In 2004 and 2005, Geoff Pullum wrote a few Language Log posts about Dan Brown's style. I think that they're among the funniest bits of stylistic criticism since Mark Twain took on "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", and I'm not alone in being impressed. Two of these posts ("The Dan Brown code", May 1, 2004; and "Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence", November 7/2004) are still generally among our top ten pages, and "The Dan Brown Code" has been the third or fourth Google hit for {Dan Brown} for some time. As a result of those posts, Geoff was invited to contribute to a collection called "Secrets of Angels and Demons", published in December of 2004.
Recently, Mark Steyn contributed a book review to the Canadian weekly magazine Maclean's, "The Da Vinci Code: bad writing for biblical illiterates". The online copy is dated May 10, 2006, and in paper form, the material appears on p. 54 of the May 15, 2006 issue. Steyn's piece is about 1300 words long. The first 550 words or so are about Dan Brown's writing; the rest is about the Gospel of Judas. If you read the first portion of Steyn's review along with the two Language Log posts that I've cited (here and here), I believe that you'll notice some striking similarities.
In this post, I'm going to limit myself to pointing out some of these similarities. I'll explain later what I think they mean. [Some opinions are now available here, here, and here.]
The first thing to observe is that Steyn cites Pullum:
The linguist Geoffrey Pullum -- or linguist Geoffrey Pullum, as novelist Dan Brown would say -- identifies this as the anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier, to which renowned novelist Dan Brown is unusually partial.
The reference is to Brown's habit of starting books with phrases like "renowned curator Jacques Saunière", "physicist Leonardo Vetra", and "geologist Charles Brophy". Roughly 400 of Steyn's 550 words on Dan Brown are focused on this intrusion of journalistic style into Brown's novels. Steyn's wording suggest to me that he is giving Geoff credit for the the grammatical terminology, not for the stylistic observations or the selection of examples. The reference to Pullum comes after two paragraphs describing two anarthrous examples of Brown's style (out of the three that Steyn quotes), which are presented as if the stylistic observation were Steyn's original reaction as a reader:
So I didn't like the title and then I began reading the book. In the beginning was the word, and Mr. Brown's very first one seems to have gone missing:
"Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."
And after that I found it hard to stagger on myself. Shouldn't it be "The renowned curator"? What happened to the definite article? Did Mr. Brown choose to leave it off in order to affect an urgent investigative journalistic style? No, it's just the way he writes. Here's the first sentence of Angels &Demons:
"Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own."
The key joke in Pullum's two cited posts was the observation that this phrasing (which Pullum calls "an occupational term is used with no determiner as a bare role NP premodifier of a proper name") is characteristic of journalism and never normally used in fiction, and that Dan Brown nevertheless uses it to start several of his novels. In his Language Log post "Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence", Pullum illustrates this point by discussing, in order, three quotes from Brown:
1. Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.
2. Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.
3. Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.
Steyn's 400-word discussion of Brown's anarthrous style is also structured around the discussion of these three quotes. He elides the last phrase of the last quote, but otherwise he gives the same quotes in the same order, supplying no other examples:
1. "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."
2. "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own."
3. "Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years . . ."
Following the last Dan Brown quote, Steyn produces a real zinger of a witticism:
Novelist Dan Brown staggered through the formulaic splendour of his opening sentence.
I'm not the only one who was impressed:
(link) And on a lighter note, I always enjoy Mark Steyn. This is great on the Da Vinci Code: "Novelist Dan Brown staggered through the formulaic splendour of his opening sentence."
Steyn's bon mot was also posted (as the example sentence in a fake Word For The Day post for "anarthrous") on May 11 on Free Republic.
Steyn's witticism is strikingly similar to the language of Pullum's post "Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence", as displayed in the table below.
| Dan Brown's sentence | Pullum's parody | Pullum's repetition | Steyn's blend | |
| 1 | Renowned | Renowned | Renowned | |
| 2 | curator | author | linguist | Novelist |
| 3 | Jacques | Dan | Geoff | Dan |
| 4 | Saunière | Brown | Pullum | Brown |
| 5 | staggered | staggered | staggered | staggered |
| 6 | through | through | across | through |
| 7 | the | his | the | the |
| 8 | vaulted | formulaic | savage | formulaic |
| 9 | archway | splendor | splendour | |
| 10 | of | of | of | |
| 11 | the | the | his | |
| 12 | museum's | opening | Santa Cruz | opening |
| 13 | Grand Gallery | sentence | campus | sentence |
[Seven of Geoff's Dan Brown posts are reprinted in our recent book, but of course they are still available in the Language Log archives, along with some others not yet reprinted:
"The Dan Brown code" (May 1, 2004)
"The sixteen first rules of fiction" (May 15, 2004)
"Dan Brown still moving very briskly about" (November 4, 2004)
"Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence" (November 7, 2004)
"Oxen, sharks, and insects: we need pictures" (November 8, 2004)
"Thank God for film: Dan Brown without the writing" (December 2, 2004)
"The kaleidoscope of power" (January 18, 2005)
"Learning the ropes in the trenches with Dan Brown" (July 14, 2005)
"Don't look at their eyes!" (July 19, 2005)
"A five-letter password for a man obsessed with Susan" (September 10, 2005)
For the many writers in need of material to deal with the imminent opening of The Da Vinci Code movie, there's a lot of good stuff in there that hasn't been re-used yet. ]
Posted by Mark Liberman at May 15, 2006 12:21 AM