Dan Brown's literary mistakes - 

Anthony Esolen shares my opinion of Dan Brown's writing:

We are still in Chapter One.

Outside his window, hidden in the shadows of the Via Torregalli, a powerfully built woman effortlessly unstraddled her BMW motorcycle and advanced with the intensity of a panther stalking its prey.

“Unstraddle that bike,” said the policeman, effortlessly writing out a ticket.

“Why should I unstraddle it?” the powerfully built woman retorted, with the intensity of a mule in the middle of the set of the Gunsmoke television show, refusing to move.

“All bikes have to be unstraddled in the shadows of the Via Torregalli,” said the policeman, with the intensity of an oak tree whose roots delve thirty feet down into the earth beneath a BMW factory in West Germany.  “Don’t you see the sign?  ‘No un-unstraddled bikes allowed.’”

Damn cops, she thought effortlessly, with the intensity of a powerfully built lady of the evening swearing at a cop.  Always making you unstraddle!

There's more in the post.

Dan Brown Strikes again!

Anthony Esolen reviews Inferno:

And what about the madman who concocted the virus, one Bertrand Zobrist?  Well, he is really a lover of mankind, don’t you see?  He wants to give mankind enough breathing space—because we are about to enter hell.  What is hell?  Not the loss of God.  Hell is other people—lots and lots of other people, with their garlicky food and their wailing toddlers and their excrement.  Hell is overpopulated Manila, not spiffy New England, where Dan Brown lives.  What is heaven?  Oh, heaven, that’s the brave new world around the bend, when people will be engineered to live longer and not have so many babies, so that they might, well, do whatever they please, apparently, because just as there is no point to a Dan Brown allusion or a Dan Brown metaphor or a Dan Brown travelogue, so there is no point to human existence, either.  We’ll just be nicer, and the fewer of us around to bother about, the nicer it will be.

I’m often taken to task for suggesting that we have been suffering a cultural implosion, for pointing out that an old issue of Boys’ Life is linguistically more sophisticated than the current New York Times.  May I kindly submit Dan Brown as exhibit A in my prosecution?  “That Dan Brown sure is erudite!” say reviewers around the country.  “That Dan Brown, he sure knows his art!  He sure has the goods on the Middle Ages!  His hero is a symbologist – he studies symbs!”  “That Dan Brown knows his science, don’t he!” 

I defy anyone to find for me a best-selling novel written in English before 1950 that is as relentlessly inane and chic-trite and morally destitute as this one.  In saying so, do I also mean to impugn the tastes of his readers?  Let me answer by adapting Dante’s verse over the gates to the lower world: Lasciate intelligenza, voi ch’entrate. 

Check your brains at the door, all you who enter!  Check your souls and your humanity, too. 

If you read a Dan Brown novel, you can basically feel your brain cells imploding.

One thing about reading a Dan Brown novel is that it makes you feel smart!

From recent article on Dan Brown's most recent literary offense: 

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

And, of course, my much lauded 2004 reflection on Dan Brown's literary works - "The DaVinci Code - I've read the book so you don't have to"  -

I am on record as assuming - based on its sale’s performance - that while the DVC would be a scholastically ignorant work purveying a knee-jerk ideology, it would also be well written. After reading the book, I have to issue a mea culpa. The DVC really is poorly written.  

Brown employs several literary artifices which are simply amateurish. For example, Brown has perfected the “expository lecture” device. Under this device, some comment or question induces the hero, Robert Langdon, to flash back to some lecture he gave which gives Brown the opportunity to inject some purportedly relevant academic information into the book. Hence, a casual comment about “PHI” leads to a three page disquisition on the Fibonacci Numbers (p. 93 - 97). See this article on Fibonacci Numbers. Now, the point of this disquisition is unclear. Apparently, it’s designed to “Wow” the reader with Brown’s encyclopedic knowledge since Brown rattles off innumerable purported examples of the “Golden Mean.” The Golden Mean really exists, but the problem is that Brown is too lazy to do any serious research to get it right. And he boots what he does write. One thing about Brown's style is that his constant injection of tendentious "scientific" or "literary" or "historical" points, suchs as the throw-away comment about the ratio of male to female bees in every hive in the world being 1.618, raised “red flag” that suggested that Brown was “making shit up”(hereinafter “MSU”), about which more later.

James Fennimore Cooper's Literary Mistakes

This article collects "Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences" so you don't have to.

Only 20?

Some examples:

17. Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.

16. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move." On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly. Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

A silhouette with white hair and pink irises stood chillingly close but 15 feet away. What’s wrong with this picture?

And:

14. Angels and Demons, chapter 100: Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World - The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata.

The Rio de la Plata. Between Argentina and Uruguay. One of the major rivers of the Old World. Apparently.

And:

9. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 32: The vehicle was easily the smallest car Langdon had ever seen. "SmartCar," she said. "A hundred kilometers to the liter."

Pro tip: when fleeing from the police, take a moment to boast about your getaway vehicle’s fuel efficiency. And get it wrong by a factor of five. SmartCars do about 20km (12 miles) to the litre.

How like Dan Brown - a show-off about his knowledge of technical trivia, but too lazy to do any research.

Finally:

5. Angels and Demons, chapter 4: learning the ropes in the trenches.

Learning the ropes (of a naval ship) while in the trenches (with the army in the First World War). It’s a military education, certainly.

4, 3, and 2. The Da Vinci Code, opening sentence: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.

Angels and Demons, opening sentence: Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.

Deception Point, opening sentences: Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.

Professor Pullum: "Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence".

And there is so much more. From my 2004 review - "I've read the Da Vinci Code so you don't have to." - there's this:

Yet another lame literary device is the “convenient selective stupidity” strategy. Hence, we have the “Papal Bull” Captain Bezu Fache, who has intuited that Langdon is guilty of murder, think nothing of the fact that a cryptographer shows up at the crime scene(!?!) and claims to have a message for his chief suspect from the American embassy.(!?!) (p. 51- 53.) Of course, it could well be the case that French cryptographers have a long-standing tradition of providing answering services for various embassies, but I was skeptical the moment I read this gambit. Strangely, though, Fache, a determined man interested in railroading Langdon, wasn’t.

Perhaps it is time to hand Western Civilization over to the Muslims if this is the most rewarded form of modern writing.

Secularists have to keep repeating the myth that there is a war between science and religion

Catholics, on the other hand, just do science.

Father Barron on "Angels and Demons."

For people who want to read a book and feel smart


Carl Olsen points out that Ron Howard is coming out with the next Dan Brown-based movie, "Angels and Demons," which is touted as being much better than the tranquilizing bomb "The Da Vinci Code" because Tom Hanks loses his mullet and wears a speedo.

That's reason enough to boycott the movie.

It seems that Angels and Demons is as fact challenged as The Da Vinci Code. Danny Loss has read A&D so you don't have to and has compiled a really long list of blatant factual errors in the book. I did the same exercise for the DVC by "dog earing" every page of the DVC that had a factual error. Every other page was dog-eared by the time I was done.

Compare and Contrast

You will not reading a book that has been described as:

The novel is a luridly written amalgam of bodice-ripper and historical fiction centred on Aisha, the favourite wife of the prophet Muhammad. "Married at nine to the much-older Muhammad, Aisha uses her wits, her courage, and her sword to defend her first-wife status even as Muhammad marries again and again, taking 12 wives and concubines in all," the summary reads.

Random House, which was set to publish the book on August 12, decided not to publish because:

Random House said yesterday that it had been advised by a number of Islamic scholars and security experts that the novel was offensive to Muslims and that "it could incide acts of violence by a small radical segment".

On the other hand, Random House courageously published the Da Vinci Code despite the fact that Brown's book was offensive to Catholics.

Dan Brown's Literary Offenses.

Courtesy of Insight Scoop, I've discovered two new sites that uncover the truth long concealed from the public by the Gnostic/Freemason/Publishing cabal: Dan Brown is an awful writer.

From the Black Iris:

It started with ‘Da Vinci Code’ and ended with ‘Deception Point’ as I’ve only recently managed to cover all of Dan Brown’s books. My conclusion? Brown is a pretty bad writer. I’m sorry, I know there are big fans of the guy out there but he’s frankly a bad writer. So what makes it for him? A good idea based on something people know little about and manage to discover during the reading. From that idea a kind of thriller-like plot is constructed where the protagonist must save the day and the villain is always concealed until the final moments. What comes next is the execution of the writing, a certain style that Dan Brown completely lacks.

And from Geoffrey K. Pullum:

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why. And why did I keep the book instead of dropping it into a Heathrow trash bin? Because it seemed to me to be such a fund of lessons in how not to write.

Apparently, Brown's painful literary stylings can be found in his other books, which Geoffrey K. Pullum has read so you don't have to:

But the acme of inexpertly crunched metaphors in Deception Point is on page 27 (and I swear I'm not making this up): he uses the expression "learning the ropes in the trenches". Think about that for a while. Learning the ropes is a naval metaphor; it's about rigging and sails and mooring. Being in the trenches is an army metaphor. You can hardly be in both services simultaneously — hauling up sails on a naval frigate while dug in with the infantry on the western front. Dan has to make his military metaphor mind up.