My first Kindle book completed, and I don't know if I can take another of Dan Brown's formulaic series of denouements.The book is fine, but Brown suffers from a Tolkien-esque need to label everything as ancient and belonging to someone: The Holy House of Heredom, The Winding Staircase of Freemasonry, The Code of Kryptos, the Ad of Nauseum (tee hee). See also The Mirror of Galadriel, The Riders of Theoden, The Dagger of The Witch King, The Fighting Knives of Legolas ... but I go on. (or at least Tolkien did).
And while good suspense writing demands some, er, suspense, every freaking chapter ends with stuff like "Wide-eyed, Mal'akh lay gasping for breath .. all alone on the great altar".
After a while, the persistent cliff-hangers got to me. I guess I'm suffering from something like my brother Lawrence, who maintains that he hates any book or film that starts with the result, and then tells the story of how things got to that result. My complaint is that I don't like writers or directors that can only maintain suspense using the same old devices. I'm tempted to write a spoof porn script using those devices, but someone might print it and show it to my mum! So you'll never get to read:
Chapter 2: .......... Ricky gasped as Rebekka tore violently at her stiffly-starched blouse, while fumbling frantically at his belt.
Chapter 3: Meanwhile, over at the grocery store, Joe deliberated over his choice of ice cream. "What flavor should we have tonight?", he wondered. This was always a problem for him. He knew he should have thought about this before trudging around every aisle at Safeway.
On a positive note, The Lost Symbol made it even more likely we'll spend a weekend in DC, armed with a list of alleged pyramids, obelisks and hidden-in-plain-sight evidence of the Freemasons' fabulous-ness.
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