John Heron Project

The celebrated author Dan Brown smiled, smugly, until a revelation struck him.
“A revelation has just struck me!” he thought.
He decided that he would not mention it,
Either in internal monologue nor in narration
Until such time as he couldn’t hold it off any longer
Or found the plot was flagging.
“And that’s what I do,” he thought,
“Because I am a celebrated writer — no, author — of religious-themed
Conspiracy thrillers.”
A figure stepped dramatically from the shadows.
“Please,” the figure that had just stepped dramatically from the shadows whispered,
Frustratedly, “Stop. Just stop. With the internal monologue and the adverbs and
“Everything. Stop it.”
Dan Brown immediately recognised his antagonist as minor hack author Wood Ingham,
Writer of a few books he was actually not all that proud of,
An Englishman and therefore likely to be revealed
As the villain of this piece.
Wood for his part, regarded the celebrated American author,
Whose religious-themed conspiracy thrillers had sold
Millions of copies
(And two of which had been made into hit movies starring Oscar-winning
Hollywood actor Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou who everyone loved in Amelie
Although she was only in the first one
And Ewan McGregor out of Star Wars was actually in the other one)
With a face contorted by contempt and hate
As was his perfidious English manner.
“Perfidious Albion,” mused Brown,
Smirking as he realised that he was about fifty per cent sure what
“Perfidious” meant
And knew that Albion was a good synonym for England or something.
English hack Wood for his part considered what had led him to this juncture…
“Hang on. Hang on,” said the tall, fair-haired bespectacled Englishman,
Doing something sort of English with his spectacles because
That’s how
You build character.
“You just changed point of view! You pull this all the time, man.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Brown, not knowing
What the English hack meant.
“I mean, come on, you haven’t even mentioned in your internal monologue
“That you’re tied to a chair, man.
“I mean, what is that?
“I mean, is that really how you think you build tension, by
“Withholding information and then going, hah, here’s the shock that the
“Characters experienced twenty pages ago?”
Dan Brown struggled silently, wondering how he was going to escape
The bonds that held his wrists tightly to the back of the chair,
And which were indeed the subject of his sudden revelation at the top of this page.
Brown bristled, nobly. “Release me, hack!” he cried.
“Shan’t,” said Wood, smugly. “This is my fictional revenge fantasy and
“I’ll let you go when I decide.”
“You just broke the fourth wall! And you tell me I’m not a great writer,” retorted Brown.
“Damned right I do,” said Wood in his
Unmistakeable English accent, undaunted by the great author’s inexorable logic.
“Like, just for the one example, what’s with the European stereotypes?
“Like the French copper is badly shaven and smokes a lot and
“The French lady is chic because that’s the only French word you know.”
Brown realised with a thunderbolt that this wasn’t fair.
He did know other French words.
“That isn’t fair,” shouted Brown, understanding that shouting is better for
Drama. “That isn’t the only French word I know!”
“What other words do you know, then?” inquired Wood, leeringly.
“Baguette,” uttered the best-selling author triumphantly.
“Besides,” added Dan Brown, “You only hate the Da Vinci Code because I blow the
“Doors off your Christian preconceptions!”
“Oh please. Your wife did your research on Post-It notes.
“Badly.
“Anyway. Umberto Eco can write a perfectly decent religious-themed thriller.
“No,” added Wood,
“I hate your work because it’s shit.
“I hate your work because
“You can’t write a believable character.
“Because you can’t write believable dialogue.
“Because you think a Smart Car is faster than a Parisian police saloon.
“Because you think that a self-mutilating albino can be
“An invincible ninja monk.
“Because you think the Greatest Cryptologist in the World
“Can’t recognise mirror writing
“And needs to be told who Leonardo Da Vinci is
“Because your protagonist is professor of an academic discipline
“That doesn’t fucking exist
“But the thing that offends me most is that every time
“I pass the big high street bookshop
“I see big displays promoting your new book
“And it pains me
“Like physically
“It pains me
“Because you are selling millions and millions
“Of your shitty, shitty novels,
“Because of the bookshop real estate you own
“That means that others can’t.
“Fuck you, Dan Brown.
“Fuck. You.
“Because I am a better writer than you!”
Said Wood, furiously.
Dan Brown thought for a moment, and smiled. He replied,
“And how many novels have you sold, exactly?”
Wood seethed, silently.
(more…)

Actually, I was wrong. It’s pretty good.

Yeah, I’m big enough to admit that.

…is the best way to describe the man behind Slacktivist, who is right now writing a detailed commentary on the Left Behind series, the only literature novel books words printed on paper I arguably despise more than the D* V**** C***, with which they bear a great deal of comparison.

In the most recent entry, about their description of the charismatic nature of the Antichrist (who apparently bans guns and preaches tolerance. Man, I know whose side I’m on) and why it doesn’t work, we get this gem:

All of which is to say that this chapter was almost structured to fail for LaHaye and Jenkins. Carpathia is their Antichrist, so he’s by definition, superlatively superlative. And this is his Big Scene in which he demonstrates and displays all of the characteristics we’ve been told about him up until now. Set up this way, the scene was bound to fall flat, even if it had been in the hands of good writers.

But this chapter wasn’t in the hands of good writers. It was in the hands of a careless hack guided by a heretical pedant.

This man is my friend.

I’ve often wondered: what if the fundamentalists are actually right? I mean, you do, in the dark of night, wonder if they’ve really got something, if their deranged apocalyptic ravings and counter-factual Biblical interpretation might have something to it.

What if the Rapture actually happens and all the fundamentalists get swept up into Heaven?

I almost hope it does. Although I don’t think I could be on the side of any God who supported people like that. I’d be glad to be left behind.

Besides, we’d be shot of the bastards.

Via

You may know I read the ForteanTimes. Anyway, this months it’s their D* V**** C*** special themed/blatant cash-in issue. Hoo-ray.

Now, like I’ve said before, the FT wildly varies between lunacy and hard-headed scepticism. This month is no exception, what with career nutjobs Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince writing on the Priory of Sion (it’s real!) and social worker-cum-voice of reason Kevin McClure writing about why something else these same people wrote is very silly indeed. And then there’s the Hierophant, who writes, among other stuff:

That anyone would trust in the validity of anything in the Da Vinci Code smacks of grim proof of a paradox: the reading public’s abysmal illiteracy. As reviewer Simon Brooks suggested, the novel seems to have been written for “Americans with the attention span of a gnat and the depth of cultural knowledge of a sea cucumber”. In short, if you treat Brown’s book simply as a text, it starts to crumble away.

Anyway, there’s also, every month, a rather ghoulish section which rounds up unusual deaths in the news. I tend to skip it, usually. However, I didn’t this month, and I saw this:

ABBOT ALAN REES, 64, LEAPT 30ft (9m) onto concrete from a second-storey balcony at Belmont Abbey last October and died of head injuries the following day. He had been reading the Da Vinci Code, which made him question his faith. The Swansea-born Catholic monk, who wrote music for Pope John-Paul’s visit to Wales in 1982, had suffered depression since a mental breakdown in 1993, but Dan Brown’s potboiler was evidently the last straw. Western Daily Press, 21 Mar; D. express, 22 Mar 2006.

Observing that having to get through Brown’s prose is enough to drive anyone over the edge would be tasteless, so I’ll refrain.

I’ve been thinking about my gut-level reaction to a lot of things - films, books, TV - and wondering why I react so violently, so negatively, to some things, and not to others, to which I would naturally be expected to react the same way. The recent media confloption surrounding fabricated “from the streets” singer-songwriter Sandi Thom finally caused me to realise what it was.

(No, she’ll have no links from me. You can Google her, if you must.)

See, notwithstanding her being a major label invention (who cares?), the thing that makes Sandi Thom’s hit single “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)” so completely, appallingly offensive to me is, well, OK, it’s complex.

It’s not that the single’s stupid, and it is, it’s really stupid, moronically stupid, so stupid that if it were a person it’d still be stuck in the Year 7 Special Educational Needs class at the age of 30, so stupid that if it were a person, we’d have to watch it drooling out the snot it’s just absent-mindedly eaten.

But no, I like a lot of stupid music. There’s a charm in a lot of stupid music, particularly in stupid music made by clever people (vide Girls Aloud). I like a lot of stupid music that’s a major label invention (again, check out those Girls Aloud, who are about as fabricated as you can get).

What’s really, really offensive about it is that it is that stupid and yet, it thinks it’s really clever, and more, that it’s fooled a big chunky chunk of the Great British Public, Gawd Bless ‘Em, into thinking it’s really clever, to boot (yet again, contrast Girls Aloud. No one thinks that they’re clever. Put it this way: the Guardian isn’t going to ask Cheryl Tweedy’s opinion on anything of consequence, anytime soon) .

It’s like IWIWAPR (WFIMH) is like - wait for it, because you know what I’m going to say - the D* V**** C***, in song form.

And nobody wants that.

Well, actually a lot of people apparently want that. Which is kind of depressing.

[Edit (11/6/6)] It has, however, been pointed out to me that I haven’t said in detail why it’s so stupid. In brief: it’s stupid because it trades on false nostalgia. It’s stupid because its chorus states “77 and 69″ as years where “revolution was in the air” (err, what about ‘67? Or ‘75?) It’s stupid because it conflates punks and hippies (and you know how well they’d respond to that). And most of all, it’s stupid because the lyrics don’t even bloody scan properly.

I’ve been following the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case recently.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh brought it against Dan Brown for apparently stealing the central concepts of their not-wholly-convincing pseudohistorical potboiler Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The whole circus proved fascinating, and there was always the desperate hope that Baigent and Leigh might win and successfully gain an injunction to prevent the forthcoming movie of the D* V**** C*** from screening.

Now, since Holy Blood, Holy Grail purports at least to be factual, how can you nick ideas? It was a daft premise for a case and I’m surprised Baigent and Leigh (who, incidentally, is the owner of the most impressive combover I have ever seen) took it this far. They realised that it was a shaky case, and instead tried to prove that Brown had actually lifted passages from their book. As someone in possession of - I like to think - a slightly better than average command of the English language, I think that were I to discover that Dan Brown had nicked my sentences, I’d be really humiliated that they were of a piece with Brown’s prose, and work to excise them from new editions of my own work post haste, lest my language be tainted by association. Not Leigh and Baigent.

You may be aware of my opinion of Brown’s “novel”. If you aren’t, here ’tis. Suffice to say that entirely separately of its subject matter (which, honestly, I’d use for the plot of a novel - it’s ideal), it is a bad book. It is moronic, and it galls me that a book which is, honestly and truly, so appallingly, cynically and stupidly written could be such a phenomenon.

In fact, actually I think that’s the sin I can’t forgive. I remember once going to a book group and hearing someone say that Midnight’s Children was clever, and whether or not you like it (it’s in my Top Five), that’s certainly the case. it’s clever. Except this person said that it was clever in such a way and in such a context as to make it very clear that they considered it to be a bad thing. I couldn’t ever understand that. Dan Brown’s book, on the other hand, is stupid. In a bad way. I could count the ways, but I’d bore you. Oh, what the hell. Here it is in printable PDF format, so you can take it home with you. Anyway. yes. Stupid, stupid book.

Where was I? Oh, right. Yeah. The case.

Well, it seems that Dan Brown’s wife Blythe did all his research for him, and that Brown is perhaps even stupider than I thought. The Fortean Times, which I love because it veers between crackpot theorising and sober inquiry, usually in the space of a single issue, put it like this:

Two of the strangest aspects of a bizarre trial - two weeks’ discussion of Jesus’ kiddies, the invented Priory of Sion and Blythe’s expertise in art history - were how little Brown knew about his own book, and how little press coverage bore to the proceedings…

…says a member of the press, who didn’t get given one of Random House’s case summaries and press releases, and who is therefore feeling a bit left out. But I’ll skip over that one. It’s the one about how Brown didn’t have a clue where all these cool little historical quasi-factoids were coming from, because he just got ‘em from his wife. He just turned her post-its into his turgid little piece of crap.

Idiot.

Successful, multi-millionaire idiot.

But then, we knew there was no justice in the world.

Anyway. In today’s Guardian, there’s an account of the case, written in the clunky, cliché-ridden, culturally chauvinistic style of Dan Brown himself.

Here’s a paradox: the accurate parody of bad writing is a mark of good writing. Who knew?

From Charles Kingsley’s painfully didactic yet compassionate and policy-changing Victorian kids’ classic The Water Babies:

And first he went through Waste-paperland, where all the stupid books lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winter wood; and there he saw people digging and grubbing among them, to make worse books out of bad ones; and a very good trade they drove thereby, especially among children.

And also, presumably, among fans of religious-themed conspiracy thrillers…

There was a documentary about Dan Brown’s blockbusting “novel” The Da Vinci Code last night, on Channel Four.

I cheered all the way through it - it showed up the inanity and stupidity behind the book’s research, but, while it’s cheering to find a mainstream TV documentary that eschews sensationalism for common sense and important to show up the gullibility of the general public a la Francis Wheen, and while there were just so many more really basic errors that even an idiot like me could spot, I’ve actually got to say that the real thing that bothers me about the popularity of The Da Vinci Code is how incredibly bad it is.

Really. I had to read this piece of toss for a book group towards the end of last year, and I want those three hours of my life back, damn it! I’ve never read anything, anything at all, so objectively bad for years! Badly written, badly plotted, bad dialogue, improbable, hokey situations, characters which were essentially stereotypes of Europeans formed in the minds of people who have never met a European in their lives…

And for the love of God, the actual presentation of the narrative! The way that Brown attempts to create tension by telling you a character has seen something, and then telling you what it is three chapters later. The way Brown tries to flatter his readers by having his supposedly top-rated academic heroes agonise over the difficulty of conundrums which a seven-year old could solve with ease! Gasp at the way a Smart Car can outrun the Paris police! Be amazed at the fact that the British guy turns out to be the villain all along, even though any idiot can see it from the moment he appears!

It’s not so much a novel as the ejaculation of a supremely infertile mind.

The only good thing I got from The Da Vinci Code was this: I had procrastinated for a long time about sending my novel to an agent, fearing that I would be wasting my time. And then a friend who quite liked the book - misguided and wrong, but still a friend who I love dearly - said in an email “well, could you do better?”

Well, duh. Of course I can do better. Mr Brown, I have you to thank for the rekindling of my literary aspirations. If you weren’t such a useless writer, I would never have had the courage to even try to get published. Will I make it? Maybe I won’t. But I’m still a better writer than you.