I once said I'd rather lick the belly of a cockroach than do this. Things change.

[freckles_and_doubt]

Things That Tell You You're Not In Kansas Any More: the shower. My mother's shower has two settings, Lukewarm and Too Hot. You have no idea how grumpy I become when deprived of my righteous daily quotient of standing under hot water, therapising.

Some of the grump may also be because the exigencies of the French experience caused me, as a stress control measure, to descend to reading The Da Vinci Code, a copy of which my father had lying around the house for no adequately defined reason. Dear gods. I expected it to be bad, but not that bad. As I have mentioned in the past, skimming the first paragraph of the novel in a bookstore caused me active and violent pain. I have to say, I stand firmly by my initial judgement: that's incompetent mutated journalese if ever I saw it. Nonetheless I slogged through to the end, driven mostly by a sort of masochistic curiosity to see if it kept to its high standards of dreckness throughout. Yup.

The language, of course, is dreadful - see the earlier post for links to the Language Log dissection, which is entertainingly rude. The narrative, if anything, is worse. I expected the book to be the usual mindless thriller, leavened with a bit of entertaining paranoid conspiracy theory and pop mythology. It wasn't even that. It has absolutely no sense of pace: its slow, lame, stumbling plot telegraphs its "twists" and "reveals" so far in advance that you're bored by the time they actually arrive, and takes about the first third of the book to cover about two hours, in unnecessary detail including lots of statistics no-one cares about. This man wouldn't know a description if it wrote adjectives up his leg with a soldering iron. He thinks it's all about numbers and historical architecture. He only avoids the unnecessary detail when describing actual characters, who are sort of semi-animated cardboard cutouts with big red circles drawn around their most clichéd traits. And the mythology. Dear gods, the mythology. It's a half-baked, half-witted, half-arsed concatenation of random symbolism tied together with fetid string and a loopy, amoebic and deeply suspect feminism which is heartily stomped by the story. It's an offense to good conspiracy theory, frankly.

There are three major pop literary blockbusters in the last few years: Harry Potter, the Da Vinci Code, and Twilight. Despite the emotional scarring I'm glad I've actually now read all three, so I can say with authority that they're all bad, but in fact Harry Potter isn't as bad as the other two. On the whole, Dan Brown is also a worse writer than Stephanie Meyer, and what are the odds of that?

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I read another Dan Brown, can't recall the name right now, but mildly enjoyed it. Yes, it was bad, but it sort of rolled along in a way that carried me with it. The science was quite astonishingly bad, though. Really very very bad.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

That's what blindsided me: I expected to be carried along, and simply wasn't. I think the science (cryptography, in this case) was also astonishingly bad in this one, but I don't know enough about it to generate more than a feeling of wild unease every time they start spouting off about codes. I am now re-reading Cryptonomicon by way of taking the bad taste out of my mouth.

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Says something that an intelligent woman can come up with such a critique of the book, while most other people raved about it & Hollywood turned it into a blockbuster.

I mean, I know entering a theatre means 'suspend your disbelief by the handles it comes with' - but if it's truly that bad, what does that say about the majority of the book-reading (ok, book-buying) & film-going public?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

It's worse than that. One of the cover blurbs reads "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest and most accomplished writers in the country." The magnitude of that lie must have warped space-time for a few significant seconds around the head of the writer, one Nelson DeMille, who has at a blow ensured that I would rather lick a cockroach than read anything he "wrote". (The inverted commas being because he clearly wouldn't know writing if it wrote adjectives up his leg with a soldering iron). Unless, of course, he means "best, smartest and most accomplished" to signify "enormously successful in financial terms", in which case, fair comment.

I think the bulk of the world's readers of popular lit do, in fact, equate success with quality. Tragically.

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, for far too many people 'success' seems to = 'makes a lot of money', but there we are.

Delicious cockroach

[bumpycat.livejournal.com]

The only Dan Brown I've read is Digital Fortress, which is equally wretched and painful to read. I despair for humanity.

[rumint.livejournal.com]

Similarly to bumpy, I read Digital Fortress part way until the very bad crypto made me throw it aside. As a crypto engineer I expect writers to get it somewhat wrong, but not this bad... Cryptonomicon is good to restore your taste, if a bit dated now(90's crypto). Charlie Stross's Halting State has more up to date 21C crypto ideas.

Yes, I despair of the success of Da Vinci code, as you say, it is an insult to conspiracy theory and art history, never mind writers... And any DM can come up with better plot twists. If I telegraphed a twist that obviously my players would assume it was a trick.