The World According to Dan Brown in his new book “Origin”

Anyone who has read Dan Brown’s work — and with 200 million copies of his books in print, you know who you are — is familiar with his signature technique of inserting little chunks of expository information into the narrative. Among the topics addressed in his latest thriller, “Origin”: the wide-ranging talents of Winston Churchill, the elusive appeal of abstract art, the exciting peculiarities of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral and the latest insane developments in the world of artificial intelligence.

This is central to the Brown approach, because he himself prefers literature that is instructive and, ideally, not wholly invented.

“Origin” is Brown’s eighth novel. It finds his familiar protagonist, the brilliant Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconography Robert Langdon, embroiled once more in an intellectually challenging, life-threatening adventure involving murderous zealots, shadowy fringe organizations, paradigm-shifting secrets with implications for the future of humanity, symbols within puzzles and puzzles within symbols and a female companion who is super-smart and super-hot.

As do all of Brown’s works, the new novel does not shy away from the big questions, but rather rushes headlong into them. Here the question is: Can science make religion obsolete?
As the story begins, Edmond Kirsch — “billionaire computer scientist, futurist, inventor and entrepreneur” — is preparing to present a new discovery to an eager crowd (and to the world, via the internet) at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. He has promised that this announcement, the details of which are enticingly withheld until the very end of the book, will upend people’s view of religion by proving irrefutably that life can be created using the laws of science, thus excising God from the equation. (The theory is real, borrowed from the M.I.T. physicist Jeremy England).

Mr. Brown, 53, spent four years writing and researching the book. He is nothing if not disciplined. He rises at 4 a.m. each day. His computer is programmed to freeze for 60 seconds each hour, during which time Mr. Brown performs push-ups, sit-ups and anything else he needs to do. Though he stops writing at noon, it’s hard for him to get the stories out of his head. “It’s madness,” he said of his characters. “They talk to you all day.”

Brown’s books have made him rich, but he does not have the aura of a rich person.

“Blythe has a fixation with death,” Mr. Brown said cheerfully. “Once she literally took me on a date to a cemetery.” The two met more than 20 years ago in Los Angeles, where Mr. Brown moved after graduating from Amherst College. He grew up in Exeter, N.H., and went to high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father taught math.
Mr. Brown credits his father, now 81, with instilling in him a love of science, math and intellectual puzzles, and his mother, who was religious but became disillusioned with church politics, with instilling in him a wonder for the mysteries of the world.
Though Mr. Brown comes out strongly in favour of science, both in person and in his novels, he cannot give up the possibility that there is something else out there.
“It’s probably an intellectual weakness,” he said, “but I look at the stars and I say, ‘there’s something bigger than us out there.’