Dan Brown: "When we die, our consciousness survives"

PragueThe American Dan Brown (Exeter, 1964) has won hundreds of millions of readers around the world thanks to the mysteries that Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard University, must always solve against the clock. The 61-year-old novelist left the institute where he taught thanks to the overwhelming success ofThe Da Vinci Code (2003; in Catalan in Columna), but he has retained the affable demeanor with which he taught English and Spanish—he lived in Madrid for a time in the 1980s—to his students.

Brown chose Prague to give his most recent lesson, specifically the Chapel of Mirrors in the Czech National Library complex. After receiving the honorary key to the city from the mayor and listening to a frenetic organ playing that made him burst out laughing, perplexed yet honored, the author explained, before 140 journalists from around the world, why he changed his mind about one of the "universal themes" that has preoccupied him. "What if death weren't the end of our journey, but the beginning?" he asked. This was the great question that led him to write The last secret (Columna / Planeta; Catalan translation by Marc Barrobés and Esther Roig), the sixth installment of the adventures of Robert Langdon, who in this case spends a few days in the capital of the Czech Republic to accompany Katherine Salomon, "acclaimed scientist" and the professor's lover.

Shortly before disappearing without a trace, Salomon has had time to give a last lecture in which she outlines her latest research in noetics, a discipline that "studies human consciousness from multiple perspectives", and to affirm that she is "detached from the body", as can be read in the novel. "Since I wrote The lost symbol [2009, in Catalan in Columna] I've been in contact with noetics, and the latest advances being made related to consciousness are surprising. If science tells us that our interpretation of reality is so different from what it really is, if our consciousness is capable of fluctuating from one place to another, the notion of life and death would change," the author continued. The audience listened to him in silence, just as they do in the novel during Salomon's lecture.The last secret, However, it quickly accelerates, as in all of Brown's books, and the elegance and sumptuousness of Prague take a backseat to become the setting in which Robert Langdon must solve a series of riddles in order to rescue Salomon.

"I want people to fall in love with Prague when they read my novel and, above all, to come during the off-season, when it is at its most wonderful. I have visited the city on numerous occasions for research, and there is not one of the settings that I have not set foot in," the author argues, "to invite alchemists and cabalists to explore the idea of the afterlife."

Esotericism, embassies and an epileptic golem

"An experience that affected me greatly and that, in part, also led me to write The last secret “It was my mother’s death from leukemia,” Brown said. “I was convinced then that death meant total darkness, disappearance: I thought it was like unplugging a computer. After years of research for this book, I think the opposite: when we die, our consciousness lives on. Now we just need to know how. I reckon it’ll take about five or ten years before we even begin to know.”

Dan Brown sprinkles the action and scientific experiments ofThe last secret –"many of them incredible, but authentic," he insisted – with ghostly and esoteric touches. There are strange apparitions, dire premonitions, mysterious books – such as the 13th-century Codex Gigas, known as the Devil's Bible– and even an epileptic variation on the golem, a mythical figure breathed life into centuries ago by Rabbi Löw of Prague, eager for revenge on those who would use the secret of life for vile purposes (one of the novel's subplots involves embassies and intelligence services).

"I like to write about the big issues that concern us," he says. "Human consciousness is the greatest of all. It's the lens through which we experience reality. Right now, the model of consciousness we've come to accept is outdated, just as the geocentric model of the world about the universe of life and death was centuries ago." In the novel, Salomon's noetic research—which champions phenomena such as telepathy, precognition, and near-death revelations—is challenged by neuroscientist Brigitta Gessner, who believes that consciousness can only be explained through a series of physical processes, such as neural networks. "I was as skeptical, if not more so, than Robert Langdon in the book," Brown has said. "I'm not a religious person, even though I can understand the need for religions because there are phenomena that are incomprehensible to us. But these are not matters of the spirit, but intellectual matters. Science is what interests me most conscientiously, and the more I am interested in it, and the more I am interested in it consciously, I realized that I knew."

The worldwide launch ofThe last secret It will be remembered as one of the most spectacular of the season: the American edition's sales at Random House are 1.5 million; in Spanish and Catalan, Planeta has released 500,000 copies. However, these figures pale in comparison to what Brown has achieved with The Da Vinci Code, a novel that has sold more than 85 million copies worldwide and motivated the blockbuster eponymous film starring Tom Hanks. "Writing isn't a gift I have," he said with a smile. "I just persist: I work seven days a week. The characters couldn't care less whether I succeed or not. The challenge is always the next blank page. I move forward by instinct and according to my own tastes."