In case you haven't been paying any attention at all to the world of books, Dan Brown's latest book just came out. With that, I thought I'd share how I feel about his writing style, not him as a person. I don't know the guy, but I'm sure he's an interesting guy to talk to. Now, I know that this could be a potentially divisive post, but I'm hoping to keep it fairly level-headed. I'm pretty good at being objective, but if you think I missed something or that I'm way off base, I'm all for considering your point, as long as you back it up with examples. You can't just leave it with, "You don't know anything about anything, poophead." Now that we've got some ground rules for discourse, here we go.
The first thing I want to say is that the man's books are definitely page-turners. They're the kind of books you pick up and read a chapter and get to the end of that chapter and think, "I just can't stop with that," and thumb through the pages to find out how long the next chapter is. "Oh, that's not too long," you inevitably think to yourself and commit to reading for just a few more minutes so you can finish the next chapter. This process continues until you get to the end, realize that you've just missed that meeting you were supposed to go to, didn't make dinner, didn't take the trash out, and missed your usual bedtime by about two hours. Then you kick yourself for getting so sucked in as you think about how many parts of the story could actually be true.
Having said that, he seems to put comic book characters into his books. They tend to be fairly flat, with their defining characteristics aligned the same general direction. Robert Langdon is just a regular guy who's freaky good at puzzles and codes. Langdon also seems like Superman in that it seems like his hair never really gets messed up, he makes his way through the story relatively unscathed. Sure, maybe he gets beat up every now and then, has to run and hide a couple of times, but he's not like John McClane in Die Hard, bleeding all over the place in his cut-up bare feet, doesn't seem to have a dark side that he indulges when he's on the run and "accidents" could happen. I understand that because he's so smart, he gets to stay just a little bit ahead of the physical danger. But that never seems to help Batman. Batman's the World's Greatest Detective, but he has to get his point across to criminals with his bonecrushing fists.
The last point I want to bring up is how many deep, sinister global conspiracies can there be in the world at a time? Holy crap! And a single guy (Robert Langdon) has dug into all of them? Really? I mean, this is more than Mulder and Scully figured out. They only had to deal with the one about aliens. All the other weird stuff they had to figure out were just unexplained, odd cases. And that was their freaking job! They weren't puppeteers by day, mystery solvers when Uncle Sam called the hotline. They were already FBI agents, so it was their job to dig into conspiracies.
All in all, I think the stories are interesting, the characters aren't. And Mr. Brown sells a lot of stories.
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