People say that you can't criticise something until you have tried it for yourself. Nonsense. I am about to criticise Dan Brown and I have never read one of his novels. So what are my qualifications? Well, a resort to authority, or perhaps pseudo-authority. An over reliance on authority is a terrible thing ("I was just following orders"). However, who would wish to argue with this collection of thoughts on Mr Brown's oeuvre:
Stephen King: "the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese"
John Humphreys: "the literary equivalent of painting by numbers, by an artist who can’t even stay within the lines"
Salman Rushdie: "so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name"
Stewart Lee: "there is nothing of any value in Dan Brown"
Stephen Fry: "complete loose stool-water"
New York Times: "primer on how not to write an English sentence"
Anthony Lane: "unmitigated junk"
Geoffrey Pullum: "(one of the) worst prose stylists in the history of literature"
So imagine how pleased with myself I was this morning when I saw a fellow passenger reading Brown, and thought to myself "something to do while you wait to die." (The smug commuter mentally criticised the bespectacled fat man.)
Did I steal that from somewhere? It came to me unbidden, which is always a hint that something isn't original thought. But it felt original. And it felt good.
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