The Setting of the Novel "The Lost Symbol"

Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon

The book The Lost Symbol is the third in the critical and commercially successful Robert Langdon series of books. In the story, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard, gets a  call from his friend, Peter Solomon, a scientist and a high-ranking member of the Freemasons, asking him to speak in his place at an event in Washington DC. Langdon travels there, where he finds out an impostor, who had kidnapped Solomon, wants  him to find "the portal", a way to seemingly look abck into the past.

     The author, Dan Brown is the ultimate master of character, plot and setting development.. he craetes characters that you can easily love, hate and you never know who's good and who's bad until the very end. But, I especially love the subtle ways Brown can incorporate certain events to easily show the time of year of the plot. During the scene where Langdon arrives at the Capitol to speak, a security guard says, "NFC play-offs ... Everyone's watching the Redskins tonight."  This dates the book to January, but the year the book take place in is not disclosed. A person receiving and iPhone is mentioned,  so you can date it to anytime after 2007, as that was the year the first iPhone came out.

There is  talk that  this book will be made intoo a film, with Tom Hanks starring as Langdon, a role in which he has played twice before. And you can bet that I'm going to see it.