Why is the publishing community so dismissive of Dan Brown?

Posted on January 27, 2010 in Uncategorized

Over the last six months, whenever I’ve heard publishers discuss Dan Brown, it’s usually been in quite a negative tone. This is something that I’ve found quite surprising, since he is one of the bestselling authors of all time. Indeed, he’s the bestselling author of adult fiction (no, not the dirty kind, although Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra did get up to some tantric sex in Angels and Demons). He would be the bestselling novelist of all time, if it weren’t for Harry Potter and his shenanigans. Yet we pay him no respect for this achievement.
It’s not just publishers (apart from Random House) who don’t like Dan Brown. Independent booksellers don’t seem too enamoured of him either. Indeed, when The Lost Symbol was published, the blog of the Crow on the Hill bookshop offered all purchasers of the novel a free present: wrapping paper that had “shit present” written all over it. However, it’s not Dan Brown’s fault that such independent bookshops wouldn’t be able to make any profit from the novel, due the loss-leading discounts that the other major retailers placed upon The Lost Symbol.
One could very well argue that the Bookseller Crow’s opinion was justified, that Dan Brown just got very lucky with The Da Vinci Code, because all the readers were fascinated by the concept of Jesus’ supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene and the resulting bloodline, and that the rest of the plot was negligible in comparison. However, I’ve just re-read The Da Vinci Code, and my opinion is that it is a classic, albeit a slightly flawed one. In many readers’ opinions, Angels and Demons is Dan Brown’s best novel, although I must admit that its silly pyrotechnics do leave me somewhat cold.
So, why was I re-reading The Da Vinci Code? Well, for one thing, I like to be contrary, and thought that there was a case for producing an argument in defence of Dan Brown. For instance, I’d been unconvinced of J. K. Rowling’s merits until I’d read the 3rd Harry Potter, the sublime Prisoner of Azkaban, and thought that Dan Brown would be worth the benefit of the doubt. I’ve also just started a new paperback imprint, and so thought it would be a good idea to study the methods of the bestselling adult fiction author of the day to see if I could learn anything. So, I decided to publish a guide to Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, and boy, did I learn a lot! It took more than two month’s full time research to produce Punked Books’ Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol: The Ultimate Unauthorized and Independent Reading Guide (ISBN 9780953317226), written under the pseudonym ‘Alex Carmine’. This was mainly due to the fact that Dan Brown did several years of research in writing the novel, a great proportion of which ended up in the text, since Robert Langdon is a university lecturer in his day job. The fact that Langdon’s a teacher is a great device that Dan Brown utilises well in his novels, since he can always interrupt the narrative with a flashback to a lecture that explains important concepts, with his students asking the obvious questions. In this way, Dan Brown gets away from the need for Langdon to have a dumb companion to explain everything to. Indeed, most of Langdon’s companions have skills that are equivalent to his, which allow them to discuss concepts at a more advanced level than his students. It also helps that Langdon is, like us, quite sceptical about the more outlandish worldviews of his companions (such as Katherine Solomon’s faith in the frankly weird field of Noetic Science).
Dan Brown is often accused of being a poor prose writer, which is curious, since he used to be a teacher of creative writing. It’s true that his prose can sometimes jar: on the other hand, it’s not as terrible as its commonly accused of being. Dan Brown often seems to be regarded as a lowest common denominator writer, but there are parts of The Lost Symbol that exhibit great subtlety, such as the quotation of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the novel, which makes most sense for readers who bother to have a look at this reference in more detail. Indeed, there are several other examples where Dan Brown makes classical allusions in this way, and appears to adopt the devices of more literary novelists. It could be argued that Dan Brown has reacted against the accusations of ‘dumbness’ by producing a novel that perhaps strains a bit too much to be highbrow (the long discussions about Noetic science at the end of the book aren’t all that enthralling). Since this is his first novel since The Da Vinci Code, it’s inevitable that Dan Brown would have been affected by the trials and tribulations of his success. For instance, Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, which was so enthusiastically adopted by George Lucas in the production of some of the best blockbuster movies from Dan Brown’s youth, would very much appear to have influenced Dan Brown in the writing of The Lost Symbol, especially since this is the first book of his that he knew would be filmed. There’s also a delightful perversity in Dan Brown’s rendition of the traditional fable of the young hero son who dares to take on his dark, forbidding father within The Lost Symbol, which I explain in more depth with Dan Brown’s "The Lost Symbol" the Ultimate Unauthorized and Independent Reading Guide (which you can find via Google Books below). Having done so much work on The Lost Symbol, I’m convinced that although it may be slightly flawed, there is enough of quality within it to gradually eclipse The Da Vinci Code. I am sure that it will be one day recognised as being Dan Brown’s most mature work.