Brown Stains, II

 [Rescued from Drafts]

The Dan Brown villain plots...

A single bell chimed on Mal’akh’s grandfather clock, and he looked up. Six thirty P.M. Leaving his tools, he wrapped the Kiryu silk robe around his naked, six-foot-three body and strode down the hall. The air inside this sprawling mansion was heavy with the pungent fragrance of his skin dyes and smoke from the beeswax candles he used to sterilize his needles. The towering young man moved down the corridor past priceless Italian antiques—a Piranesi etching, a Savonarola chair, a silver Bugarini oil lamp.

Wow. antiques. But hold it, etchings, even Piranesi etchings - and I yield to nobody in my admiration of the Carcieri -

aren't priceless: they're multiples, and they go for comparatively small sums.

The Brown version

Their collection had grown into an eclectic fusion of new and old . . . of cutting-edge and historical. Most of Katherine’s books bore titles like Quantum Consciousness, The New Physics, and Principles of Neural Science. Her brother’s bore older, more esoteric titles like the Kybalion, the Zohar, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and a translation of the Sumerian tablets from the British Museum.

One of these things is not like the others.

Mmmm... The Kybalion, 1908 (but claiming to be the essence of the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus,a contemporary of Moses); the Zohar, 13th CE claiming to be 2nd CE; Sumerian tablets, before the 2nd millenium BCE; The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979), New York: William Morrow and Company, hardcover: ISBN 0-688-03402-0, paperback: ISBN 0-688-08402-8, 352 pp. You know you're getting old when the books around in your youth are referred to as 'historical'.

And the first edition of Principals of Neural Science was published in 1981.

Oh, but the thrill's not there any more. Picking errors in Brown is becoming uncomfortably like pedantically missing the point. The Lost Symbol isn't epically bad, like DVC, it's just not very good. The question that arises is not "Why are millions of people wasting their time on this book?" but "Why am I wasting my time on this book?"

Credit where credit

Dan Brown
Should be run out of town
For earning more than us
For such an unspeakable puddle of pus.

Brown stains

Turning to the latest Dan Brown...
And overcoming the instant disappointment that he's changed the previously invariable pattern of his first sentences...
it's still just as gloriously crappy as it ever was.

Langdon sat up straight and slid his lecture notes back into his leather daybag. He’d been halfway through reviewing Masonic symbology when his mind had drifted. The daydream about his late father, Langdon suspected, had been stirred by this morning’s unexpected invitation from Langdon’s longtime mentor, Peter Solomon.
The other man I never want to disappoint.
The fifty-eight-year-old philanthropist, historian, and scientist had taken Langdon under his wing nearly thirty years ago, in many ways filling the void left by Langdon’s father’s death. Despite the man’s influential family dynasty and massive wealth, Langdon had found humility and warmth in Solomon’s soft gray eyes.
Outside the window the sun had set, but Langdon could still make out the slender silhouette of the world’s largest obelisk, rising on the horizon like the spire of an ancient gnomon. The 555-foot marble-faced obelisk marked this nation’s heart. All around the spire, the meticulous geometry of streets and monuments radiated outward.
Even from the air, Washington, D.C., exuded an almost mystical power.
Langdon loved this city, and as the jet touched down, he felt a rising excitement about what lay ahead. The jet taxied to a private terminal somewhere in the vast expanse of Dulles International Airport and came to a stop.
Langdon gathered his things, thanked the pilots, and stepped out of the jet’s luxurious interior onto the foldout staircase. The cold January air felt liberating.
Breathe, Robert, he thought, appreciating the wide-open spaces.

Dynasties are families unless otherwise specified; "academic dynasty", yes, but otherwise just dynasty.
What could one possibly step out of other than the interior?
I've never thought Robert Langton was all that bright, but having to remind oneself to breathe - by name - is surely diagnostic.
And so it goes, clunker after clunker, every thousand-dollar word flatter than the last.
The 'obelisk, rising on the horizon like the spire of an ancient gnomon...' A gnomon is the sticky-up bit on a sundial, so 'like a gnomon' or even 'like an ancient gnomon' are possible; but gnomons don't have spires, which are architectural; gnomons don't have parts at all, a gnomon can't be disassembled into 'spire' and, say, 'base'.

And the spire can't be rising on the horizon: he's still in the air, and the horizon is what, twenty miles away? Langdon can see the obelisk, perhaps, with its shadow, which is why Brown originally thought of the word 'gnomon', but not on the horizon. The horizon comes in because the word obelisk suggests something sticking up in the air like a spire, and the fact that Langdon can't be seeing that doesn't stop Brown typing it in. He doesn't shape, he accretes.

Brown has absolutely no facility for visualization; his observations are assembled from a kit of subroutines. He proceeds within a cloud of cliches vaguely linked in his mind with the memory of a meaning.