Painful reading

Research for a book project has forced me to read excerpts - as little as possible - of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code . It makes for painful reading, and not only because of Brown’s stupid historical claims. The prose is bad, painfully bad. To read the book is to endure an attack - not a religious attack, but an assault on all standards of literary taste.

I have to read it, and that gives me the right to rant. So I will.

Take this: Sophie (whoever she is) hears someone mention the Council of Nicaea, and Brown writes, “Sophie had heard of it only insofar as its being the birthplace of the Nicene Creed.”

Ouch! And, Where to begin?

First, that sentence has twice as many words as it needs. It could be “Sophie had heard of the Nicene Creed” or “Sophie knew only that the Council produced the Nicene Creed.” But Brown sticks in the turgid and wholly unnecessary “only insofar as its being.”

Which, second, makes no sense. How can one “hear” of something “insofar as” something else? And the present participle “being” is jarring. “Only insofar as it was” would still be wordy but at least would make temporal sense.

And what’s that about “birthplace”? OK, OK, I can take metaphor. The Creed is not really a baby and it was never really born. I get that. But Sophie’s just been reminded of the ” Council of Nicaea,” not Nicaea, and the council ought not be described as a birth place because it is not a place . Brown could have said “Sophie had heard only that the Council gave birth to the Nicene Creed.” As he wrote it, we’ve got two tin metaphors clashing against each other (the “birth” of a creed, and a “council” as a place), giving me a headache and threatening to break my ear drums.

Maybe Brown is terribly clever, and puts this tripe into the heads of characters who can’t think in straight lines. Maybe it’s all part of a conscious method of characterization. Maybe . . .

NAW! He’s just a bad writer.

I blame the people who raved about the book. But they are not the main culprits. It took me about thirty seconds to revise that sentence into something resembling English prose, and my question is, Couldn’t an editor have done that? Isn’t that what editors get paid to do? (I did my work for free.)

Then again, I haven’t read the whole book, and maybe the editor just ran out of gas. Maybe I should pity rather than criticize. After 200 pages of rewriting, she sighed, brushed away a tear, and just decided to let “insofar as its being” go.