Origin by Dan Brown – a Nostradamus for our muddled times

I used to think Dan Brown was merely a crackpot. Now I wonder if he might not be a prophet. What once seemed to be his deranged fantasy increasingly looks like our daily reality. In our myth-maddened world, we are befuddled by bloggers peddling conspiracy theories and menaced by transactions on the dark web; we can’t cross a road without dreading some runaway act of messianic terror, and we experience an implosion of identity if we lose our smartphones or forget our passwords. In listing those perils I have summed up the plot of Brown’s new novel Origin: whether or not we read his apocalyptic thrillers, we are living inside them.

Origin stirs up again the witches’ brew that Brown first concocted in The Da Vinci Code. Scientific enlightenment engages in another battle with religious fundamentalism, fought out in glassy labs, glossy luxury hotels and devilish cathedrals, with Gulfstream jets and Tesla self-driving cars to ferry the characters between locations. In Inferno Brown threatened mankind with extinction by reactivating the bubonic plague; here the human race is warned of its imminent redundancy, as machines with synthetic brains prepare to take control of us.

A personified supercomputer with a British accent manages the plot of Origin by issuing instructions from an iPhone. Brown’s hero, the professorial brainbox Robert Langdon, is not much more human: he has a head full of electronic files and copes with emergencies by consulting his “eidetic memory”. The heroine, a future Spanish queen, could be Amazon’s Alexa equipped with a “slender figure” and squeezed into a “form-fitting dress”. Brown’s dialogue makes all his characters, whether or not they have bodies, sound like cybernauts. “Tonight’s crisis impacts us far more deeply than you can imagine,” says one of the plot’s functionaries. “Roger that. Keep us apprised,” she adds. This isn’t speech: it’s vocalised word processing.

As usual with Brown, the end of history approaches at high speed. An Elon Musk-like futurist – who happens, in a quick commercial endorsement, to be wearing “a sleek Kiton K50 suit and Barker ostrich shoes” – is murdered while announcing a scientific discovery that will update Darwin and foretell our next evolutionary phase. The “reveal”, as they call it in Hollywood, is delayed for 400 pages, but I doubt that I’ll spoil anyone’s enjoyment if I disclose that it turns out to consist of gobbledegook about “nucleotides” and “obligate endosymbiosis”.

Despite the chemical jargon and technical data, Brown remains a gothic novelist who is best when sending his characters to grope through mazy architectural spaces, his personal versions of Northanger Abbey or Hogwarts Academy. The action here hurtles from the titanium-scaled leviathan that is Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao to the skeletal carcass of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, with a detour to the fascist mausoleum built by Franco in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. Such caves of occult unreason are where Brown feels at home.

Though his denouement piously drones on about the scientific amelioration of human ills and the need to replace warring religions with an all-purpose spirituality, Brown’s true aims are more devious and deviant. His cryptic hints about malevolent global forces ratchet up our anxiety; blending the testimony of actual scientists such as Hawking and Dawkins with his own dotty or loony inventions, he produces a mentally corrosive mixture of truth and falsehood. Why should we trust a writer who thinks that Spain has a president not a prime minister, and who spells one of his favourite adjectives “collosal”?

Here, to set beside the fake news that warps election results in what’s left of the real world, is a specimen of phoney fiction, expertly designed to confuse the credulous. Yes, Brown is a prophet, and a false one – a Nostradamus for our muddled, crazed and probably terminal times.