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Speakers vs. hearers | Main | Indigoed in Pearlspace

May 01, 2004
THE DAN BROWN CODE
Approximately three people still haven't read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code: Mark
Liberman, David Lupher, and reportedly at least one other person (as yet unidentified).*
Regrettably, neither Barbara nor I are able to claim that the third non-reader is one of us. What can
I say by way of excuse for this? I found the book was on sale really cheap in CostCo when we were
about to leave on a trip to Europe. I bought it for the long, long flights that lay ahead of us, without
knowing much about it except that it was supposed to be an intellectual mystery with cryptography
and symbology and stuff and the blurbs said it was great. I didn't open it, I just grabbed one off a
pallet of about 500 copies. Barbara was between mysteries at the time, so she grabbed it from me
and rapidly read it over the next couple of days before we even left for the airport. I asked hopefully
what it was like. She scowled and said something about the Hardy Boys. My heart sank; I
understood her to mean it was pathetic but possibly of interest to the 11-year-old market. By the
time we were on our plane she had made sure that her flight bag contained a new novel by Menking
Hannell, and over southern Oregon she told me it was great as usual. Unfortunately I had no better
idea of what to do with my time, so I openedThe Da Vinci Code.
I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first
sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time
stylistically.
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned.
Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter
heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunire 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
Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the
company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum
vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in
journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this
might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunire died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.
But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence details of not only
his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of
utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunire is
fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates).

We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that
he was curating at the Louvre.
The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and word choice blunders in almost every
paragraph (sometimes every line). Look at the phrase "the seventy-six-year-old man". It's a
complete let-down: we knew he was a man the anaphoric pronoun "he" had just been used to
refer to him. (This is perhaps where "curator" could have been slipped in for the first time, without
"renowned", if the passage were rewritten.) Look at "heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it
tore from the wall and Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas." We don't need to
know it's a masterpiece (it's a Caravaggio hanging in the Louvre, that should be enough in the way of
credentials, for heaven's sake). Surely "toward him" feels better than "toward himself" (though I
guess both are grammatical here). Surely "tore from the wall" should be "tore away from the wall".
Surely a single man can't fall into a heap (there's only him, that's not a heap). And why repeat the
name "Saunire" here instead of the pronoun "he"? Who else is around? (Caravaggio hasn't been
mentioned; "a Caravaggio" uses the name as an attributive modifier with conventionally elided head
noun "painting". That isn't a mention of the man.)
Well, actually, there is someone else around, but we only learn that three paragraphs down, after "a
thundering iron gate" has fallen (by the way, it's the fall that makes a thundering noise: there's no
such thing as a thundering gate). "The curator" (his profession is now named a second time in case
you missed it) "...crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for someplace
to hide" (the colloquial American "someplace" seems very odd here as compared with standard
"somewhere"). Then:
A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared
through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His
irises were pink with dark red pupils.
Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak a person speaks; a voice is what a person
speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away
behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?)
cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means
temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette
is a shadow. If Saunire can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at
fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.
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.

I don't think I'd want to say these things about a first-time novelist, it would seem a cruel blow to a
budding career. But Dan Brown is all over the best-seller lists now. In paperback and hardback, and
in many languages, he is a phenomenon. He is up there with the Stephen Kings and the John
Grishams and nothing I say can conceivably harm him. He is a huge, blockbuster, worldwide success
who can go anywhere he wants and need never work again. And he writes like the kind of freshman
student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching. Never mind the ridiculous plot
and the stupid anagrams and puzzle clues as the book proceeds, this is a terrible, terrible example of
the thriller-writer's craft.
Which brings us to the question of the blurbs. "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and
most accomplished writers in the country," said Nelson DeMille, a bestselling author who has
himself hit the #1 spot in theNew York Times list. Unbelievable mendacity. And there are four other
similar pieces of praise on the back cover. Together those blurbs convinced me to put this piece of
garbage on the CostCo cart along with the the 72-pack of toilet rolls. Thriller writers must have a
code of honor that requires that they all praise each other's new novels, a kind of omerta that
enjoins them to silence about the fact that some fellow member of the guild has given evidence of
total stylistic cluelessness. A fraternal code of silence. We could call it... the Da Vinci code; or the
Dan Brown code.
_____________
*The third non-reader was unknown when this post was first drafted, but it has since been edited, and as of today (May
2, 2004) I can confirm that Bill Poser and Danny Yee are both claiming not to have read The Da Vinci Code. Fair
enough. So at least four people have not read it. I just wish one of them was me.

[Update -- Additional Language Log posts about Dan Brown's novels and related topics:
"The sixteen first rules of fiction" (May 15, 2004)
"Dan Brown still moving very briskly about" (November 4, 2004)
"Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence" (November 7,
2004)
"Oxen, sharks, and insects: we need pictures" (November 8, 2004)
"Thank God for film: Dan Brown without the writing" (December 2, 2004)
"Learning the ropes in the trenches with Dan Brown" (July 14, 2005)
"Don't look at their eyes!" (July 19, 2005)
"A five-letter password for a man obsessed with Susan" (September 10, 2005)
"Some striking similarities" (May 15, 2006)
"Is Mark Steyn guilty of plagiarism?" (May 15, 2006)
Cutting in line: what would Of Nazareth do? (May 16, 2006)
A tale of two copiers (May 17, 2006)
]
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at May 1, 2004 03:43 PM