A Lost Cause

While in the San Francisco airport last weekend, I succumbed to the annoying tickle of pop culture and bought a copy of Dan Brown’s latest blunder. I am ashamed. As suspected, the one-dimensional book included a plot line that was predictable and writing that was less than remarkable. For the entire five-hundred-and-nine-page dramatic spasm, I cringed my way through, nearly gagging at every phrase in Italics (the thoughts of the characters). They were reminders to me that I was reading below standards.

Perhaps it is just a personal literary pet-peeve, but I’ve always found it absurd and insulting to use characters’ thoughts as a way to volley information back to the reader, thrusting facts down the reader’s throat, especially in such a way as to make the characters sound as though they’ve uncovered a major revelation when you’ve just made the same discovery three chapters prior.

Simply put, Dan Brown is an annoying author. True, he can keep you mildly entertained on a surface level, but ultimately you wind up always nine steps ahead of what I’m sure he thought was intended to be anticipation. Instead, it was more a sense of “Are these characters really that dumb?”

It was five years ago that I read both The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, so my memory may be slightly skewed. However, I seem to recall the main character of these novels as somewhat intelligent – at least, not unintelligent. Now, though, our friend Bobby Boy has taken a dramatic drop in I.Q. points.

This downshift in intelligence, coupled with Brown’s irritating lecture-like quality of writing, left me a little less than thrilled. That said, I still claim he has an interesting way of bringing together connections, myths, legends, etc. That is clever, yes; but how many times can you use the same predictable plot formula in order to develop a novel with the same character? Hello, Dan! People can see through this! Thus, The Lost Symbol is a lost cause, and I’m sure Mr. Brown is laughing all the way to the bank.

The only reason I would be interested in watching the film adaptation would be the incredible cinematography I anticipate to be filmed on location in Washington D.C. For this reason alone, I would advocate going to see the movie. Plus, Tom Hanks is just awesome. That is all.