Da(m)n Brown

I have no personal vendetta against him, nor am I prejudiced. I am just a kid who grew up reading “The Hardy Boys” and “The Three Investigators” kind of novels. The kind of fascination and awe I had for those novels are not the same as those that I have for the 4 Dan Brown novels… might be because I was a school kid teenager then and now I am a mature adult… but then Dan Brown’s books were meant for adults right?

But let us get into the fundamental question… is he really the great author that everyone portrays him as? Unputtdownable !!! awesome plots !!! stupendous narration !!! fast paced thriller !!! "I love Dan Brown" !!!

Is it so?

Let me tell you how to become a Dan Brown…

Watch a lot of movies… English action ones preferably those on the lines of extreme action Mission Impossible series and Bond movies… here you can get the fast paced narration. The high speed car chases on the English mountains to the amazing navy seal rescue operations can be copy pasted into one of the chapters… you don’t even have to mention the source or fear copyright problems…

Also watch a lot National Geographic and Discovery. Here you will get a lot of information on the most pressing issues of the world right from the historical paintings in Paris from the 800BC to the abnormal rock formation at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Just pay attention to the detail, google up the jargons and you have more text for your descriptive passages. It does not matter if the “facts” are technically correct or if the words actually connect. Just put them in with amazing words just cooked up from around the world like massively multiprocessor data diagnostics for software encryption and decryption to chrondules and vortices and Bernoulli principles used for skydiving (implying actually it is enough if you have studied a little bit of high school physics for jumping off an aircraft without a parachute).

Next, cook up a plot, does not matter if it is half cooked, but it should be really bizarre and location should be even more bizarrely exotic… like the polar ice-caps or the internal storage vault of NSA’s information system or the most religious area of the Vaticans. The plot should be as terrific a president attempting to prove that spaceships actually landed on the earth and that we are aliens, just to preserve his tenure and get re-elected. Only the president himself is only a puppet in the whole drama of deception and deceit and all the mass murders… it was his limousine driver, who is actually a CIA-KGB double agent working to preserve world peace by preserving the secrets that would otherwise be instrumental in creating a nuclear catastrophe.

And mix all of them together to form a khichdi of events from movies, “substantiated” with factual jargons from technology and pull in nature’s help from national geographic and discovery and just follow the plot as the central backbone – and VOILA… you are Dan Brown… oops sorry… not yet, the central character should be a man, and of course he should have a initially fragile lady who changes into a fighting tigress over the course of the story…

If you are still not pissed off and if you still want to read about what I think of each of his 4 books read on. This torture would have been spared if I had had the patience to finish all the 4 books of his in one go unlike now, where I actually found time to finish the last of it after I learnt blogging. I sincerely apologise. (I am also trying to get over my addiction to tea, these outbursts can also be called withdrawal symptoms when I try to do something else to get my mind out of thinking about tea.)

The Da Vinci Code – the book that shot him to fame is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. His other books were not as controversial as this one attacking the celibacy of the world’s most celebrated bachelor. The silly puzzles of anagrams and crazy killings are an insight into the author’s level of imagination – a worthy Hardy Boys plot or some other teenager book. Put in a lot of adult characters and a mention of a sexual orgy, it becomes a novel worthy of the mature adult mind. Thank god, it was not based on Islam, otherwise it would have been war instead of demonstrations.

Angels and Demons – a really forgettable book, though the plot appeared better than da Vinci code… the imagination is bizarre where a man of god can actually murder the pope for the sake of religion… amazing imagination. And the man of god is well versed with flying army choppers and parachuting, which is quite common these days.

Digital Fortress – an amazing tale of software security, but told at the wrong time. In today’s world which is practically running on the assumption that everyone understands IT, the author himself does not; the naiveté of the author to trust the world on non-piracy oriented software sharing…

Deception Point – amazing how simply assumptions are made with respect to tasks… a 8 ton massive rock is just very easily insert up a huge glacial ice land in the arctic… and how a small software bug can actually cost the president his political strength… the icing in the cake… the fish that are so central to the book’s story… absolutely comical end. If you ever read it, don’t miss the epilogue.