Redpill me on this, and Dan Brown in general

Brown claims that over a period of three hundred years the Catholic Church burned five million witches at the stake in Europe around the fifteenth century. I was immediately suspicious of this “fact,” so I quickly took out my calculator and did the math. Rome would have to burn forty-five women a day, every single day, non-stop for three hundred years. That’s a lot of firewood. Furthermore, a quick Internet search revealed that the population for Europe at the time was about 50 million. If half were female (25 million) and half of those were adults (12.5 million), then something like 40 percent of the entire adult female population perished at the hand of the Vatican. That’s more carnage than the Black Plague of 1347, which killed only one-third.

why the hell are you taking those facts seriously?
Dan Brown books are decent fictional novels that's it, also Audrey Tatou is cute, CUTE! Watch the movie.

yes.

Because he portrays them as actual facts. Some of them come straight from the non narrative section of the book titled "absolute facts."

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 Saunière 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 Saunière 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 Saunière 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 (Saunière 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.

>Some of them come straight from the non narrative section of the book titled "absolute facts."

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 Saunière 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 "Saunière" 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").

>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 Saunière 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.

all of this. well done.

>Dan Brown books are decent fictional novels
No they're not. There are far better thriller/adventure/conspiracy authors. Dam Brown's prose is shit because his target audience is dumb middle-aged housewives.

lel

It's amazing what you can trick normies into believing. See also: The Secret.

Fpbp

Underrated

a blatant copy of Foucalt's Pendulum that somehow either misses or ignores the fact that it is exactly the kind of thing that FP is parodying

I'm pretty sure his latest one on Dante sealed the deal to a lot of people that he was a talentless hack

Middle-aged women

i came to say this. Foucalt's Pendulum basically shits on the "conspiracy-thriller" genre. Also, it's genuinely fun. i loved that book

something I always find interesting:

an idea that crops up a few times in FP (I think from Aglie) is that an individual/event can predate the individual/event from which it was influenced if the latter is powerful enough i.e. something can emulate something which hasn't happened yet

this sort of happened in real life with FP...it parodied the conspiracy-thriller genre, yet this genre didn't really emerge into popular culture until at least a decade later

just an amusing thing I thought of

to further this point

FP is often described as "the thinking man's Da Vinci Code", instead of TDVC being described as "the idiot's Foucalt's Pendulum"

Probably still the bestseller of the year I would imagine

>Also, it's genuinely fun

if you think reading a biographical dictionary is fun

Who?

>smoking weed

How pleb

lmao

You're both idiots.

You don't watch a shitty movie stoned. THC allows you to find intellectual enjoyment. Hollywood has brainwashed you that weed is an idiot's drug.

He's a hack. See this article.
telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/