A DaVinci Dumbness: the importance of continuity.

Congratulations to Dan Brown for becoming a much richer man due to his thriller, The DaVinci Code. I helped pay your royalties. Hats off, and I'd love to be in your shoes.

But Dan, would you please engage a competent editor for your next one? The blunder that stubbed my mental toe on page 3 robbed my read of a lot of pleasure…for the rest of the book, part of my mind's eye was diverted from the story to the writing. (And it wasn't all that happy with what it saw.)

Here's the goof. In the prologue, Louvre Museum curator Jacques Saunière is shot and falls to the floor, mortally wounded. But he has to try to warn others about the attack. So this happens…

Staggering to his feet, he pictured his three murdered brethren. He thought of the generations who had come before them…of the mission with which they had all been entrusted.

An unbroken chain of knowledge.

Suddenly, now, despite all the precautions…despite all the fail safes…Jacques Saunière was the only remaining link, the sole guardian of one of the most powerful secrets ever kept.

Shivering, he pulled himself to his feet.

Ouch. First he staggers to his feet and then, just three paragraphs later, pulls himself to his feet. But, you see, he was already on his feet.

The problem with such a goof, especially right at the front of the novel, is that the author's credibility is called into question. A shaky author's hand is revealed, taking the reader out of the story. The spell is broken and, for me, never quite mended. I know, picky, picky, picky. But I'll bet I'm not the only one.

How many people read that passage and missed the mistake before the book was published? Even afterwards, it's apparently non-apparent -- I mentioned this gaffe to a sharp-eyed writer/editor who'd read the book and she had missed it.

I'm surprised by how often I come across similar continuity problems in the works I edit. I wonder why they're there -- if I can hold enough of an entire novel that I didn't write in my head to catch them, surely the author can, right? As Mr. Brown shows us, evidently not (having said that, God help me if anybody ever catches a continuity lapse in one of my novels). Now that he can afford an editor, I hope he involves one before the next book comes out, if for the sake of continuity alone (don't get me started on characterization or mechanical plot devices).

Dan, I'm available, and a very writer-friendly editor.

Did anyone besides me notice Mr. Brown's little slip? What do you think?

Comments

[Laura]

Yup, I saw that...and you'd think since he was already published prior to this "hit" that he would have had an editor through his publisher looking out for his blunders. It's chronic in a lot of books on the shelves, one or two little blips in which someone's brain just shut down and missed. It happens even to the best of us, even good editors.

One of the things that has helped me catch the little glitches is reading a section backwards, it forces me to really see what I'm reading and make sense of it. It's quite a process I've developed, I'm hoping it'll pay off someday when one of my books finally makes the leap.

Good blog!

[Karen Junker]

Yeah, I noticed it. I forced myself to read the book, mostly because I want to know what makes it a bestseller. Probably it's the same thing that makes Roseanne Barr a famous actress. People go for the rush, not the details.

[James]

I didn't notice these particular slip-ups, though it was probably because I was too busy gouging out my own eyes with a pair of chopsticks.

Dan Brown has to be the luckiest writer alive, that's all I have to say. His plots are threadbare-to-nonexistent, his characters barely worthy of the term, his "research" confined to regurgitating text nearly verbatim from his source materials, and (as you see) his prose is atrocious. And yet...he managed to stumble upon a perfect combination of beach read and religious hysteria, thus becoming a multi-zillionaire.

Sigh.

[Jennifer]

My husband liked this book, but I didn't care for it. (He read it in French, so maybe the translation was worded differently.) There was nothing terribly wrong with it - it was bland. I suppose hype had a lot to do with its success. I think Mr. Brown wrote it with Hollywood in mind, which is why it was so thin on characterization, plot, and vocabulary.
I haven't read a really good 'bestseller' book in ages - anyone else get that feeling?