flushing the Brown

The last few years have been marked by endless creative, evasive maneuvers to avoid Dan Brown.  I’ve hidden in the deep Kingsolver forest, taken wrong turns down Clancy alley, cruised on the Chabon highway, and taken side streets whenever possible to avoid the beaten path.

      The thing is, the guy is one of the biggest names in fiction these days, and that has always made me nervous.  As is the case in music, film and other arts, there is a part of us that wants the most famous, successful writers to be the best- the ones that move hearts and souls - the ones that change lives with a single penstroke.  This is amplified in Brown’s case, as he deals almost exclusively in the mystery, real and imagined surrounding science, history, mysticism and freemasonry, subjects of substantial personal interest.  The last thing the modern world needs is an impotent ambassador to these great nations of thought preaching their virtues even as he summarily butchers them and offers up only tripe.   As fate would have it, he is such an ambassador.

    I finally took the plunge and steered my way onto main street, stopping directly in front of The Lost Symbol, and immediately regretted the choice.  Like everyone else, I saw The Davinci Code and was duly impressed by how accurately Tom Hank’s hair imitated a toupee.  The white monk assassin was terrific fodder for many a Scary Movie spin off parody, and I, like so many others, got to feel like the pristine monolithic secrets of the world’s power hungry elite were effectively rendered flaccid by the single minded persistence of a lowly Harvard professor.  

    The Lost Symbol, to cut to the chase, is so poorly written, one has to throw up

 

 

 

 

one’s hands and ask the same questions that have bounced in the wake of the success stories of Boy bands and Britney Spears, Michael Bay and Keanu Reeves…. How did they EVER get contracts?  Is there any justice in the world?  When did talent completely fall off the list of prerequisites for fame?  How many times can one “author” use the exact same words to describe a peripheral character’s eyes in a chapter?  Hint – it’s more than three… 

Seriously, the writing is so bad, it almost could be excused as stylistic, if the style had anything whatsoever to do with the form… First book in a long time I’ve simply not been able to wend my way through.  I’d burn it, but I like the air too much.  I bet it would make good compost, though...

 

Comments

[Vger42]

I totally agree with you. I barely made it through Da vinci Code, and haven't picked up a Dan Brown book since. Really poor writing!

[Squidbag]

I actually liked Angels and Demons and the DaVinci Code, even if the latter was made up mostly of ideas he ripped off from the Freemasonic literature of the last 20 years. I have illustrated editions of both, which helps. They are obviously flawed. I really hate the whole "only atheist character turns out to be a treacherous snake" thing. All that said, Lost Symbol is an undulating mass of vomit. Hated it, and think that Brown is trying to write screenplays instead of novels, and that his quality dips (or in this case, plummets) with each one.

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