In his latest novel, Origin, Langdon returns. His student-friend Edmond Kirsch, who is a combination of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as a tech wizard, and Richard Dawkins in his contempt for religion, is about to reveal a finding which would shake the foundations of all major religions, making them obsolete. Murder and mystery intertwine with basic questions of existence. We are told again and again in a bluntly perceptible effort to build the suspense of a discovery that would shatter the basic premise of all religions. In the end, what we get is a digital fast-forwarding through time, the famed Urey-Miller experiment. The fast-forward now takes into consideration entropy and emergence of dissipative structures. The primordial soup, driven by impeccable equations, does result, at least in the realm of fiction, in the generation of DNA molecules. There is also a disembodied AI in the novel. After the typical run-of-the-mill Langdon adventures, which involve a beautiful woman, high-speed chases, some gruesome murder of men of wisdom and a platonic love of the conventionally forbidden sort between unexpected persons in high seats of authority, the story ends with the reshaping of a harmonious reality by a collective humanity inside the magnificently incomplete ‘Sagrada Família’ church.

Only one of the many problems with the latest Brown novel is the stark inconsistency of his fictional realm. Already Langdon had experienced something more primordially profound than a digitally fast-forwarded abiogenesis. Because in Angels and Demons, Catholic priest and physicist Leonardo Vetra, who would be killed by an assassin, was shown as having provided the proof for Biblical creation. Consider the following excerpt from Angels and Demons (2000):

Langdon wondered what this meant. Leonardo Vetra created matter’s opposite?

...

Vittoria was surprised with the indifference in Kohler’s tone. “There were other issues as well,” she said. “My father wanted time to present antimatter in the appropriate light.”

“Meaning?”

What do you think I mean? “Matter from energy? Something from nothing? It’s practically proof that Genesis is a scientific possibility.”

Given this earlier episode, one wonders how the digital abiogenesis – the emergence of life in a simulation of primordial soup in a small planet around a mediocre yellow sun – can really make any difference to Langdon’s belief system.

The novel does make a passing and not so flattering reference to Hinduism, though it starts with the mention of the World Parliament of Religions, where in 1893, Swami Vivekananda made the Western world aware of the philosophical grandeur of Hinduism. Brown, however, seems to have got his facts on Hinduism wrong, and in a dangerous manner.

In the book, the atheist tech wizard shows a video clip of an event in which children are dropped from an Indian temple terrace as one of the many ill effects of religion: “The Grishneshwar Temple Drop, Langdon thought, recalling that it was believed by some to bring God's favor to a child.” The Grishneshwar temple is one of the 12 jyothirlinga temples in India, and the event described in the novel happens in a village temple 300km away from here. Another Hindu-phobic urban legend born!

The other reference to Hinduism in the book is a listing of the so-called Hindu creation myth with other similar mythologies – as essentially similar to each other. Buddhism is mentioned twice and only in the context of a passing reference to belief in reincarnation – totally inconsequential to the narrative of the novel. Why this almost arrogant indifference and faulty categorisation of Hindu-Buddhist traditions?

Brown has talked about Eastern religions in a recent interview: