressed in his latest thriller, ‘Origin’: the wide-ranging talents of Winston Churchill, the elusive appeal of abstract art, the exciting peculiarities of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral and the latest insane developments in the world of artificial intelligence.
This is central to the Brown approach, because he himself prefers literature that is instructive and, ideally, not wholly invented. “I feel like if I’m going to take time reading, I better be learning,” he said recently. He was sitting in his large and cunningly designed house here in the New Hampshire countryside. Of his novels, he said: “This is the kind of fiction I would read if I read fiction.”
‘Origin’ is Brown’s eighth novel. It finds his familiar protagonist, the brilliant Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconography Robert Langdon, embroiled once more in an intellectually challenging, life-threatening adventure involving murderous zealots, shadowy fringe organisations, paradigm-shifting secrets with implications for the future of humanity, symbols within puzzles and puzzles within symbols and a female companion who is supersmart and superhot.
- Dan Brown | Author
As do all of Brown’s works, the new novel does not shy away from the big questions, but rather rushes headlong into them. Here the question is: Can science make religion obsolete?
As the story begins, Edmond Kirsch — “billionaire computer scientist, futurist, inventor and entrepreneur” — is preparing to present a new discovery to an eager crowd (and to the world, via the internet) at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. He has promised that this announcement, the details of which are enticingly withheld until the very end of the book, will upend people’s view of religion by proving irrefutably that life can be created using the laws of science, thus excising God from the equation. (The theory is real, borrowed from MIT physicist Jeremy England.)
‘Origin’ is published by Random House and is being released on Tuesday, with an initial printing of two million copies, eventually extending to several dozen countries in 42 languages, according to the publisher. Readers will find in it a familiar swirl of big ideas and non-stop action, so that those who aren’t enchanted by the erudition can find relief in the plot, and vice versa.
Brown, 53, spent four years writing and researching the book. He is nothing if not disciplined. He rises at 4am each day and prepares a smoothie comprising “blueberries, spinach, banana, coconut water, chia seeds, hemp seeds and ... what’s the other kind of seed?” he asked. “Flaxseeds, and this sort of weird protein powder made out of peas.” He also makes so-called bulletproof coffee, with butter and coconut oil, which he says changes “the way your brain processes the caffeine” so as to sharpen your mind.
His computer is programmed to freeze for 60 seconds each hour, during which time Brown performs push-ups, sit-ups and anything else he needs to do. Though he stops writing at noon, it’s hard for him to get the stories out of his head. “It’s madness,” he said of his characters. “They talk to you all day.”
Brown’s books have made him rich, but he does not have the aura of a rich person. His house, concealed behind gates, is not so much the home of a flashy millionaire as that of a person with the means to alter his surroundings in any wildly idiosyncratic way he (and his wife) want to.
He showed me around on condition that I didn’t present the house as “incredibly ostentatious”.
No, more like fantastically bonkers. Push a button on a library shelf, and it swings around to reveal a secret shelf that contains the first Brown book (‘The Giraffe, the Pig, and The Pants On Fire,’ written when he was five) and an exotic scientific-looking object that turns out to be the antimatter prop used in the film of ‘Angels and Demons’. Touch the corner of a painting in the living room, and it slides aside to expose a hidden room whose walls are decorated with gold records, awarded to Brown as a result of vast audiobook sales in Germany.
The house is also full of paintings, sculptures and unexpected additional works by Brown’s wife, Blythe, who has a taste for the macabre. A dining room sideboard contains a tableau featuring taxidermied animals like a fox and a pheasant; a table in the kitchen holds a Hieronymus Bosch-like sculpture replete with tiny skeletons and other objects churning together in a hellish configuration.
“Blythe has a fixation with death,” Brown said cheerfully. “Once she literally took me on a date to a cemetery.” The two met more than 20 years ago in Los Angeles, where Brown moved after graduating from Amherst College. He grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire, and went to high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father taught math. (I was at the school as well and knew him slightly.)
At the time, Brown was a not-successful musician; his future wife, more than a decade older than he is, was the director of artistic development at the National Academy for Songwriters. Because of their unequal work relationship, they dated in secret for seven years, Brown said, at one point even attending the Grammys together, along with fake dates, to conceal the romance.
Brown does not have a lot in common with Edmond Kirsch, the futurologist and entrepreneur of his book, but they do share a car: the Tesla Model X, the least expensive version of which costs about $80,000. Among other things, it can drive and park itself.
He and I got into the car, which looked kind of minivan-esque until it accelerated from 0 to 60 in under three seconds, right in the (not very long) driveway, and then switched lanes by itself on the highway.
We were on the way to Exeter, where Brown was going to a service in honour of his mother, who died several months ago. (‘Origin’ is dedicated to her; her initials, C.G.B., appear, very faintly, on the back cover of the book.) Brown credits his father, now 81, with instilling in him a love of science, maths and intellectual puzzles, and his mother, who was religious but became disillusioned with church politics, with instilling in him a wonder for the mysteries of the world.
Though Brown comes out strongly in favour of science, both in person and in his novels, he cannot give up the possibility that there is something else out there.
“It’s probably an intellectual weakness,” he said, “but I look at the stars and I say, ‘there’s something bigger than us out there.’”
