Misanthrope Girl

As I have mentioned before, I have never tortured my eyeballs by subjecting them to a Dan Brown novel. This was a personal choice and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s The Dan Brown Code simply further entrenched my desire never to do so.

However it is because of Pullum’s piece that I am able to appreciate Michael Deacon’s excellent skewering of Brown in the Telegraph on Friday:

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

If you haven’t already, do please go and read the whole thing. If, like me, you have chosen to avoid Brown’s oeuvre then read Pullum first.

Recently, via the Register, I came across Oxfam’s list of the most donated and most sold books at their charity stores .

To be honest the list doesn’t contain any real surprises and (thankfully) I can only put my hand up to having read works by two of the mentioned authors – Stephen King and Terry Pratchett – and certainly nothing by Dan Brown who tops the most donated list and is at number 3 on the sellers list.

The presence of his Vatican bothering-ness however reminded me of a particularly wonderful blog post a former colleague showed me many years back that pointed out, for the uninitiated, just how bad the multimillionaire’s writing really is.

Being a kindly soul I thought I would pass it on.

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

Enjoy!