A Dan Brown encore: Brownian motion?

Slublog carps that Dan Brown is ready to "inflict" a new book on America, and that seems exactly the right verb.

From s stylistic point of view-- Putting aside its willingness to play fast and loose with art history, church history, and any other kind of history, let's not forget how awful The Da Vinci Code actually was and is.

Geoffrey Pullum assessed its craftsmanship this way:

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.

Another Dan Brown book, Angels and Demons, got big-budget movie treatment, as you probably know, seeing as how the film's May 15 release has been flogged in pixels all over the Web for weeks now.

That book, Pullum says, is even more badly written. "I'm sorry, but this man is simply not competent to write prose for public consumption," Pullum asserts, and he's got reams of evidence to support that verdict (e.g., of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, he opines: "to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae.")

Carl Olsen agrees with Geoffrey Pullum about Brown's weaknesses as a novelist, but Olsen has lately busied himself with the thankless task that Amy Welborn did a few years ago, namely, documenting the laughable limits of Brown's "research."

In Angels and Demons, Brown's hero marvels at “Michaelangelo’s famed spiral staircase leading to the Muséo Vaticano . . .” (ch. 31)," but Michelangelo didn't build that staircase, as Olsen points out: "The Vatican Museums are correctly known in Italian as Musei Vaticani, and the staircase was designed in 1932 by Giuseppe Momo, personal architect of Pope Pius XI."

Still the hits just keep on coming, because Brown also claims that Winston Churchill was Catholic (ha!) and that Copernicus was murdered by the church (double ha!)

John C. Wright (who knows fiction when he sees it) and Father Z. (who knows fact) strive entertainingly to answer the question "Just How Stupid is Angels and Demons, Anyway?" Comments on their posts are fun, too.

I especially like this comment left for Father Z:

But Father! My Bene Gesserit mother always taught me to regard Paul Muad’Dib Atreides as the Kwisatz Haderach!

Julie at Happy Catholic would probably chortle at that comment, too.