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(A Reader's — and an Aspiring Writer's — Critique of The Secret of Secrets By Dan Brown )

After I moved to the Zendo, the natural progression was becoming part of the Bodhi Sangha book club. Each month they curate a list of seven or eight books, and all of us vote and select a book for the month and the last Saturday of the month spend some 2 hours sharing views on it. Some members — like Dr. Rao, a retired Indian-American physician, and Ritesh, an academic settled in Germany who is completing his doctorate,  Carl who lives in Kyoto next to a Zen monastery etc  — read every single chosen book and come prepared with views and critiques. Many others do too. That one-and-a-half to two hours is worth its weight in gold.

Dan Brown needs no introduction to any reader in the world. Not after The Da Vinci Code.

The book for March was Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets — a breezy read, a fast page-turner. I was completely engrossed for a day and two. Then, after a gap of two or three days, I found myself reflecting on it.

There are books I have read in one sitting. Gone with the Wind, for instance. We got hold of a copy during our final-year engineering exams, and my roommate Goofy and I read it straight through, the exam entirely irrelevant. And then there are other books — O.V. Vijayan, Kamala Das — which demand something slower, something more interior.

What follows is my critique of The Secret of Secrets. When I was reading, I was simply reading. That reflective hat came later — a gift from a generous online writing course I was able to attend at no cost. Sincere gratitude for their generosity.

The Machinery of Pace

Brown builds his narrative through relentless scene-shifting — short chapters that end mid-tension, dropping the reader into a different strand before resolution arrives. In cinema this is called cross-cutting. In literature the precise term is interlacement — the medieval technique of braiding multiple storylines so that the reader is perpetually suspended between threads. Brown deploys this with considerable skill. The pages turn almost involuntarily.

The Crichton Effect

What gives the novel its unusual grip is Brown's faction — the scaffolding of verifiable fact beneath the fictional story. He elaborates, sometimes at length, on noetic science, the Hermann Grid, precognition, sudden savant syndrome, EMet and Met, the Barnum Effect and others. A reader who fact-checks these discovers they hold up. And that changes everything. The fictional frame partially dissolves. What was a thriller quietly becomes a possibility. This is the Crichton inheritance — dense, accurate research deployed not to educate but to destabilise the reader's certainty about what is real. Brown uses it masterfully.

The Knowing Hand

And yet. Brown teaches creative writing. And it shows.

A writer who teaches technique becomes hyper-conscious of the toolbox. Every chapter end arrives on schedule. Every cliffhanger deploys with the punctuality of a train. Every scientific digression appears at precisely the moment the pace needs breathing room. The interlacement is too clean, the faction too carefully placed, the dramatic revelation too well-timed.

The seams are visible. The hand is always there.

Brown's interlacement is like a magician's trick — you know the hand is moving, but you still lean forward. Yet there is a difference between suspension and surrender. In Dostoevsky or Vijayan, you surrender because the world itself has swallowed you. In Brown, you are suspended because the scaffolding keeps you dangling. It is a thrill, yes. But not the free fall.

This is the central limitation of the classroom writer — tremendous structural competence, imaginative caution. He writes like an excellent student who has understood every rule and replicates them faithfully. There is skill here, undeniable. But rarely surprise at the level of form.

Technique is safe. It guarantees a certain level of readability. But risk is what makes literature unforgettable. Kamala Das risked shame. Vijayan risked incomprehension. Melville risked ridicule. Brown risks nothing. He entertains, but he does not endanger himself. And so the reader is never endangered either.

And yet — here is the other side. Some books demand one-sitting immersion, like Gone with the Wind during engineering exams, when the world outside is irrelevant. Others demand gaps, pauses, reflection. Brown's scaffolding may be deliberate, but the reader's rhythm decides whether it becomes mere entertainment or a seed of reflection. The critique is not only of the writer. It is also of the reader's own machinery of attention.

The Dharma of Reading

Every book is a gate. Some gates open into gardens, some into deserts, some into wounds. Brown's gate opens into a museum of ideas — consciousness, precognition, noetic science. You walk through, you admire, you nod. But you rarely bleed. The Dharma of reading is not only to be informed, but to be transformed. Brown informs. Transformation is rarer.

And what the Untaught Writers Had…

Dostoevsky had a Siberian prison and a firing squad. O.V. Vijayan had Khasak and a devotional relationship with Malayalam itself. Kamala Das had her body and her uncontainable honesty. Emily Brontë had the Yorkshire moors and one novel in her and died at thirty. Melville had harpooned actual whales and lived among cannibals.

None of them managed technique. They managed truth. The craft followed necessity, not the other way around.

What the Indian aesthetic tradition calls pratibha — spontaneous creative illumination — cannot be taught or replicated. It arises. And when it does, you cannot see the writer's hand at all. Only the wound, or the landscape, or the obsession. Mahabharata, does not give any clue about Veda Vyasa, neither Ramayana about Valmiki. 

Brown chose to write a thriller. That choice is already the distance between him and that company.

The Honest Verdict and  the reader's — and aspiring writer's — Gratitude

Brown is not without genuine quality. His enthusiasm for ideas — consciousness, the limits of knowledge, mind preceding matter — is real, not manufactured. That curiosity rescues him from being merely mechanical. When the research opens an unexpected room, the wonder is authentic.

But the architecture around it is always a little too deliberate. The technique is the scaffolding. The ideas are the building. In his best moments, you forget the scaffolding. In his weakest, it is all you see.

He writes like a man who knows exactly what he is doing. The greatest writers never quite knew. And that unknowing was everything. Still, gratitude remains. A book that engrosses for two days is already a gift. A book that makes you reflect after gaps is another gift. And a book that provokes critique is the greatest gift of all. Brown gave me all three. For that, I bow.