Book Review: Origin

The Mickey Mouse watch-wearing, claustrophobic symbology professor from Harvard comes back for the fifth time in Dan Brown's Origin, a pulpy cliffhanger of a thriller that attempts to answer the questions: "Where do we come from? Where are we going?," pitting Creationism and Evolution (aka Science) against one another in a fresh high-stakes battle across different architectural landmarks in Spain. Brown's conspiratorial-backdrop is similar in tone, style and format to the other books in the series, yet I can't possibly remember the last time when I stayed up so late and finished a book in one sitting, finding myself turning the pages so feverishly as if the ink was laced with some kind of drug. All the requisite trappings of a Robert Langdon adventure - a beautiful female sidekick (this time a museum director), an assassin who has a personal score to settle and labyrinthine puzzles abound with religious iconography - make their presence without fail, but given the world we live in, Origin gets a 2017 update in the form of Winston, a powerful AI assistant that's like "Siri on steroids." Langdon, as a character, remains the exposition dump that he has always been, but whatever deficiencies Brown may pose as a writer of literary fiction, it can't be denied that he knows exceedingly well how to tell a story, and a damn exciting one at that.