Not a Dan Browner

Although I like Dan Brown's novels, and was rapt when I read The Da Vinci Code, I felt the old ho hum feeling when I read in the WSJ about his just released book, Inferno. The review, The Ninth Circle of Sell by Tom Shippey says:

Chapter after chapter ends with Langdon saying, "My God, that's it!," or with Mr. Brown telling us, "In an instant, he knew." But the "it" is never all of the puzzle, and there's always something else to know. The pace is so hot that it is not till you are well into the chase that you pause to wonder who has set up all these clues and why whoever it is wants them to be solved. Even then, you won't be able to figure it out. Langdon can't, and he knows everything. Of course, he's suffering from short-term amnesia, he's dashing from place to place like a tourist with one day to cover Italy, and people with guns are chasing him, but his real problem is just that nothing is as it seems.

In one of my writing classes the instructor pointed out that it's generally a bad technique to describe the main character by writing something akin to "I looked and the mirror and saw the same brown hair, the same 6'1" man with schlumpy shoulders and hang dog look that I had seen for all of my fifty-two years."

It was at that point that the instructor paused and said, "I mean unless your Dan Brown." At that point he went through the top ten techniques never to use and pointed out that Dan Brown broke everyone of them in the first three chapters of The Da Vinci Code.

But it was this article, Dan Brown's Secret to Keeping Secrets by Alexandra Alter that really piqued my interest. In it she writes:


For Mr. Brown, who has made a name for himself writing novels about explosive revelations and codes, secrecy is paramount. So he uses a technique that he has mastered as a thriller writer: misdirection.

"If I'm trying to keep things secret, it's impossible to talk to these specialists without them saying, 'Oh, my God, you wouldn't believe who was here today and what he was asking,' " Mr. Brown says. "These trips usually take longer than they should, because out of 10 things I see, five of them have nothing to do with the book. I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing."

I guess this speaks to me if only cause it makes me wonder what it would be like to have thousands of ardent and adoring fans that they would actually care with a passion about when the next novel is coming back. I have two or three, I'll let you know when I hit two or three thousand. Maybe next year.

Still, they're both worth reading when you get a mo.