The Da Vinci Code opens later this week, and I imagine that Ruth and I will go see it at some point. We both read the book. I bought it while in a foul mood after a painful dental procedure, planning to hate it in order to spite the world. It wasn't as bad as I expected, having already sat through the audio book version of Deception Point. But it was bad.

I thought about trying to describe the ways in which these books are bad. Then a few weeks ago I found a bunch of old posts by one of the Language Log guys absolutely ripping Brown to pieces. I think the biggest thing is Brown's "knack for coming up with exactly the phrase not to use." Even if the plots of his novels were better, it is very hard to get into the action because the you're constantly distracted by unfortunately phrasings and ludicrous dialog.

Dr. Pullman starts out by laying out some specific criticisms of word choice and style.

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.

Later, he explains how every Dan Brown novel begins with exactly the same sentence.

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier ("Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered across the savage splendor of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, struggling to remove the knife plunged unnaturally into his back by a barbarous millionaire novelist"), and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.

And, in probably the funniest post on the subject, he returns to cover both the lazy repetition and the terrible word choice.

A renowned male expert at something dies a hideous death and straight away a renowned expert at something quite different gets a surprise call and has to take an unexpected plane flight and then face some 36 hours of astoundingly dangerous and exhausting adventures involving a good-looking (and of course expert) member of the opposite sex and when the two of them finally get access to a double bed she disrobes and tells him mischievously (almost minatorily) to prepare himself for strenuous sex. Where are we?

We're in a Dan Brown novel.

[...]

But the acme of inexpertly crunched metaphors in Deception Point is on page 27 (and I swear I'm not making this up): he uses the expression "learning the ropes in the trenches". Think about that for a while. Learning the ropes is a naval metaphor; it's about rigging and sails and mooring. Being in the trenches is an army metaphor. You can hardly be in both services simultaneously — hauling up sails on a naval frigate while dug in with the infantry on the western front. Dan has to make his military metaphor mind up.

I'm sorry, but this man is simply not competent to write prose for public consumption.

Good stuff all around. Please go read all of those posts, and if you enjoy them, also the one on Digital Fortress and abuse of eyebrows.

Finally, a bit of google bombing. There is compelling evidence that someone named Mark Steyn is a plagiarist.

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