Dan Brown's Inferno

Good news for Florence in Northern Italy! A new Dan Brown book has hit the bookstores and it's all about local boy Dante Alighieri. No, he's not an overpaid soccer-player but an early 14th century writer.  Check him out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri.

You already know Dan Brown, of course; he's the guy who got rich writing an appallingly bad book called The Da Vinci Code.  So, has he learned anything?  Is the new book, Inferno, going to be any better?  I haven't read it myself -- I'm waiting for them to start arriving in bulk at my local charity bookshop. But the early reviews both sides of the Atlantic don't look good.  Here are a few samples.

"The new novel is probably the closest Brown will ever get to his version of The Hangover: Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital with a bad case of retrograde amnesia after a gunshot head wound and a strange object connected to Dante's Inferno." Brian Truitt, USA Today

 "Narration appears lifted from a Fodor's guide, as when Langdon pauses in the middle of a life-or-death escape to remember the history of a bridge: 'Today the vendors are mostly goldsmiths and jewelers, but that has not always been the case. Originally the bridge had been home to Florence's vast, open-air market, but the butchers were banished in 1593.' It's like trying to solve a mystery while one of those self-guided tour headsets is dangling from your ears." Monica Hesse, Washington Post

"As a stylist Brown gets better and better: where once he was abysmal he is now just very poor. His prose, for all its detailing of brand names and the exact heights of buildings, is characterised by imprecision. It works to prevent the reader from engaging with the story ... But in the end this is his worst book, and for a sad, even noble, reason – his ambition here wildly exceeds his ability." Jake Kerridge, The Daily Telegraph

Jack Kerridge has it dead right. In the preface to The Da Vinci Code Brown gave credit for the research to his wife. That, in my opinion, could be grounds for divorce. But the problem is not with the stuff he makes up, it's with the stuff he doesn't need to make up. It's the job of fiction writers to invent reality. But every time he makes a simple mistake of inconsequential fact he torpedoes the reader's carefully suspended disbelief.  In one four-page passage of DVC (the chase across Paris) he makes seven basic mistakes.  For example, Europol does not operate marked police cars with flashing lights and sirens in the French capital.  Nor any other European capital for that matter.  [Easy to check: https://www.europol.europa.eu/.]

Dan Brown is an achingly bad writer. His editors at Doubleday should be ashamed of themselves. These are all problems good editing can fix. Maybe Doubleday doesn't have any good editors with some professional pride? Maybe they are just happy to bank the proceeds from selling this crap?