... has been penned by Stephen Greydanus, and is titled, "Lies, Damned Lies and Dan Brown: Fact-checking Angels & Demons." Greydanus, who runs the Decent Films site, has written about Brown's novel and the upcoming movie for Catholic World Report, Our Sunday Visitor, and National Catholic Register. His critique is thorough, well-written, and judicious—and often quite humorous:
“Brown’s writing is not just bad,” writes Dr. Geoffrey K. Pullam, Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, in the first of a number of blog posts on Brown at Language Log. “[I]t 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.”
Among other things, Pullam calls out Brown’s penchant for opening action scenes with clumsy “curriculum vitae details” in sentences like “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery” (the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code) and “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own” (the first sentence of Angels & Demons). Pullam delights in debunking Brown’s literary non sequiturs: a voice “chillingly close” yet fifteen feet away; a “mountainous silhouette” with visible pupils and irises as well as skin and hair color.
Pullam’s examples are from The Da Vinci Code; similar instances from Angels & Demons aren’t hard to find. On the first page of chapter one of Angels & Demons, we read that “Langdon sat up in his empty bed”; two pages later, “Robert Langdon wandered barefoot through his deserted Massachusetts Victorian home … ” But he’s still in the bed on the first page, and obviously occupying his Massachusetts Victorian home; you can’t sit up in an empty bed or wander through your deserted home, barefoot or otherwise.
This, of course, is Brown’s inept way of letting us know that Langdon lives and sleeps alone — which perhaps partly explains the author’s embarrassing eagerness, two paragraphs later, to establish his hero’s virility and attractiveness. “Although not overly handsome in a classical sense,” we read, “the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.”
The next paragraph goes on to tell us how Langdon’s friends “had always viewed him as a bit of an enigma” — a bohemian classicist who could be seen “lounging on the quad in blue jeans, discussing computer graphics or religious history” as well as “in his Harris tweed and paisley vest, photographed in the pages of upscale art magazines at museum openings where he had been asked to lecture.”
Literarily, the problem with this preoccupation with Langdon’s credentials as a fascinating, virile, maverick man of the world is that in this scene Langdon is — as Brown has clearly if clumsily established — alone in his home; there’s no one else in the scene for Langdon to impress with his erudite appeal, or through whose eyes we might experience the Langdon effect. So either Langdon himself is sitting around meditating on his own personal mystique — or else, if no one in the scene is thinking about it, we have the author transparently telling (rather than showing) what he wants us to know about his hero, which is to say, indulging his own authorial enthusiasm for his hero’s mystique (with the implication that readers will be equally fascinated).
Read the entire piece.
And speaking of Dan Brown and humorous, John C. Wright has a great post on Brown's "whoppers" about history and such.
Comments