Still time to book tickets for the exclusive appearance of bestselling author Dan Brown at the National Concert Hall on Monday week as part of the 2013 Dublin Writers Festival. But remember, no riffraff: it’s exclusive. “Brown,” the DWF website tells us, “will be discussing his latest novel, Inferno, set in Italy and centred around [centred around? – think about it] one of history’s most enduring masterpieces: Dante’s Inferno.”
Will Dan have crafted a new masterpiece on the back of an old one? Dante, Dan … uncanny. Of course we will of course always have the sneerers, the jeerers, the hoity-toity, the pseudo-intellectuals, the jealous, the embittered, the pedants, the elitists, the losers (sorry, elitests, loosers) who will point out that Dan Brown cannot write and wonder what the hell he is doing at a Writers Festival. But don’t mind them. We know that these days (these days!) it’s about bums on seats, broadening the audience, connecting with the public, celebrating success and all those other things which are so much more fun than reading books and thinking or writing about them.
As Michael Deacon put in The Daily Telegraph this week:
The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.
Oh yes, very clever. But who’s got the money, Michael?
