I’ve moaned all my moans about sloppy writing and improbable
detail, but there’s one more moan to come.
Sophie has discovered the grandmother and brother she
thought had both been killed in a car crash when she was young. The brother
comes dashing across the lawn, and this is how Brown describes the meeting:
‘Sophie?’
Through her tears,
Sophie nodded, standing. She did not know the young man’s face, but as they
embraced, she could feel the power of the blood coursing through his veins… the
blood she now understood they shared.
Do I need to expound? I hope not. Brown can hide in a corner
while we groan through the sloppy prose and lack of credibility in the details,
but he should do penance for this piece of prime Roquefort. He should. He must be punished for making me
cringe so hard that I even lost the lovely Sophie for a second in the fog of
disbelief. I suggest he gives all royalties from the book to a charity of my
choosing. My e-mail address is on the blog.
Having said which, the well structured plot - for which I have already given him credit - is brought to a
satisfactory conclusion. Apart, that is, from one thing:
No Sophie. While Langdon is finally discovering the
secret whereabouts of the Holy Grail in France, Sophie is still hugging her brother in Scotland. That
isn’t right. Sophie has been the more powerful of the two ever since she
instructed Langdon to follow her instructions because he was in danger. And
that’s how it’s supposed to be, because the book is all about re-establishing
the lost power of the feminine. So why does the man and the man alone finish
the story? A mixed message, I think. Not right.
And one more thing that’s been troubling me ever since
Sophie’s first appearance. What colour is burgundy hair exactly? The colour of red wine? Does such a colour exist
in nature, or are we to believe that Sophie, for all her languid Gallic chic, dyes her hair dark red?
Well, she and Langdon have a date to meet in Florence for a week of
wicked frolics in a month’s time, so I expect he’ll get to discover what colour
her hair really is then.
The End.
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