The story of Dan Brown, famous author of even-more-famous best-selling book The Da Vinci Code is a curious one. As often re-told in the various author biographies around the web, this is how Dan Brown decided to be an author: one day, while at the beach in Tahiti, he finished reading some random paperback and said, “Hey, I can do that.” Thus began his illustrious novel-writing career.

What was Dan Brown reading that was so inspiring? Was it Steinbeck’s East of Eden? Or maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Nobel Prize winning work One Hundred Years of Solitude? Or maybe another classic work of fiction that masterfully weaves a complicated narrative in with incredible characters, beautiful passages and remarkable insights, inspiring Brown to strive for those same heights? Well, sort of. It was Sidney Sheldon’s “Doomsday Conspiracy.” Here are the first couple sentences from the featured editorial review on Amazon:

“A science-fiction — yes, science-fiction — novel from the master of soap. And one with a MESSAGE, too, just like the SF of yore–the clichés of which Sheldon shamelessly recycles as he ham-handedly depicts an earth under threat of invasion by aliens ticked off at — what else? — our destruction of the environment.”

When you read a zero-star novel from a Z-list author, of COURSE your reaction should be “Hey, I can do that.” Virtually ANYBODY who received a grade higher than a B- in high school English could do that. It doesn’t mean that your novel will be gloriously well-written, but yes, you can probably “do that.”

Dan Brown had amazing commercial success with The Da Vinci Code, thanks to his admittedly sharp ability to pick the exact topic that would infuriate Christian audiences, and delight secular readers: the idea that Jesus was just a regular guy. As a result, an army of motivated and angry Christians accidentally gave Brown the publicity boost he needed, while secular audiences reveled in talking about how mad the Christians were getting. Nice move.

His book really did outrage the Christian community, to a phenomenal degree. Campus Crusade for Christ made movies, brochures, study guides, presentations and websites all dedicated to debunking the theories of the book. Same with Focus on the Family, and same with a billion other Christian organizations that would get more than a little tiresome to name.

While all the upset Christians were busy reciting the mantra, “It’s just fiction, it’s just fiction, it’s just fiction,” SOMEBODY should have piped up and said, “Wait! The Da Vinci Code is more than just fiction! It’s also horribly written fiction!”

Thankfully, somebody has finally said exactly that, and even explained why it’s bad writing. Geoffrey Pullum of LanguageLog has composed a very enjoyable dissection of the first few sentences from The Da Vinci Code. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety on the original site, but I’d love to share a few passages here for your enjoyment:

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, ‘Prologue’) is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don’t do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist’s profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn’t work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

As Pullum concludes, Brown’s writing is “not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.” It seems amazing to me that critics and Christians alike forgot to notice how badly the novel sucked, and instead spent millions of dollars making it famous through anti-Da Vinci Code campaigns. The Da Vinci Code is just a faux-edgy paperback thriller from a sub-par author who got lucky by angering an enormous audience that specializes in making religious pet peeves public. While this advice comes about four years too late, I suggest to anybody thinking about getting mad about the book or about Dan Brown: “Just ignore him, he’ll go away.”