Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 24

An extraordinary writer, Dan Brown is notable for many things, not least of which is the fact that he has a name so boring, so dull and ordinary, that he might actually be a committee and his name might be an acronym. Did A Novel, Broke Records Of World Novel-ness. Something like that, anyway. But because of his huge success, notably the Da Vinci Code and lots of others called things like The Retard Sanction and Atlantic Moss, many people profess to hate Dan Brown.

True, he’s not the world’s greatest writer. True, he writes sentences like: ‘Hell!’ cursed Senator John Donkey as he slammed the phone slammily down. Fifty-six and silver-haired yet still with the youthful good looks that belied his many years working the oil rigs of the Persian Gulf, the senator cursed rudely and realized realizingly that he was – without question – trapped forever in a sentence from which he could never escape.’

But he is very popular and he writes what we used to call ‘yarns’. Big, floppy adventure stories with cardboard people in them, that are escapist, ridiculous and page-turnerly. So why is he – and all the other lesser, not quite so wealthomatic, blockbuster people – so reviled? Is it because his books are easy to read, and easy things must also be bad things? Is it because he is successful and all successful people are bad evil murderers? Or is it because by hating Dan Brown and the rest, you are saying, ‘Look! I didn’t like the Da Vinci Code! And if I go on about it, people will think I must be really erudite and read only early twentieth-century Vorticist novels; when in fact I am an ill-informed snob who once got halfway through Pride and Prejudice and had to start again because I’d forgotten what it was about.’ (See JANE AUSTEN.)