But WHY is it shit?
So, to shit, and why
Inferno is so precisely brown and noisome.
I'm not the clever and erudite thing you believe. It's true, I once dabbled in the world of literature, until one fateful day – part way through the labour that is Finnegans Wake (
it doesn't have an apostrophe you know, all clever people do) – I had a small epiphany. Not a big neon Jesus epiphany, well not unless Jesus was the small sparkly elf as portrayed in the apocryphal Book of Kevin, but enough of an epiphany to bring me to a literal halt and to contemplate just why the hell I was bothering with the slog. So, I put Finnegan in my wake and suddenly a weight lifted, like my very soul had taken a big draft of helium and was about to make one of those squeaky comedy pizza orders. At this point, some men – mostly those men destined to be caped crusaders (and despite the predilection towards tights, it generally is men, make of that what you will) – would have taken the life opportunity offered and maybe retreated to a monastery in highest Nepal to learn martial art skills and moody looks, but my calling was different, so instead I headed to Pizza Hut and spent a while wondering just how much processed cheese they could infect a small piece of bread with, and whether it would be better to just embed the bread inside a block of cheese and be done with it. Who wants bread when you can have cheese. That became my philosophy. That's what the stuffed crust taught me. There's cheese and there's death. Choose cheese.
So to Mr Brown. From past readings (and I did read the
Da Vinci Code), I figured that he could hammer together enough plot to hold together a plausible story, it's admittedly the shonky shed of storytelling, the kind of thing that'll hold up for the spare hour or two in an airport lounge or the on beach. It's there, it should do the the job, and given enough pace, it should hold together. It's not going to be standing in a few weeks. Cheese is there to be eaten, not admired.
Oh, you're going to demand specifics. The writing is easy to pick on, it's the small kid with the peculiar odour and jam-jar thick glasses. The prose dies on the page, right in front of you. You want to call someone but you know it's too late. Defibrillation would be futile. It's like the words have turned up out of some vague sense of obligation, after all he gave them a job last time, but they would rather be somewhere else. You can almost sense them sneaking off, they've heard there's a better book over there. There undoubtedly is. He insists on simply telling you things. The lead character is in the hospital when a doctor walks in. She has the
assertive gait of an athlete. She's just walked into a hospital room, not pole vaulted in.
Her eyes, though a gentle brown, seemed unusually penetrating, as if they had witnessed a profundity of experience rarely encountered by a person her age. Seriously, someone wrote that sentence. Editors read it. Proofreaders skimmed over it. Someone printed it. At no point from the conception to the printing of that sentence did a single person utter the word 'uh?' That
assertive gait of an athlete probably came in handy a few entire pages later when she was running from the leather clad, spiky haired, motorbike-riding assassin. If you can get past the recently deceased prose, it's like being beaten about the head with the cold, dead haddock of cliché.
And mostly because there is no pace. That was the one thing that might have carried it. It proceeds with all the dramatic tension of someone reciting the alphabet. The chapters are short and episodic, even if the writing could carry it, there's not even the space for tension to develop. No tension equals no pace. It has all the tension of the gusset of a ten-year-old pair of y-fronts. A book should grab you and carry you along. It doesn't have to be fantastic writing, and as someone who's trying to write a novel (well, two), I'm pretty impressed just by the act of holding a story together for a few hundred thousand words. It's a marathon. Sure, some people run a marathon like it's a race, others do it dressed as a giant chicken. They finish and that's the important thing. It's the achievement and the fact that you've been taken along for the ride. So what if that was on the back of a giant, sweating chicken.
I don't get on with proper literature these days, I can't abide the hothouse I've-done-a-creative-writing-course prose that's so beloved of the literati, but writing should have some fizz. It doesn't have to be a riot of adjectives, no one needs to kettle those restive adverbs, it just has to tell a story and make you interested in that story. And that failing is why
Inferno is big, brown, and smelly. Flush it for your own good.
Did someone mention
Twilight?