Gunning Along the Champs Elysees.

I’m struggling with The Da Vinci Code. I’m getting to the point where I’m feeling reluctant to pick it up, because something else is bothering me now:

The Cliffhanger Technique.

You have a character tell 90% of a story, but you don’t let him finish it. Instead, you shift scene for the next couple of chapters and only reveal the dénouement three chapters down the line. It’s a creative writing technique to encourage the reader to keep turning the page, only it isn’t. It’s a commercial writing technique. It’s Saturday morning cinema stuff, and it’s getting on my nerves.

Meanwhile, let’s have an example of what’s been bugging me right from the start:

Sophie is driving Robert away from the Louvre, intent upon getting him to the relative safety of the American Embassy where he will receive protection from a false accusation of murder. This shouldn’t be too difficult because we’re informed that the embassy is only half a mile away. They drive, they talk, they screech around corners, and two pages further on we’re told that Sophie can breathe again because the embassy is now less than a mile away. See what I mean?

During the course of the drive, they take a hard left at a set of traffic lights. Robert looks behind him to see that the police aren’t following, but are still crowded round the Louvre. Ah, but, erm… they’ve just taken a hard left, so the Louvre isn’t behind them now. It’s over there, with a load of damn great buildings obscuring the view. See what I mean?

Any writer can make this sort of mistake; it’s partly what editors are for. The problem is, The Da Vinci Code is littered with them. Unacceptably so.

Oh, and let’s just throw something else into the mix:

While they’re making this great escape, we’re told that ‘Sophie gunned the car along the Champs ……..’ ‘Sophie gunned the car around a tight left.’ ‘Sophie gunned the car across the verge.’ Dan, vary the bloody verb, will you! When you’ve read ‘Sophie gunned the car’ five freggin’ times on one page, it gets a bit irritating, it really does.

I don’t think I’m up to the task of reading a popular novel. I’m not the sort who can be gunned along purely on the excitement of plot and character, missing all the flaws in my peripheral vision on the way. I see everything in my peripheral vision; it’s what the curse of keen awareness is all about. I fail the test. Guilty as charged.

I expect I’ll persevere just to find out who Sophie’s ancestor was (which I already know, of course, but it would be irritating not to let Dan – in the guise of Robert – explain it to me.)

And then there’s a Flann O’Brien novel I want to read. I doubt anybody will be gunning cars in a Flann O’Brien novel. If the only one I’ve read so far is anything to go by, irrationality will be a brilliantly constructed technique, not just a load of sloppy errors.