It was one of the worst books I have read in long time. I only finished it because I had received it as a gift and I would have felt guilty if I had thrown it away. Note that I like all kinds of “thrillers” (I read Dick Frances, Dean Koontz, and the like on weekends) and so I don’t think that I was holding A&D to any sort of inflated standard.
I could deal with the implausable plot and the impossible pace, but I could not stomach the stereotypical characters and the oversimplified conflicts. According to Brown all religious people hate all scientists and vice versa. At one point in the book he actually shows the world’s leading scientists rejoicing at the news of the possible mass murder of thousands of Catholics and the destruction of the world’s finest treasures of art.
Brown talks down to the reader throughout the entire book. Nemo put it well:
But its even worse because Brown comes across as a smug know-it-all, when he in fact knows little more than overused, oversimplified stereotypes.
Worst of all however is that the character development is not psychologically realistic. He sacrifices the authenticity of the characters in order to keep throwing in plot twists. This is in my opinon the mark of a bad book and a poor writer. I can deal with improbable plots and impossible situations but when the characters are not believeable then the whole story falls apart.
I think you meant “touting” in your first sentence, right? I wouldn’t’ve nitpicked, but after Shade had it as “taunting” I gave into my little voice.
Anyway, KC, I hear you about TDVC not being literature, and I am fine with that. I love all sorts of books - what’s the baseball saying? “Play the Game Within Yourself” - so if you are a fastballer, don’t try fancy pitches; if you are a junkballer, don’t try to bring the heat. I love good trashy books of all genres - sci-fi, detective, chick lit, etc - I love books that are great examples of a genre, whether the genre is trashy or not…
I guess my point is that I don’t think Dan Brown writes good trashy books - of the two I read - Angels and Demons and Decepton Point - the one thing he seemed to do reasonably well was set a fast pace and keep you moving. That’s it - the plot, characters, plausibility, etc…really kinda sucked. And so when TDVC took off to become the phenom it has, I just kinda rolled my eyes - I tried him twice before and really don’t think he is a particularly good writer. YMMV.
FWIW - my favorite “normal man gets thrust into a worldwide conspiracy” types of books are a few by Robert Ludlum - the all-time king of this type of genre; and the movie “North by Northwest” - absolutely fits into this category - trashy thriller fun that Hitchcock and Cary Grant turn into a masterpiece…
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good thriller as much as the next reader. But go out and get something by Tom Clancy or Ken Follett or A.J. Quinnell before you read Angels & Demons.
The tension in the plot stems from a fancy high-tech undetectable bomb which is due to go off in less that 24 hours. (Not really a spoiler, you get that after 20 pages.) No problem, that’s just a MacGuffin.
My issue was that three feet away from the undectable bomb was a wireless security video camera broadcasting the ubiquitous red LED timer. Rather than race around Rome solving riddles, I was screaming at the book for someone to just track the broadcasted signal.
I slowly got over that as the book progressed. I was enjoying the frivolous conspiracy theories.
Brown would do things like quote extensively from a cited article in the New York Times or the BBC. I figured that he was taking historical “dots” and connecting them in an interesting way. That was fair in my mind, after all, it is fiction.
Then when I went looking for those articles, the dots didn’t even exist. There were no such articles in the Times or the BBC on the days listed. My opinion of the book crashed back down into the negative zone.
I agree. I could not care less that the “facts” in either book were manufactured out of thin air. I enjoyed reading them both.
Implausible? Of course! Are the James Bond adventures (for example) any more plausible? Sheesh.
I don’t understand why people spout such vitriole. I think much of it has to do with the armchair critic’s seeming opinion that “if it’s popular, it’s crap.”
By the way, Digital Fortress in my opinion is so bad to be almost unreadable. If you want an example of bad writing, bad plotting, and bad characterization, point to that instead. And Deception Point was disappointing after his middle two books.
Are we reading the same thread? It seems to me that nearly everyone in this thread has said they are willing to suspend disbelief for a better thriller or mystery – anything from Tom Clancy to Dean Koontz and others. In fact, I think people went out of their way in this thread to clarify that they were not saying “if it’s popular, it’s crap.”
I guess I just have carry-over frustration with other people who do have the opinion that if it’s popular it’s crap. In general, I think people tend to criticize Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons for the wrong reasons. YMMV.
I read both DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, and I’ve posted my vitriol against these in other threads. I’m not so much in the camp of the “it’s an implausible plot” as I am in the “Dan Brown can’t write for shit” category. Little Nemo got it exactly right:
God do I hate that kind of writing. If the main character is supposed to be smarter than the average joe (like, say, me the reader) have him act that way. You don’t have to explain everything to the reader.
And it’s a shame, because I’ve got to give the Mr. Brown his props for coming up with genuinely interesting ideas, or topline themes. It’s just that the execution is so poor…
I read DVC first, then A&D, and felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu – it’s like A&D was a first draft of DVC.
It’s a fun, beach book, I guess. But his faults are so glaring…I think the one that bugged me the most was when he described a videotape as a precious piece of “cellulose”. Potatoes are made of cellulose; videotapes are made of celluloid. Just what do editors do these days, anyway?
I’m just here thinking that some people dismiss Quicksilver, or Foucault’s Pendulum, as populist claptrap, but a lot more dismiss DVC, but still in a minority enough for controvosy, as compared to “I’m stuck on an island in an implausable gameshow” show of the week, which everyone knows is claptrap, so enjoys without backlash.
(Random point that bugs me. These two men are the most educated on Earth about the grail. You’d bloody well hope they would know Hebrew - at least the alphabet. Hell, I know 20% of it. Less amazement, please.)
Oh, be serious. Pffft. Compared to Illuminatus!, Brown’s book is dumbern’ a sack of bricks. Actually, compared to most goddamn anything, it’s dumbern’ a sack of bricks, but the contrast stands even more sharply with Illuminatus! because those books were so damn fun.
Look, I have nothing (NOTHING) against a little light reading. Hell, I just motored through all four Ace Atkins “blues mysteries” books. But Brown does three things that drives me up a wall and makes me want to hurt him:
[ul]
[li]He makes his characters stoopid. These people are supposed to be leading experts in religious and semiotic (oh, by the way, try to find THAT word somewhere in Brown’s books. He tries to get away with “symbolismolisticology” or some shit.) lore. And they can’t figure out that the sooper-dooper sekrit code word that’s stumped Bacon and Galileo and Botticelli and God himself is just fucking written backwards.[/li][li]He makes shit up, and specifically intimates that it is true. The books are riddled with this shit. Like the Templars finding something under the Temple Mount at Jerusalem. Horseshit. They dug, didn’t find anything, then got whupped like bitches and went home.[/li][li]When someone who knows what the fuck he’s talking about points out that Brown’s books are full of steaming, ahistorical bullshit, Brown takes the most disingenuous possible route and says that “he enjoys the discourse,” like the exposure his work is getting is shining the pure light of Truth into the fetid bowels of the Catholic Church. It’s not “discourse,” you schmuck! It’s someone telling you you’re wrong and warping history for your own pecuniary gain! Just admit that the whole thing is fiction, and everything’s jake, you turkey.[/li][/ul]
That was my reaction, too - it was almost the same book, with locations and ‘info the “evil” Vatican is trying to hide from humanity’ changed. I’ve wondered if I would have liked A&D better and DVC less had I read A&D first.
I agree with you here. I just discovered Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder novels (a “popular” series), and I really found the writing, plot, pacing, and characters all clever and enjoyable. Who wouldn’t want to laugh out loud? Unfortunately, when I recommend them, people seem to put them in a category of “crap” without even reading them.
Re: James Bond and plausibility. I think others in this thread have explained it better than I. I can buy into James Bond, despite the ridiculousness, for two reasons. First, it doesn’t take itself so seriously or pretend to be something it’s not. And second, the character himself is consistently developed as someone who would be doing the things he does. In A&D, I noticed that all of the main character’s personality was conveyed through what other people supposedly thought of him, or things he had done in the past. His actions and words in the “present” didn’t ring true, and did nothing to tell me anything about him at all. I can’t buy into a character when I have to be told in simple statements what I should think of him, rather than shown his behaviors and draw my own conclusions.
P.S. I am such not a literary person. I hope I used all those words correctly. :o
Dan Brown writes popcorn books.
While you’re reading one, you can’t stop. (Just like you have to keep digging into the popcorn bucket.)
But, once you’re done, there’s nothing left.
They’re just dumb, fun, easy reads.
And he’s making jillions of dollars. Good for him. (There is a place for popcorn in this world.)
It was pretty terrible. I kept going because I like B-movies, and this was a B-movie in print (you know, it’s so bad that it’s enjoyable), and I enjoyed quoting particularly awful bits to DangerDad and watching his head explode.
