More on the flatulent gasbag of mediocrity that is the Da Vinci Code experience.

Ha! Someone else who was suprised to find that the DVC is really, really poorly written.

Publius guides us to this post by Cnytr that takes the Da Vinci Code to task for being an offense against literature. Here's her take on the literary meris of the DVC:

The strikes against Dan Brown are as follows:

1) Bad Plot
2) Bad style
3) No Sense of Timing
4) Flimsy, Floppy, See-Through Characters Who Aren't Really Characters At All
5) Bad Dialogue
6) Bad Transitioning (ugh, what a movie this is going to make)

She also nails down Brown's wooden literary style, his beating the reader over the head with silly etymological derivations, and his flat characters.

I'm particulalry amused because in the post below I flashed back to Twain's classic "Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offences", in which Twain explains:

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

Likewise, because of Brown's wooden prose and cardboard characters, this detail seemed to have been overlooked in the DVC.

Cnytr's post is therefore music to my ears. I had thought that a law might have been passed requiring eveyone to respectfully compliment the DVC as "a work of fiction".

Here's my post on the DVC from 2004. In an opening paragraph I observed:

"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."

I also thought Brown's literary device of inserting "expository lectures" was lame, particularly when the lecture was given in a flashback sparked by a question to Langdon but Langdon never bothered to answer the other character's question!

Likewise, last year I observed:

"Another amateur stylistic quirk that Brown employs is tying physical appearance to moral status. Thus, Langdon - our hero - is every man’s man. In a two-for-one exhibition of bad literary habits, Brown uses a flashback lecture to describe Langdon’s “captivating presence” and as being “Harrison Ford in Harris Tweed.” (p. 9.) On the other hand, the villains are as physically defective as they're morally impaired. The fact that they’re either albino or crippled led this review to argue that Brown’s book revealed more an open prejudice toward the disabled than it did to Catholicism. Although I think the argument is a stretch, I think that the correspondence course that Brown took on writing must have stressed the idea of developing two-dimensional characters through the use of physical description."

I'm so happy about someone else being willing to acknowledge that Brown is a poor writer, I'm beside myself.