The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

"She was moving down the corridor toward them with long, fluid strides...a haunting certainty to her gait."

There are so many things wrong with this sentence that it’s difficult to know where to start. In no particular order:

- “a haunting certainty”; what on earth does that mean?
- The three dots...why?
- Isn’t gait a word usually associated with horses? Brown uses it here to introduce the heroine/love interest.

Okay, so it’s hardly original to criticise the prose of this book, but I’ve encountered more stylistic zest in a photocopier manual. The clumsy exposition, the bizarre choice of adjectives, and the unconvincing dialogue – they all made me laugh out loud at their ineptitude. I confess I enjoyed some of the reheated conspiracy stuff despite its unoriginality, but you have to wade through pages of turgid travelogue masquerading as plot to get there. It takes nearly 200 pages to get out of the Louvre for crying out loud.

This book is a failure as entertainment, in terms of ideas and as an artistic endeavour. Is this really the world’s favourite author? God help us.

ps This post caused quite a stir in when I wrote it in a reading group of which I was briefly a member. Check it out.