It made art and poetry seem glamorous, and mixed them with luxury tourism and scenic chases. It repeated adjectives and explanatory phrases from one paragraph to the next, perhaps to jog the dulled short-term memory of the tired long-haul flier. He saw instantly that the stout book was brilliantly engineered. Steven Poole, The Guardian: The tall writer began to analyze the blockbusting novel using his close knowledge of conceptology, the famous discipline about thoughts. (Step over this prone body and press 32 to learn more about the velvet box containing Dante’s death mask in the Palazzo Vecchio.) Originally the bridge had been home to Florence’s vast, open-air market, but the butchers were banished in 1593.” It’s like trying to solve a mystery while one of those self-guided tour headsets is dangling from your ears. Narration appears lifted from a Fodor’s guide, as when Langdon pauses in the middle of a life-or-death escape to remember the history of a bridge: “Today the vendors are mostly goldsmiths and jewelers, but that has not always been the case. … Unfortunately, at other times the book’s musty passageways seem to be not so much holding history up as sagging under its weight. Monica Hesse, The Washington Post: His novels are like high-stakes, 500-page Mad Libs a reader doesn’t have to worry that it will be a fun ride, just that the adverbs and proper nouns will line up in a way that honors the art form. Let’s just hope the new Pope won’t make the mistake of his predecessors and boost Brown’s sales even further by issuing a denunciation.” Wilson, The Daily Mail: “It’s all twaddle, but at least it is entertaining twaddle. … But in the end this is his worst book, and for a sad, even noble, reason – his ambition here wildly exceeds his ability.Ī.N. It works to prevent the reader from engaging with the story.
His prose, for all its detailing of brand names and the exact heights of buildings, is characterised by imprecision.
We can’t even be told that the Piazza della Signoria is one of Langdon’s favourite plazas without being reassured that this is “despite its overabundance of phalluses.” As a stylist Brown gets better and better: where once he was abysmal he is now just very poor. There is nothing kinky about Robert: the man is so vanilla that he must be part-descended from orchids. Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph: I don’t think I am giving away anything the reader won’t anticipate when I reveal that at one point Langdon has to wear Sienna’s blond wig as a disguise, and that he feels very uncomfortable doing so. After the jump, the funniest reviews and meanest jabs to make you chuckle into your highbrow nonfiction (or ignore while you’re waiting in line at the bookstore). Needless to say, the book’s expected to do rather well - Doubleday is printing four million copies - but (surprise!) the critics are less than enthused. Today is undoubtedly a day of celebration for the publishing industry, because it marks the release of Dan Brown’s newest Robert Langdon novel, Inferno.