May 20, 2006

• Tell you what, it was absolutely appalling to read the opening sentences of The DaVinci Code at Language Log, the blog-type-thing of Geoffrey Pullum, a professor of linguistics.  One keeps hearing how good a book it is, deplorable theology and historical inaccuracies aside. 

  They’re kidding, right? 

  
  Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted
  archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting
  he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old
  man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and
  Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

  As the professor put it:

  Brown’s writing is not just bad;
  it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In
  some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully
  selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of
  this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep
  reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco
  International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old
  Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row
  did not appeal, that’s why. And why did I keep the book instead of
  dropping it into a Heathrow trash bin? Because it seemed to me to be
  such a fund of lessons in how not to write.
  
  ….[Brown] is a
  huge, blockbuster, worldwide success who can go anywhere he wants and
  need never work again. And he writes like the kind of freshman student
  who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching. Never mind
  the ridiculous plot and the stupid anagrams and puzzle clues as the
  book proceeds, this is a terrible, terrible example of the
  thriller-writer’s craft.

  Well!  This gives one, as Hercule Poirot liked to say, furiously to think.  If the publishing industry places this high a value upon  “syntactic swill” then why shouldn’t there be a slice of the pie with my name on it?

  Perhaps I ought to haul out Mercy Maude! and try to complete it.  

  BTW, when it comes to the almost-unanimous bad reviews for the movie, the palm surely must go to a reviewer for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, John Beifuss, who noted:  You know a movie’s a dud when even its self-flagellating albino killer monk isn’t any fun. 

  Maybe there’s a way to work a self-flagellating albino killer monk into MM? 

  And mine’ll be fun. 
  
  

  • 11:20 am
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