Why I'm Surprised to Hear the Movie Is Bad

Dan Brown is a bad writer - bad in one of the two dimensions that you can be a bad writer in. (I think the reason many linguists and other science-types are so surprised Brown's so successful is that their writing only has that one dimension.)

Brown is a bad stylist, as Geoff Pullum has often blogged about over on Language Log (I'm pointing you at the list of his posts There are 17 results now, though some are rehashing it in view of Mark Steyne's rather liberal lifting of Pullum's stuff.., but I digress).

His metaphors often make you stop dead, and his syntax is odd - he has a tendency to use the wrong arguments for a verb, as in thinking lecture works like say instead of like talk, for instance (as Pullum points out), and that ridicule does, too (as Pullum doesn't mention): that is to say, he writes things like this:

"Terrorism," the professor had lectured, "has a singular goal." (from A&D)

You are white as a ghost, the inmates ridiculed, as the guards marched him in, naked and cold. (from TDVC)

He's also under the impression that rib takes a that clause instead of an about one. (He's not afraid of the tag said, though, and he's mastered the non-tag speech attribution: he's not a beginning writer, just an awkward one.)

I did want to say that there are things Brown does that Pullum doesn't mention, like my favorite (though it's from Angels and Demons not The DaVinci Code:)

[Langdon is visiting CERN.] ...a young man jogged by. His T-shirt proclaimed the message: NO GUT, NO GLORY!

Langdon looked after him, mystified. "Gut?"

"Grand Unified Theory," Kohler quipped. "The theory of everything."

Quipped? That's a quip?

Okay, that's not a problem with syntax. So try this one:

Langdon watched, detached, his mind churning circles like the [helicopter's] blades, wondering if a full night's sleep would make his current disorientation any clearer. Somehow, he doubted it.

To churn circles means to produce circles by vigorous activity. Langdon's mind is producing circles? I think Brown meant churning in circles. Much stranger, though, is the make his disorientation any clearer. When you 'make X (any) more Y' X must have been Y to start with. And, first, what is a 'clear disorientation'? I think it can only be an 'obvious' one. And probably a full night's sleep would have indeed not made Langdon any more clearly disoriented. But I don't think that's what Brown meant. I think what Brown wanted wasn't clear but clear up: would a full night's sleep have cleared up his disorientation any? Syntax.

Also, Brown has a tendency to leap out of the limited 3rd person point-of-view for one brief paragraph, which is disorienting - for instance, in that same scene in A&D, where Langdon is meeting Kohler for the first time, not even having known the man existed two hours earlier. Suddenly, in the midst of a story being narrated strictly from Langdon's viewpoint, we get told this:

Maximilian Kohler, director general of CERN, was known behind his back as König—King. It was a title of fear more than reverence for the figure who ruled over his domain from a wheelchair throne. Although few knew him personally, the horrific story of how he had been crippled was lore at CERN, and there were few who blamed him for his bitterness...nor for his sworn dedication to pure science.

(Actually, speaking of syntax, the use of sworn is a bit strange there, and the use of nor is simply wrong.)

But the main thing is, that Langdon cannot possibly know this, and yet we are supposedly seeing the whole thing through Langdon's eyes. Desire to give the reader more information than the POV subject can know leads to this ... but it jars.

Anyway, the thing is, Brown is a bad writer in the technique of writing.

But he's a damned fine storyteller. He can spin a yarn like nobody's business.

I was really looking forward to seeing the story without the narration.

(I'll probably go anyway. Sir Ian MacKellan is always worth my time.)