Word: browning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...familiar Brownian treats. Langdon has already flashed us his trademark Mickey Mouse watch ("I wear it to remind me to slow down and take life less seriously"), and we've gotten a taste of his freakish memory, his crippling claustrophobia and his rueful skepticism. We've been reminded of Brown's taste for ritual violence - there's a touch of Thomas Harris about his writing. We've even been introduced to a lonely, violent fanatic with weird skin. His name is Mal'akh instead of Silas, and instead of being an albino he's covered in tattoos, but same difference...
...here's the thing. It's easy to run Brown down, because his writing isn't very deft. He introduces new characters with a kind of electric breathlessness that borders on the inadvertently hilarious ("Newly hired security guard Alfonso Nuñez carefully studied the male visitor now approaching his checkpoint ..."). And the unfortunate sentence "His massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny" should itself be forcibly tattooed on Brown's massive sex organ. Worse, Brown's scholarship reads like the work of a man who believes what he reads in Wikipedia. In particular, the book suffers...
...little sickmaking to watch the undergraduates fawn over Langdon - as if! And I want to know who provides cell-phone service for Brown's characters, because they can make calls even when they're underground...
...make this a resounding but - it would be irresponsible not to point out that the general feel, if not all the specifics, of Brown's cultural history is entirely correct. He loves showing us places where our carefully tended cultural boundaries - between Christian and pagan, sacred and secular, ancient and modern - are actually extraordinarily messy. Langdon points out, for example, that the U.S. Capitol "was designed as a tribute to one of Rome's most venerated mystical shrines," the Temple of Vesta, and that it prominently features a painting of George Washington in the guise of Zeus. ("That hardly fits...
...turn man into god, which is something that Mal'akh, the tattooed nut job, has a keen interest in. Langdon is joined by the head of the CIA's Office of Security, who for some reason is a tiny, feisty Japanese woman with a huge scar on her neck - Brown screwed the dial one notch past quirky there. Langdon is also accompanied by another in Brown's line of "attractive, dark-haired," essentially interchangeable brainy-hottie heroines, who happens to be a noetic (oh, God, I typed it again) scientist. (See TIME's top picks for fall 2009 entertainment...