Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mystmarimatt
Dan Brown's novels are in the same vein as those of Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles, Both authors use formulaic narratives and story structures to show what they really want to show, all of the nifty information they've dug up. The plots of these stories end up as they should: pointless, drab canvasses upon which each author can paint how brilliant they are and what their extensive research has produced.
|
Yep. I read
Deception Point, which was pretty decent, though completely formulaic. There's a prologue, as there is in each of his books. The first sentence of the prologue introduces a character who appears to be happily going about his own business in the Arctic. In fact the first two words of the novel are his name.
Two words into the book I knew that character would be dead before the end of the prologue. And he was.
In case you haven't read all of Dan Brown's books... If you've read one of them, you've read all of them.
Angels and Demons is
The Da Vinci Code with antimatter produced at CERN.
Deception Point is
The Da Vinci Code with a meteorite and NASA.
Digital Fortress is
Da Vinci Code with a supercomputer at the NSA (and as a technologist, this particular novel made me very embarassed for Mr. Brown).
They're not bad reads (well, excluding
Digital Fortress) but mostly they're a playing ground for the interesting research Brown has done.
Incidentally, see <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html">this brilliant article</a> excoriating Brown for the stylistic naivete and awkwardness of his prose:
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>