Reviews; Books: December 2003 Archives

I’ve spent the last couple of night staying up past my bed time reading this weighty tome. A giant thriller book of about 450 pages it’s a reasonably engrossing and suitably workman like novel which knows what buttons to hit and how to hit them.

I picked it up precisely for this reason. It’s had good reviews and sold lots of copies, but the Guardian slated it for using every cliché under the book. That’s true it does, but the story is good enough to just about get away with it. By creating a story focussed on the search for the Holy Grail, Dan Brown writes on a subject that’s always going to suck a lot of people in. The Grail’s an ideal subject to base a story around – it’s legend imbued as it is with plenty of intrigue and double crossing. In many respects, this is the author’s strongest suit, peppering the book with interesting stories and anecdotes about the Grail’s past as well as informing us about religious symbolism and early Christianity.

I find this sort of subject matter fascinating, and Brown is keen to stress in his preface the accuracy of his source material – so much so that I’m really surprised he didn’t add a bibliography at the end of the book, it would have been a good (and interesting) touch.

Unfortunately what lets the book down is his characterisation – or more specifically the dialogue which he gives the protagonists. It’s not that it’s bad, just that everybody sounds the same – seems to speak in the same style and with the same sentence structure etc. No more is this clear in the conclusion, when one character – the English historian – who to date has only spoken in pretty short sentences, has some very long ones which doesn’t sit at all with your image of him, and indeed feel like they could have been said by anyone. It’s a shame really, because Brown’s powers of description are good enough – you get a good picture of what these people look like, but the fact that they all sound the same whether their the grumpy French policeman, American scholar, or Papal aide – dents his effectiveness a little.

That minor gripe aside – you can gloss over the cliché (viz. the grumpy French policeman,) and enjoy how Brown uses every device in the book to take you on his Grail journey…

I loved Michael Moore's book Stupid White Men - if I had my way I'd make everyone read that book - goodbye Hardy, welcome Mikey!

Sure, not everything hit the mark, but the chapters on how the book was published, how Bush won Florida (and with it the Presidency,) as well as the title chapter, were totally spot on - giving a frightening insight into the side of America you don't see in the movies or on your average Stateside City jaunt.

So my expectations of his new book were very high. Probably too high. The book feels like it has been written in a hurry. There's still some big punches, and a few good laughs, but they don't come as often as before, nor as big.

The first chapter - which focusses on 9/11 and the US response to it - is suitably revelatory, asking lots of v. uncomfortable questions about what Bush did and how he did it. It certainly makes you suspicious of his links to the Saudi's...

The Guardian circulated this - in a G2 section, so if you read that, you could probably live without the rest of this book. It's good, very pamphleteering in style, but it's not as good as it's predecessor.

(Actually some reviewers have got very snobby about this - commenting that all Moore does is collate facts discovered by others and then share them with a wider audience, making lots of money in the process. Sounded like sour grapes to me...)

Sorry Mikey, but I think it's better to save you pennies and look at Moore's website - which also includes some good stuff that his publishers were too scared to put into print.