The Bubonic Book Rat

Black Trillium, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May and Andre Norton

You know what I really love? Fantasy. You know what I also love? Markets! You know, the kind of market with lots of stalls selling all kinds of interesting stuff, like jewellry and artwork and all the odds and sods people want to get out of their garages. It’s not like a shopping maul where everything’s regulated and the merchandise is pretty much what you’d find in any other shop. At a market, you never know what you’ll find.

At a particular market I went to, I came across a couple of guys who were selling old books – and they specialised in fantasy and sci fi. I got talking to them, and asked about their stock.

“Tell me,” I said eventually, “What’s the absolute worst book you have here?”
They exchanged glances. But then one of them got up and picked his way over to a box. After some rummaging, he brought out a truly sad-looking thing, whose spine was so badly weathered it had turned almost completely white and had long since lost the title. The front cover wasn’t much better off. It looked like snails had been eating it.

“Here,” he said, offering it up. “This is one of the worst. It’s got three authors, and they somehow managed to put all their worst attributes together into one book.”

Holy crap,, I thought, triple-distilled concentrated suck..

“All right, I’ll take it,” I said, “But I’m warning you – this thing had better be as bad as you say. If I’m less than completely disappointed I’ll come back and complain.”

“Don’t worry,” the seller said. “It’s crap.”

It was.


With regards to the three authors, I have to say I’ve never really understood why anyone would want to collaborate on something as personal as a novel. I mean, how do you do it, anyway? Is it a sort of round robin thing, taking turns to do each chapter? Do they sit down together and pool their ideas like a group of movie producers? Who does the actual writing?

Well, it turns out that, in this case, they all did. Out of curiosity once I’d finished the book I consulted Wikipedia and found that the three authors did indeed take turns at writing different bits of book. And to their credit, I couldn’t tell where each one left off and the next one picked up the thread. Apparently though they didn’t enjoy the process much at all (this seems to have happened before everyone had an email account), and as a consequence the various sequels weren’t collaborations. Instead, the three authors took the first novel and wrote their own sequels in various different ways, giving the series at least two different continuities. The story of how Black Trillium came to be has more intrigue and interesting plot twists than the actual novel… not that that’s saying much.

Characters
Kadiya, Anigel and Haramis
Three Princesses (yawn), who look nothing alike despite being triplets. Oh, but they are all of course amazingly beautiful and good. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Princess in a fantasy book who wasn’t beautiful and good. Oh, and innocent. Oh so sweet and innocent.
Anyway, I lumped these three together because, beyond those blanket terms of beauty and Lawful Good that I mentioned earlier their personalities really aren’t anything to write home about. Haramis is the bookish one, Kadiya is the tomboy… I guess, and Anigel (Anigel, Angel, har har, very funny) is the wussy girly blonde one. During the course of the book all three must learn to live up to their stations in life and overcome their own personal shortcomings in order to save… world… defeat supreme… Zzzzz….
Huh? Whu? Oh, sorry, dozed off there for a bit. Let’s continue.

Orogastus
The eeeeeevil wizard who teams up with an eeeevil King in order to take over the forces of implausibly shiny Good. Orogastus is actually the most likeable and interesting character in the book, but unfortunately, given the gag-worthy storybook niceness of the protagonists, he probably would have fitted better if he were your stereotypical cackling baddie with the big long fingernails and pointy beard. That aside I did like Orogastus, and even dared hope that maybe he would survive the book. This was despite the fact that he looked like Tim the Enchanter in my head.



The Plot
The cover of Black Trillium proudly boasts that this is “The Supreme Fantasy Epic Of Magic, Love And Treachery”. You gotta love how every second fantasy book on the shelf makes almost the exact same claim. I think it’s high time they all got together and sorted it out. Preferably in a cage match.

As for the plot, I think you’ve already gathered that the “supreme” part is 100% industrial-grade balderdash. Then again, blurbs like that are pretty meaningless to begin with. But I’ll let you be the judge, shall I?

The plot in brief: it opens with the birth of our three wonderful not-Sue-ish-at-all heroines, attended by some supreme wizard lady. For some reason the wizard lady person is referred to as the “Archimage” [sic]. Yes, Archimage, with that spelling. Why? I don’t know, but I kept thinking of a surfer dude in a pointy hat and a nametag saying “Hi, my name is ARCHIE MAGE”. Anyhoodle, Archie the Mage delivers the three Princesses and puts a magical amulet around each of their necks. The amulets aren’t described in much detail, but each one contains a bit of flower fossilised in amber. The flower is the titular black trillium, which is incredibly incredibly rare.

Fast forward the standard length of time, and the three Princesses have grown into improbably statuesque and sugar-sweet young women. Unfortunately for them their super-nice Kingdom of Niceness gets attacked by the eeeevil neighbouring Kingdom of Eeeevil less than a page later. Unfortunately (again), Daddy is a useless incompetent who first proves that he couldn’t fight off a squad of Girl Scouts, and then decides to toddle off on his own to fight the bad guys. No guard, no horse, nothing. Shockingly this plan doesn’t go so well and Daddy gets dismembered by the eeeevil, competent King and his eeeeevil offsider Tim the Enchanter.

The evil guys then go off to find the Princesses, since they are of course the object of some random prophecy which says one of them will put a stop to the evil guys’ evil ways… do I even have to type this up? Fucking hell I’m sick of this idiot plot setup.

Anyway, sigh, Daddy didn’t do anything to get his daughters out of Dodge before it was too late, so they’re kicking around in some room with their mum. Mum, on being warned that the evil guys are coming, quickly shoves them into the toilet (no, really), and then sits on her arse and waits to get killed off. The evil guys come in, try for about two seconds to make Mum talk and then kill her. Meanwhile the Princesses are hiding in the toilet, with literally one damn tapestry between them and the bad guys.
The bad guys glance around the room, fail to see the Princesses anywhere in sight, and wander off.

*headdesks like a motherfucker*

Oh, but it gets better. The three Princesses – actually, let’s just call them the three Sues – are rescued by three of their servants who help them to get away. Along the way they come across Daddy’s remains – now scattered over a wide area.

Naturally, since they’ve lived incredibly sheltered lives and have never seen a dead body until tonight, none of them have any significant reaction to this and one page later they’ve all forgotten about it.

Why are so many Sues sociopaths?

With that minor inconvenience out of the way, the three Sues escape the city and are split up. Each one heads off to find Archie Magie, led by one servant apiece. The servants, by the way, are representatives of the only non-human race in the book. Called Oddlings, they’re divided into various subspecies and are basically just a variation on your standard gnome/elf/goblin.

Various whacky hijinx ensue, but one way or another the Sues reach Aunty Maggie’s house, albeit seperately. She tells them that they must each go in search of a special talisman (like one wasn’t enough), so they head off.

The three Sues, by the way, each have their own plotline and each one was written by a different author. I honestly couldn’t tell the writing styles apart, and I’ll admit that’s impressive. I don’t think I could have done that. Then again, I wouldn’t have collaborated in the first place.

Another storyline follows the antics of Prince Antar, son of the evil King, and it couldn’t be more obvious that this guy is going to join the good guys if his name was changed to Prince I’m-Not-Really-Evil. His main motivation for changing sides is that he falls in love with Anigel, which he somehow manages to do when he’s never spoken to her. That’s some real Destined Love right there.

To cut things short, the three Sues find their talismans, Haramis has a sort of implied love affair with Tim the Enchanter, they meet up again, join their talismans into one big magical Sceptre thingy that kills anyone who’s secretly disloyal (oh goody, yet another way to avoid that pesky character development), stop Tim the Enchanter from setting off a magical Atom Bomb (seriously), kick bad guy booty and win the day. As if you couldn’t see it coming from a mile off, Anigel marries Antar and they rule together in peace and justice, and everything is good and sweet and wonderful, ad nauseum.

Wow. You just can’t buy originality like that, can you? (She says, swiping someone else’s line to make an ironic point).

Prose
Horrifying clichés and dull, dull protagonists aside, I think the thing I disliked the most about this book was the way it was written. I don’t know if all three authors write like this all the time, but the use of language made me cringe. It took a very Tolkein-esque olde-fashionde approach to both prose and dialogue, and unfortunately for the authors that sort of thing is and always has been a huge aggravation for me.

Let me just quote a passage that I found particularly heinous.



Only in a fantasy book, folks.

(In case you’re curious, the person monologuing was an old Oddling nurse – just the sort of person you’d expect to deliver a ginormous discourse on the nature of only-in-a-story Evil. Oh, and this is immediately after they’ve found Daddy’s dead body – a point when most people probably wouldn’t be in the mood for listening to a lecture on fantasy-novel morality).

No. Just no.

One other thing about the prose that really, really bugged me was the use of neologisms. Neologisms, for the neophyte (hah!), are made-up words generally found in fantasy and sci fi. They’re definitely useful things, since if you invent some new creature or concept you gotta call it something. The only time neologisms become a real problem is when they’re used to re-label things that already exist. This is something referred to as “calling a rabbit a Smeerp” – in other words, using a fakey made-up name for something that already has a name. It’s unnecessary, it’s clunky, and if you do it too much – like they did in this book – it’s just agonising. There must have been more than a dozen things in this book given stupid new names. For instance, the word “ells” kept being used as a unit of measurement. Only problem is there’s no indication of just how long an “ell” is, so when something is referred to as “thirty ells high” you’re probably not going to think “wow, what a tall unspecified object”.

We’re also constantly bombarded with made-up animals and plants, all of which have dopey made-up names but few of which are described in any great detail, leaving us with a lot of meaningless words with nothing solid attached to them.

One other, major problem with neologisms is this: made-up words sound made-up. Failing to attach a cohesive linguistic pattern to them only makes it more obvious. My advice is avoid it, unless you’re a language professor like ole Tolky and are a big enough nerd to actually invent your own form of speech. Personally I think it’s a waste of time.

WTF-eries
-The motivation of Tim the Enchanter, which made absolutely no sense. At first he comes off as just another power-hungry lunatic, but later on we discover that his only real interest lies in uncovering the secrets of your standard wise long-dead race. So why did he help the evil King conquer the good guys? We never find out

-Speaking of the long lost super race, we learn that they left various devices behind which Tim the Enchanter is using. In fact, it’s eventually revealed that the only powers he has derive from these devices. What makes this way, way more surreal than it sounds is that most of these devices are clearly modelled on modern-day technology. One of Tim’s lackeys wears a pair of headphones (really), Tim has a PalmPad PDA with a stylus, and most bizarre of all, he uses a computer tracking device. No, really. It’s called a “magic mirror”, but it’s a computer. It talks, and uses terms like “debug”, and crashes if you say the wrong thing. And no, I really don’t think it was meant to be a joke.

-Toward the end, Tim the Enchanter pulls a magical super-weapon out of his arse. It’s a glowing green orb that functions pretty much like an Atom Bomb. It’s a weapon of mass destruction, anyway. I don’t know why they bothered to include it, since it never gets used. But I think the biggest WTF about it is its name – the Doomful Effluvium. YARLY.

-While he’s introducing this Magic Eight Ball of Doom, Tim also briefly mentions something called “the Golden Pastilles”. I’m pretty sure they never appeared in the book, but the name gave me a vision of a roll of solid gold Lifesavers.

Conclusion
A painfully clichéd and lifeless book, with dull prose and characters that don’t manage to rise far enough above their stereotyped roles, Black Trillium fails to provide an exciting story and is bogged down by too many irritating mistakes to count. And a note to all fantasy authors: please drop the magical jewellery. I have had it up to here with amulets, rings and watch-chains of plot convenience, and I think I’m not the only one.

( Bite me, Ayn Rand )

I figured I may as well post all my archived reviews now. No sense in waiting around.



Hidden behind the veil of the mundane, lies the portal to another world. A world constantly in touch with our own, but still utterly separate – a world whose occupants are strange and solitary, each living in their own little corner of reality, but all of them bound by the same rules.

In this world, books reign supreme. And those who rule books, rule that world.

Once, in a seedy corner of this world, populated by fangirls, fanficcers and other undesirables, a woman called Cassandre Claire lived and worked. She wrote fanfictions for the Harry Potter universe – specifically, she wrote the Draco Trilogy, in which she more-or-less singlehandedly created the enormously popular “fanon” version of the obnoxious Draco Malfoy. The proper, canon version of Malfoy was a nasty little brat with white blonde hair but no other attractive features (Rowling described him as having a “pale, sneering face”, among other uncomplimentary things). In Claire’s hands, Malfoy was transformed into “a smooth, witty sex bunny who’s really not that bad underneath”. Her fanfics also led to the popular fandom expression “Draco in leather pants”.

Claire was also responsible for the humorous Lord of the Rings fics known as The Very Secret Diaries, and those coupled with the Draco Trilogy made her into what is known as a “big name fan”, lording it over her own subsection of the Harry Potter fandom to the point where, when she reported that someone had broken into her flat and stolen her laptops, her fans made enough donations to buy new ones. After she made some remarks about wanting an iPod, the fans obliged. Yes, Claire was her own little god; a mini Rowling, with her own obsessed readers (and, no doubt, some of them wrote fanfics of her fanfics).

But the seeds of Claire’s downfall had already been planted. Foolishly, blinded by arrogance and believing she could do whatever she pleased, she broke the single most powerful and binding law of this hidden world of books – committing a crime for which there is no forgiveness.

Plagiarism.

Claire had already been in the habit of peppering her fanfics with extensive dialogue quotes from sources like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Red Dwarf and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. But she got away with it, because the rules of plagiarism are much looser in fanfic.

But then she went one step further. A reader discovered that she had copy-pasted an entire page from a novel into one of her fanfics, without proper acknowledgement. This was beyond the pale. Further investigation revealed more plagiarism – layers and layers of it. And it must be noted that while she was writing these fics Claire was also employed as a journalist – and therefore should have known full well what plagiarism is.

Regardless, the reader who had spotted it reported her for it and she was banned from fanfiction.net immediately. There was an enormous scandal – the fangirls whined, Claire flounced and whined and threatened legal action, and fandom history was made.

(Read the full story here - warning: tl;dr ahead)

But Cassandra Claire was not finished. She returned, and this time she was touting an “original novel” of her very own. Which, probably thanks to her already established fame, was published. That novel was City of Bones, the first of a trilogy (of course).

Unfortunately for Claire – now calling herself “Cassandra Clare” – the literary world is not forgiving. Everyone knew what she had done, and even today her career as a novellist is tainted. Whether she likes it or not, readers everywhere refer to her as “that plagiarising fanficcer”.

And you know what? Despite all that, she still hasn’t learned her lesson – she’s still a plagiarist. And that really ruined this book for me.

The Plot

OK, stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

Ordinary, Not Pretty, Shy, Clumsy Girl Clary Fray lives an Ordinary life with her standard-issue Loving Single Mum, until one night she sees something strange and subsequently meets some odd teenagers who reveal she she is a wizard Shadowhunter (the author tried to call them Dark-Hunters, but got a cease-and-desist letter from the person who actually owned the term). Apparently there is a secret magical world that co-exists with the ordinary one, where wizards magical creatures such as vampires, werewolves and demons exist. Behold! A seemingly abandoned hotel is really the haunt of a clan of vampires! A ruined lunatic asylum is actually home to a family of wizards Shadowhunters! Magical beings are all around us, hidden from our eyes!
And when one of these magical beings – called Downworlders for some reason – gets out of line, it’s up to the Aurors Shadowhunters to police them.

The Shadowhunters are lorded over by an organisation called the Ministry of Magic Clave, which has an agreement to protect and co-exist with Downworlders. Unfortunately at some point, a very talented but dangerous young Shadowhunter called Voldemort Valentine decided that all Downworlders should be destroyed and “blood purity” protected. He gathered a group of misfits and malcontents who agreed with him, called Death Eaters The Circle, and which included his wife and a handful of others. After a failed coup, Valentine supposedly died and the Shadowhunters went back to life as normal while his former followers repented and went back to the good side.

OR DID THEY???

Ahem. Anyway, Clary learns all this in between various idiotic escapades with her new friends, where in true Harry Potter style the kids do all the dangerous stuff without informing their tutor Dumbledore Hodge. They encounter vampires that ride around on flying motocycles (coughcough), Clary’s best friend Simon gets randomly turned into a rat (so not like Wormtail at all, yes?), they meet a flamboyant warlock with no belly button, and eventually learn that Valentine is not dead! Ruh roh!

The Maguffin in this book is something called the Holy Grail Philosopher’s Stone Mortal Cup – a magical cup that turns people who drink from it into Shadowhunters. After a lot of tedious hijinx and painful attempts at “witty” dialogue, Valentine finally reappears, steals the cup and reveals the AWFUL TRUTH! To whit:



*sigh*

After a boring would-be tense and emotional confrontation, Valentine takes advantage of the protagonists’ wimpiness and makes his escape with the Cup – laughing manically all the while, of course.

I’ve been practising my manical laugh. I’m getting really good at it, too.

The Characters

Clary Fray Our sweet protagonist is supposedly “clumsy” and “not pretty” (two of the most painfully clichéd things bad authors fall back on because they think it will stop their protagonist from being a Sue). Oddly enough, we never see one single instance of her actually being clumsy. Ever. Either way Clare’s efforts failed; Clary is a Sue anyway. Not a particularly obnoxious one, thankfully, but a Sue all the same, and as if that weren’t bad enough she’s also boring, rude and generally unlikeable. I do love spending a book with a character I like and can root for. Which is why I’m going to read A Feast for Crows now.

Harry Potter Simon Clary’s geeky, Jewish best friend, who has messy hair, glasses, and an unrequited crush on her. He must be one of those guys who likes pain, because Clary treats him like shit. This is why he’s one of the few vaguely sympathetic characters; he gets such a raw deal you can’t help but feel sorry for him. Hell, the girl of his dreams would rather snog her own brother.

Draco MalfoyJace Oh gods, Jace. Not Jace. Anything but that. I hate this guy so bad. Not that he’s particularly nasty or hateful – at least, no more so than anyone else. I hate him almost entirely because the author is so hellbent on making me love him it’s nauseating. Pale, blond and graceful, with Daddy Issues out the wazoo, he’s an obvious name-swapped Draco Trilogy Draco, right down to the constant one-liners. And I do mean constant. Nothing that comes out of this little jerk’s mouth isn’t a “witty”, “sarcastic” or “sexy” quip. This coupled with the fact that everyone wuvs him easily nets him the Obnoxious Stu of the Year award, and by the end of the book I wished someone would drop a fridge on him.

Remus LupinLuke Clary’s mother’s best friend; a sad-eyed loser who happens to be a werewolf. I didn’t really feel anything for him one way or the other, but he did manage to deliver the longest monologue in the book, which is saying a lot.

Voldemort I’m not even going to pretend with this one. “Valentine” is such an obvious Voldemort ripoff I’m amazed nobody got sued. Down to the smooth voice, the obsession with “blood purity” and the old wizarding Shadowhunter families – this guy has the lot. He even has the long, thin fingers for gods’ sakes. Anyone who thinks Voldemort was a shallow villian should check this guy out – he’s Voldemort without any other dimensions and a backstory about half as believable and twice as melodramatic. I couldn’t even root for him; he was that boring.

Ripoffs
With this one I’m not going to list WTF-eries, because the ripoffs are pretty damned WTF-inducing by themselves.

-Obvious one: the plotline is ripped straight from Harry Potter, with some Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer thrown in
-The one-liners are pure Buffy
-We have a very clear Sybil Trelawny standin, in the form of a fortune-teller who lives near Clary and her mother
-Amusingly enough, Clare even stooped to stealing from herself, with numerous passages copy-pasted straight from her infamous fanfics. One would think that she would want to put that disgrace behind her as much as possible, but, well, one would be wrong
-The hidden library/training centre/living quarters where Clary and co hide out is an obvious copy of Hogwarts
-There are numerous references to the fanfics and the hoo-hah surrounding them – when Clary finds her home broken into, she wonders why no-one stole “the valuable laptops”, Simon has a button badge that says “Still Not King” (a popular line from the Very Secret Diaries), and several characters are either named after or modelled on real people from Clare’s inner circle. The references were clearly meant to be cute little waves to her friends, but frankly I found them annoying and self-indulgent


And there you have it. Fortunately, despite her supreme arrogance and continued flaunting of the accepted code of conduct, Clare is reaping the wages of sin. Some people have observed that her books are written as if to a formula intended to attract as many fangirls as possible, but despite that the fandom for the trilogy is tiny and not particularly active as far as I know. And Clare, like Valentine, will carry the stigma of her past crimes with her forever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s more than enough.

( Warning: this review is 100% blunt and honest about my views on religion. )

The Legend of Rah and the Muggles

 

Or, as I prefer to call it, The Legend of Rah and the Arsefaces.

 

This book is a bit like the old classics, in that more people have heard of it than have actually read it or have any idea of what it’s about. I know of only one other person in the world who actually owns a copy, and they wrote the only review for it I’ve ever seen. http://www.magespace.net/mugrev.html

 

Anyone who’s heard of this book would probably have done so because of the memorable (as in memorably stupid) incident where the author, Nancy Stouffer, sued J.K.Rowling for plagiarism. Supposedly, Stouffer claimed that she had written a book which used the term “Muggles”, and also contained a character called Larry Potter. In other words, ZOMG U COPIED MY IDEA U SLAG!

 

To this day, Stouffer still owns a site called www.realmuggles.com, on which she maintains her wounded insistence that Rowling is profiting off her wunnerful idea. Never mind that nobody ever read her book, and that “muggle” is already a well-known British slang word. Never mind that Rowling almost certainly derived it from the term “mug”, meaning a stupid person. This is all about one thing: sour grapes, and lots of them.

 

The lawsuit was a fiasco, with Stouffer and her lawyers eventually ordered to pay damages for wasting the court’s time and also for lying. Another thing that many people (including the media) don’t seem to be aware of is that the book does not contain a character called Larry Potter. In fact Stouffer had a totally different book that included a character by that name. When you know that, the already flimsy case she had falls apart even further.

 

Despite her loss, Stouffer doesn’t seem to have taken the hint and to this day her website and pretty much everything she’s said on record reeks of wounded pride. Check out the list of supposed similarities at realmuggles.com – it boils down to things like “chequered floors” and “a castle by a lake”. Mein Gott!  

 

Interestingly enough, the copy of the book that I eventually bought off eBay seems to have been published post-lawsuit. I picked this up from the fact that it has the address for realmuggles.com in the back, but also because I looked at the title page and the imprint page, and saw a little “tm” mark after every. Friggin’. Word. Seriously! “Rah” has a tm, “muggles” has a tm – on the imprint page there’s a little list of words supposedly belonging to the author, in which she actually tries to lay claim to the term “elders”! Watch out Paolini – she’s gonna sue you next! Not that a plagiarism suit against you would be entirely out of order.

 

It’s pretty easy to see why a new edition of this book got published after the lawsuit – failed or not, it would have created new interest in it. I should add, though, that the author is apparently pissed off at the cheapo publisher that printed it. Apparently she feels she didn’t get enough royalties or some such thing. Never mind that I got my copy for a dollar.

 

 

( Warning: nightmare fuel )

 

A while ago, my harddrive broke and I lost everything on it. My university assignments, all my completely legal movies and MP3s, everything.

I also lost all my old reviews. Most of them I managed to get back by going through the archives at the booth, but two had vanished. One was my review of Twlight. The other was this one. I wasn't hugely upset over losing the Twilight review, but The Fifth Sorceress was one of my best, and I was very unhappy about losing it. I decided to start this LiveJournal so that none of my reviews would ever be lost again.

However, not all things that are lost stay lost. In desperation, not thinking anything would come of it, I spoke to Albert. He, it turned out, had access to old threads - including the one where I posted my Fifth Sorceress review. He may still be able to get back the Twilight review, but for the meantime, here is the crown jewel of my reviews. Enjoy!

Yes, that's right, I'm back and I have another review for you. This one was fun because I got to do some photoshopping.




The Da Vinci Code by Dan “it’s totally true” Brown


It’s been a while since my last review, but after a brief hiatus and the tragic death of my old harddrive (and all the data that was on it), I’m back and ready for another shot.

My history with the Da Vinci Code is pretty uninteresting. I noticed and then proceeded to ignore all the hype around it, being more or less completely disinterested in thrillers and aggressively disinterested in anything the media keeps telling me I should be excited about.

I had an acquaintance who was a born-again Christian, and who despised the book the way I despised Eragon. At the slightest excuse, he would go off into a long rant about how utterly worthless he thought it was, how it should never have been popular at all, blah blah blah.

“It’s not because I’m a Christian,” he would always add. It sounded more unconvincing every time he said it.

Regardless of all the completely unnecessary fuss going on over it, I went to see the movie on opening night. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. In fact, I’m listening to the soundtrack right now.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered to read the book at all, but one day I was browsing through a used bookshop. While buying a copy of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I casually mentioned to the owner that I had an interest in reading bad books.

“Well,” he said, “the really bad stuff is outside.”

Intrigued, I went out there for a look.

“Hah,” I called back a few moments later, “six copies of The Da Vinci Code?”

“Oh, you can have one of those for free,” the shopkeeper said in disgust. “In fact, you can come back tomorrow and take another one. Hell, take all of them.”

I snickered and stuffed a copy into my bag. The rest is history.

Keeping in line with my former policy of ignoring the hype, I’m not going to say much about the “controversial” stuff in this book – partly because everyone already knows about it whether they’ve read it or not, and also because what I’m thinking is screw the controversy – that’s just salesman’s bullshit. What I noticed and what I care about is that this book sucks.



The Plot

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, here’s the low-down. A ruggedly handsome symbiologist called Robert Langdon teams up with an attractive French cryptologist called Sophie to investigate the murder of her grandfather – who, despite being painfully shot in the stomach, somehow managed to leave a crapload of pointlessly complicated clues behind. Instead of, oh, picking up his mobile phone and just bloody well telling his granddaughter everything. Or maybe just calling an ambulance. But you can’t expect people to act logically in this book – the focus here is on puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles, not sensible plotting or character motivation.

Said puzzles, by the way, frequently serve to make the story that much more irritating. Basically, they fall into two categories: the ones the protagonists solve in ten minutes, while under what ought to be tremendous pressure, and the ones that are so blatantly obvious that I solved them the instant I read them. For instance, the one where they come across some writing that’s apparently in some strange language that neither of them recognise despite their numerous degrees in code-cracking. They sit there scratching their heads like a couple of chimps, completely stumped.

I took one look at the “mysterious language” and went “hey, that’s just English written backwards. What, are you blind? Everyone knows Da Vinci wrote in reverse – he was left-handed!”

Nevertheless, when they finally figured it out it was touted as a great achievement. See what I mean about them being morons?

Long story short, our extremely boring protagonists get mixed up in the dealings of an ancient cult or two, listen to a lot of bitching about how eeeevil modern Christianity is, and eventually discover that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a daughter. And, uh, that’s it, actually. In the movie it’s revealed that Sophie is Christ’s secret descendant, but unless I blinked and missed it the book doesn’t include that revelation.

Now, truth be told I did actually find myself agreeing with some of Brown’s points about how modern religions tend to be too focused on men and how the “sacred feminine” has become tied up with witches and the evils of sex – see, this is one reason why I don’t like religion much. Too much hate dumped on women and sex – two of the best things life has to offer! At least according to most guys I’ve met, anyway. ;)

That aside, I personally don’t give a rat’s hiney whether Christ might have been married or if Mary Magdalene was originally intended to found the new church after his death. In fact, I don’t care whether either of them ever existed at all. I can see how it might piss off religious groups, but while reading the book my reaction to these “controversial” angles was “who cares?”

Characters

Blargh. Who cares about them either? Robert and Sophie have got to be two of the dullest, stupidest and most completely uninteresting protagonists in the history of pulp fiction. Some of the things they do are idiotic to the point of becoming outright surreal – for example, toward the beginning they’re both in the Louvre. The French police are rushing to arrest them and could be there at any minute. So naturally they stand around with their hands on their hips and have a fifteen-minute conversation that could easily have waited until after they’d escaped.

As if that weren’t hilarious enough, they then act surprised when they get busted by a security guard. What did you think was going to happen?

Our heroes are such nincompoops that they’re very lucky the police chasing them are morons as well – and that the plot is contrived in such a way that they always manage to escape despite having no fighting skills or previous experience in running away from the law. The French can’t be too happy about seeing Paris’ finest depicted as such a bunch of incompetent boobs.

Probably my favourite characters are Lee Teabing, the “eccentric” British scholar, and Silas, the self-flagellating albino monk. Both of them are ludicrous caricatures, but entertainingly so, and at least their antics brought some relief from the relentless tepidness of the heroes. Silas, for his part, kept being referred to as “the albino”, which meant that my mental image of him kept shifting into something like this:





The Prose

One reason why I now agree with my friend that this book shouldn’t have been published – at least not in the state it’s in – is that, given that Brown is a thriller writer, it’s something of a handicap that he cannot write suspense to save his life. Cannot. Can. Not. This guy could not write a tense scene if his life depended on it.

Part of the problem is the prose, which is as bland and dull as the people it describes. The plot doesn’t help, since it’s contrived to the point that it’s painfully easy to see where it’s going and the reader is never left in any doubt whatsoever that the protagonists will escape and win through.

But the main problem, in my view, is something that could easily have been fixed by a competent editor – or, in fact, any editor who wasn’t stoned out of his mind.
The problem? Infodumping. And not just any infodumping.

Right in the middle of a scene – frequently at a point in the story where a competent author would be concentrating on ramping up the tension – Brown will suddenly break off and give us a huge chunk of information about the local history or architecture. These infodumps often go on for pages, and have almost nothing to do with the plot point at hand. And by the time they’re done, the reader has completely forgotten where they were up to in the story.

Here’s an example:

Our hero has just been rudely awakened by the French police. They tell him that the curator of the Louvre has been murdered, and they want him to come and see the crime scene with the body still there. Shaken (well, not really – he doesn’t “do” emotion), Langdon accompanies them to the Louvre.

‘Okay,’ we’re thinking, ‘this should be interesting – someone’s been murdered, and we’re about to see the body. What does Langdon think about all this? Is he scared?’

Then, right in the middle of that, the text takes a sharp turn into a 500-word infodump about one of the landmarks Langdon’s car is passing.

Just as we’re recovering from that, we get another infodump – this time about the Louvre. What it looks like, its history, Langdon’s thoughts on it – blah blah blah, on and on and on, none of it referencing or even alluding to the murder or the murder victim.

By the time the first infodump was over, I had literally forgotten what was happening or why I was supposed to care, and when the second one rolled around I got a sense of impending doom that turned out to be a fair warning for what was ahead.

Sure enough, Brown didn’t let up on the infodumps one bit. It happens continuously through the entire book, getting steadily more and more boring, and more irritating. Everything the reader needs to know – and plenty of stuff the reader doesn’t need to know, or even care about – is put into these infodumps, and they have the effect of straining all the interest out of the book until what we’re left has all the excitement – and about the same literary merit – of a pair of old socks.

Overall, The Da Vinci Code fits into a certain, very sad category of books – the kind of books I can’t really make myself feel anything about because they’re bland and uninteresting to the point where I can’t even get annoyed about how badly written they are. I can’t make myself care about that, or about the book’s ridiculous popularity, and writing a review for it felt more like a chore than an opportunity to vent.

But I still liked the movie.

Recently, one of my longtime readers created this as a present just for me.

Who other than myself would love to see a t-shirt version?

Hey guys. I'm back and posting another review. This one's a relic of the old forums, so not everyone may have read it yet.

In the meantime, I still need suggestions for more books to pick on. I've run out.


This review was written in stages, before my current structure had been worked out. 

( Warning: revolting content )

To kick off, here's one of my old favourites - my review of Breaking Dawn. I did a review of Twilight as well, but it perished along with my last harddrive, and seems to have been deleted from the Agony Booth archives as well, so unless someone else saved a copy it's gone forever.
Happily, my Breaking Dawn review is way better.


Anyway, on with the show!



( Warning: Bad Language, Also Mean-Spirited Behaviour )

I am the Bubonic Book Rat. I sleep on a bed of shredded pages by night, and by day I roam the streets, infesting bookshops and infecting bad writers with my own special brand of plague.

Bad books are my trade. I sniff them out, I read them, I shriek and curse and gnash my teeth, and finally I shred them. Bad books are my pain, my joy and my purpose. Read my reviews if you will. The only payment I ask for is recommendations. Find bad books. Tell me about them. The Bubonic Book Rat shares your pain. Fantasy is my speciality, but I'm looking to branch out. Surprise me.

I have a fair wad of reviews archived already, so before I start anything new I'm going to post those at decent intervals.