A Review Worth Waiting For

The heroic absurdity of Dan Brown

The less his talent, the more amazing his achievement 

by Clive James 
July 11, 2013
Reproduced in part, from Prospect 

As a believer in the enjoyably awful, I would recommend this book wholeheartedly if I could. But it is mainly just awful. Nevertheless it is still almost worth reading. In the publishing world they have a term, “pull line,” which means the few words of apparent praise that you can sometimes pull out of a review however hostile. Let me supply that pull line straight away, ready furnished with quotation marks: “The author of The Da Vinci Code has done it again.”

Once again, that is, he makes you want to turn the pages even though every page you turn demonstrates abundantly his complete lack of talent as a writer.
The narrative might be a bit less compulsive this time but you still want to follow it, if only to find out whether the hero and the heroine will ever get together. But to do that, they will first have to stop running to escape the heavies.

Discussing Dante even as they run, they are a handsome couple, the hero and the heroine, rather like Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps. The hero we already know. He is Robert Langdon, fresh from his activities as the “symbologist” who cracked the code associated with the famous painter whose surname was Da Vinci. (If Dan Brown’s all-time bestseller had been about the Duke of Edinburgh, it would have been called The Of Edinburgh Code.)

Langdon, though an American, still favours English tailoring. It must be easier to run in. Running beside him is Dr Sienna Brown, described as a “pretty, young woman”, in keeping with Dan Brown’s gift for inserting the fatal extra comma that he or one of his editors believes to be a sign of literacy. And indeed I should perhaps have written “the fatal, extra comma”, but something stopped me: an ear for prose, I hope.

Dan Brown has no ear for prose at all, a handicap which paradoxically gives pathos, and even tenderness, to his attempts at evoking Sienna’s charm. He has no trouble evoking her brains. She has an IQ of 208 and at the age of four she was reading in three languages. You can picture the author at his desk, meticulously revising his original sentence in which, at the age of three, she was reading in four languages. Best to keep it credible. But how to register her beauty as an adult? Here goes: “Tall and lissom, Dr Brooks moved with the assertive gait of an athlete.”

Would that be the assertive gait of a Russian female weightlifter? Probably more like the assertive gait of the British pentathlete Jessica Ennis. Anyway, as usual with a bad writer, the reader has to do most of the imagining. A canny bad writer keeps out of the way so that the reader’s mind can get to work with its own stock of clichés . . . 

. . . . (H)e believes that a short paragraph will add pace, just as he believes that an ellipsis will add thoughtfulness. Groups of three dots appear in innumerable places, giving the impression that the narrative … has measles. This impression is appropriate, because the famous symbologist and the pretty, young woman are actually impelled by their mission to save the world from plague. It isn’t just because the heavies are after them that they are always in such a hurry. . . .


The less he can write, of course, the more admirable his achievement. As well as the heroism of Robert Langdon, we must think of the heroism of Dan Brown. This is a man who started out with such a shaky grasp of the English language that he still thinks “foreboding” is an adjective meaning “ominous.” I also relished “Sienna changed tacks.” . . . On top of the shaky language are piled the solecisms. “Pandora is out of her box.” (Dan, she was never in it.) Piled on top of the solecisms there are the outright mistakes. The C-130 in which the World Health Authority task force travels is called a “transport jet.” It should be a turboprop. In Istanbul, “the Bentley roared away from the curb.” The last Bentley that ever roared was racing at Brooklands before World War Two. But at least he tried to tart up his text with the occasional everyday fact.

. . . .  I have no reason to begrudge Dan Brown his universal success. But I wouldn’t begrudge it anyway. I am an old man: old enough to find pretentious absurdity a diverting spectacle. There is not enough of it in this book, but its author will return, undaunted. Meanwhile he leaves us with a scene in which Robert Langdon puts on Sienna’s wig—she’s bald, I forgot to say—and she helps him to secure it into place with his tie. The scene comes about half way into the book and it proves beyond question that Brown can’t picture what he himself is describing. . . .

Should you read this book? Of course you shouldn’t. Will you read this book? Of course you will. As Sienna puts it: “The mathematics is indisputable.”