I’m sure Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a cracking story [it had better be], but oh boy, does the prose stink! Here is the opening paragraph from the Prologue:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
Baffling Codes!
The following coded message is introduced in Chapter 8 (accompanied by a reference to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man):
O, Draconian devil!
Oh, lame saint!
If you can decipher it, you are well ahead of the protagonist, who doesn’t crack it until chapter 20! Where’s Hermione Granger when you need her…
[hold cursor over the message to decipher the code]
I was going to explain why I think it stinks, but a quick google reveals that others have already done the same, notably Language Log. I’m not quite so finicky, but I still have a major beef with that last sentence, wherein the "seventy-six-year-old man" from the first clause is referred to by name [Saunière] in the last. The lack of a pronoun makes it sound like they are two different people, so then the reader [ie myself along with a small, randomly selected sample group] has to check it again to realize "Oh right, it’s the same guy".
And this is in the opening paragraph, arguably the most important in the entire book!
If I’d had the sense to open this book before buying it [based on its incredible popularity] I would have read those first few lines, closed it again and chucked it back on the pile. And I am not exactly a literary snob; I like Harry Potter, I’ve never made it more than twenty pages into Ulysses, and I am embarrassed to admit that I have never read anything by Umberto Eco [although somehow I manage to admire his work]. But even I can say — with confidence — that this is a poorly written book.
Brown’s aversion to the personal pronoun is almost pathological; he seems desperately afraid that we will lose track of the characters if he doesn’t keep referring to them by proper name. The following extracts are from Chapter 16, at which point Sophie, the beautiful and gifted cryptologist, is still the only female character in the novel:
Sophie wondered how long it would take Fache to figure out she had not left the building. Seeing that Langdon was clearly overwhelmed, Sophie questioned whether she had done the right thing by cornering him here in the men’s room.
…
Sophie wondered if maybe he had fallen terminally ill and had decided to attempt any ploy he could think of to get Sophie to visit him one last time.
Brown obviously took it to heart when scolded as a child: "She’s the cat’s mother!" In chapter 16, the name "Sophie" appears 25 times within the first 21 paragraphs. Again, at this point in the book, Sophie is the only female character. There are no other characters who could be referred to as "she".
When I bought this book, I was kind of expecting something somewhere between Michael Chabon’s utterly fabulous and Neal Stephenson’s . Needless to say, I was rather disappointed; where there should be prose, I find only stinky cheese. Brown has a penchant for muddy descriptions of people and places, which read like something a high-school student might be chided for. Behold the opening paragraph of Chapter 10:
Silas sat behind the wheel of the black Audi the Teacher had arranged for him and gazed out at the great Church of Saint-Sulpice. Lit from beneath by banks of floodlights, the church’s two bell towers rose like stalwart sentinels above the building’s long body. On either flank, a shadowy row of sleek buttresses jutted out like the ribs of a beautiful beast.
Terrible similes abound. Since when do sentinels tower above their charge? And I don’t think it’s possible to imagine any beast whose ribs jut out as beautiful. Ribs traditionally go inside a beautiful animal. Also, I think he is using the word "either" incorrectly; literally, he is describing a church whose rib-like buttresses jut out on one side or the other, but not both. Again, this is a chapter opening paragraph.
Shouldn’t writing ability be a requirement for the best-selling author? Personally, I want to be able to lose myself within a book, but I find it very hard to do so when clumsy sentence construction and a superabundance of adjectives keep reminding me that it’s all just a bunch of crummy words on paper.