The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw
A thrill-seeking Harvard linguistics professor and an ultrasecret branch of the Catholic Church go head-to-head in a race to uncover the secrets of the lost city of Atlantis. The ruins of the technologically-advanced, eerily-enigmatic ancient civilization promise their discoverer fame, fortune, and power… but hold earth-shattering secrets about the origin of man.
While world-famous linguist and archaeologist, Thomas Lourds, is shooting a film that dramatizes his flamboyant life and scientific achievements, satellites spot impossibly ancient ruins along the Spanish coast. Lourds knows exactly what it means: the Lost Continent of Atlantis has been found. The race is on, and Lourds’ challengers will do anything to get there first.
Whoever controls the Lost Continent will control the world.
I’ve realized that, now that I don’t have much time to read, in order to keep my blog going I’ll have to review everything I read. In the past, I kept it just to things I genuinely loved and would recommend to people. That’s changing starting now. Because I don’t love everything I read.
This book is one them.
I love thrillers and am a huge sucker for historical/religious/supernatural mystery thrillers. The Atlantis Code was obviously right up my alley.
I liked the plot okay…though I’ll say that Dan Brown writes a better history-centered thriller. What I didn’t love was the characters, especially the female characters.
The central group of characters are Lourds, Leslie, Natasha, and Gary.
Lourds reminds me very much of Robert Langdon, but less suave and more man-whore. Their is a lot of introspective commentary on the part of the narrator, justifying Lourds’s habits of sleeping around, because his only true love is his work.
Uh-huh.
Leslie seems to be in this story just to play the ditzy blonde who desperately wants to shag the professor and when she does, gets all clingy. When she’s scorned in favor of Natasha (who we’re getting to in a second), she turns into a psycho-bitch.
Uh-huh.
I liked Natasha pretty well. She’s like a female James Bond: sexy, competent, and hard as ice. But she’s kind of a man-eater, which puts her opposite Leslie for Lourds’s affections.
Really could have done without the weird love triangle.
Plot and story are good…an interesting spin on Atlantis and the Bible that I hadn’t heard before. It was also really timely, with the Vatican angle, considering we’ve just witnessed the election of a new pope. The book was interesting, exciting, and kept me reading, despite the obvious issues with the characters.
Not a bad offering for a genre that is more plot-focused than character-based. I’ve certainly read worse. This would be an amusing companion for a long plane ride.
