(Warning: spoilers ahead)<\/p>\n
I read it. The plot was excellently contrived. The way it mixes fact and fiction is great. But as a whodunit, it's a bit rubbish. Dan Brown is continually treating both his characters and readers as simpletons. Now I realise it's not an easy thing to invent clues and a treasure hunt, and these clues are pretty well done. But does he have to layer on the dramatic irony so thickly? “Here's a clue which is really really obvious to you, reader. Now look at the stupid characters – they can't figure it out. Here's some more really really obvious clues this time, in case you didn't get it, reader. Ha ha! Silly characters – they're so dumb. Let's have the bad guy make an entrance and force the issue.”<\/p>\n
e.g.
\n– they steal an armoured car and don't realise it has a tracking device?
\n– they are really, really slow over the “knight a pope interred” clue. A Pope! Pope is even capitalised in the clue! OK so the American has an excuse, but surely Sophie does cryptic crosswords…
\n– Newton? Rosy flesh? Seeds? Suggests what?
\n– and surely any idiot would have scrambled the cryptex after re-closing it. But no, just go ahead and let the bad guy know you opened it…<\/p>\n
It's a prime candidate for your typical Hollywood film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Warning: spoilers ahead) I read it. The plot was excellently contrived. The way it mixes fact and fiction is great. But as a whodunit, it's a bit rubbish. Dan Brown is continually treating both his characters and readers as simpletons. Now I realise it's not an easy thing to invent…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}