'Secret of Secrets' review: Dan Brown's latest is contagious

It's been more than two decades since "The Da Vinci Code" came out, yet the magnitude of Dan Brown’s success is still hard to quantify without using exponential math or to justify without succumbing to despair. He has enough copies in print for every adult in the United States to own one, which you can confirm by checking the coffee table in any Airbnb.

Like so many things that are insanely popular — Crocs, Nutella, MrBeast — Brown’s thrillers look easy to imitate but aren’t. He shatters dramatic moments into shiny, irresistible shards. With Brown, everything everywhere all at once is at stake — the church, social order, Western civilization — which makes your clogged gutters feel momentarily less urgent.

The last time we saw Brown’s fit, nerdy hero — Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon — was eight years ago in a mind-bogglingly silly book called "Origin." In that story, Langdon dashes around Spain trying to track down a dead billionaire’s PowerPoint presentation that "boldly contradicted almost every established religious doctrine."

Brown’s latest thriller, "The Secret of Secrets," tweaks that reliable formula only slightly, but through some occult alchemy, his New Coke is better than the old brew.

This time, Langdon is in Prague, where he has come to cheer on his older but stunningly beautiful new girlfriend, Dr. Katherine Solomon, last seen in "The Lost Symbol" (2009). The night before the novel opens, Katherine delivered a mesmerizing lecture about her work in noetics, the science of human consciousness.

Langdon is clearly smitten with this "brilliant" scientist, but she sounds like the love child of Carl Jung and Madame Blavatsky. She tells the esteemed scholars gathered at the Prague Castle, "Your consciousness is not created by your brain. And in fact, your consciousness is not even located inside your head." While studying various neurological chemicals, she "discovered" a new model that indicates "consciousness permeates the universe."

Langdon, a renowned professor of world religions, is initially skeptical of these woo-woo declarations, but after a few hours in Solomon’s bed, he sees the incontrovertible logic of her findings, which is the way major breakthroughs in brain science are typically confirmed.

There’s a curious countercurrent, though, to this spirit of credence. Katherine’s intellectual posturing about universal consciousness, precognition, remote viewing and other psychic feats puffs so high that it collapses into parody.

But very soon, these characters aren’t having any fun at all. Nefarious powers around the world can’t let Katherine’s revelatory scientific discovery get out. And so, just hours after Katherine delivers her lecture, deadly schemes are launched to snuff out her research and silence her.

What follows over the next 600 hilariously hectic pages is a great symphony of murder, mayhem and New Age murmuring. Brown’s dialogue is still cringingly corny; Langdon and Katherine’s sexy banter is saltpeter in print. And the narrative is pocked with clichés, but, mercifully, Brown’s tendency to interrupt action with historical insights from Wikipedia has been largely corralled.

And what a cast — devious spies, dubious diplomats, unethical doctors, unwitting patients and zealous patriots! American officials clash with Czech police, and everybody must contend with a modern-day golem cloaked in mud who slinks around the city seeking revenge.

All this exciting action tends, ironically, to mute Langdon’s role as hero. Amid the deaths and thefts and disguises, he sometimes comes off as Dr. Solomon’s arm candy. Yes, there are terrifically exciting moments, including a chase scene in a cavernous laboratory that for some inexplicable reason is as empty as a downtown Macy’s, but even with his enviable abs, Langdon risks feeling like an emeritus hero.

More troubling: The great professor’s knowledge feels rusty. At the end of one crisis, he takes comfort in a sacred text. "Langdon took a deep breath," Brown writes, "and hoped that John the Baptist had been correct when he promised ‘the truth will set you free.’"

Except, of course, that famous phrase was spoken, not by John the Baptist, but by Jesus.

You might think that somebody — or something — in the "existing cloud of global consciousness" would have caught that error before publication, but maybe it’s just another clue.