weateallthepies.com

I wanted to like it, I really did. I quite enjoyed “The Da Vinci Code” as a fun, yet slightly silly thriller and I could just about look past the “bollocks wrapped up as fact” feat he pulled off which still has people quoting “facts” from the book because Dan Brown told them it was real in the introduction…which was actually a very clever little trick. With this new one though the yarn just isn’t good enough to outweigh all the annoyances that I managed to overlook before.

The book has a cliffhanger every other chapter or so, all several billion of them. Most of the supporting characters exist as barely a job description, appearing for a few characterless minutes to drive the plot on to the next inevitable cliffhanger.

The “science” and tech stuff was dreadful which shouldn’t really annoy me in a book which is loosely based on reality but since Dan Brown states much like before in the introduction that all the science is real you’d expect some of it to be, well real.

There was an awful lot of guff about science not really discovering anything, just rediscovering ancient wisdom that had been forgotten, and some pretty weak coincidences between modern science and ancient texts that supposedly back it up. The IP address tracing bit was pretty funny too complete with pointless hacker who appears and disappears swiftly from the tale.

Noetic science? I’m not even going to bother with the claims made on that one. Sure it’s ‘real’ in the same way that homoeopathy is ‘real’, it exists as something some crazy people believe in. None of it is proven in the way that is claimed.

Maybe I’m just too much of a science/skeptic geek. Maybe I’d be less annoyed if the stuff wasn’t sold as being “true”. Or maybe it was all a bit dull and this is the most interesting thing I can say about it. Regardless the man knows how to make money so he must be doing something right.