Page turning pleasure

 

Would I recommend it?  That is the question that I am asking myself after finishing the last page and plonking the weighty tome on the coffee table.  Origin is the fourth (I think) novel by Dan Browne that I have read – though, now I come to think of it, I haven’t actually bought one of them.  All loaned.  And gratefully received.

     Origin is one of those books which you can read as if it’s a screenplay, so many of the set piece descriptions seem purpose written for the cinema.  It makes much of its setting in Spain and Barcelona and, as someone living in Catalonia within easy distance of Barcelona, I cannot deny the little frissons of delighted recognition as major architectural landmarks like the Casa Milà (La Pedrera), La Sagrada Familia, and even a mention of the small airport in Sabadell that we sometimes pass when going to Terrassa are described.

     Brown is a master at grafting further meaning onto the already significant, and he makes the most of the architectural backgrounds that he uses.

     To say that his novel’s narrative structure is contrived, says little – of course it is, that is part of the reason that his work sells so much and so widely.  We expect high tension action in his work, and part of the delight is seeing how he fabricates the excitement around settings and buildings that millions of people have visited.  He finds a way to make your memory of the guided tour just a little more high-octane by sprinkling his narrative magic of mysterious codes and signs to be deciphered to make the ordinary, deeply fascinating.

     Brown shares with Bryson the ability to make what appears to be complex understandable to the general reader.  He is careful to give information so that we are not left behind so, for example, philosophers or painters or mathematicians may be cited in the text, but there will always be a little extra information so that the reader can place them, almost as if they are wearing a descriptive name tab.  This is done unobtrusively, but constantly, so that you start noticing the ‘helping informative hand’ that you are given.

     Did I enjoy the book?  I have to say I did.  Will I ever read it again?  I have to say I won’t.  But Brown as a safe pair of story-telling hands producing a rollicking tale, Origin works.

 

 

Where are we going to eat for Christmas?

     In the UK, this time in November is too late to think about getting somewhere in a restaurant.  All the spaces will be gone.  And at a price that makes you wonder if it’s worth it just not to have to do the washing up!

     Here in Catalonia, you can consider going out to a restaurant on Christmas Day for a decent meal, without paying a fortune.  But even here, where you can leave booking fairly late, it is advisable to book early.

     Family discussions have at least started and tomorrow we are going to try out a restaurant that has been suggested to see what the food is like.  I have not seen the Christmas Menu but going out for Sunday Lunch seems like a good idea, and I am all for trying before eating – at least this lunch will not be as expensive as the Christmas meal.

     I suppose we expect to pay something like 45 to 50 euros for the Christmas lunch and that will probably include wine and Cava and coffee.  Not that the inclusion of alcohol means anything to me, as I am still true to my determination to drink nothing, if the only ‘something’ that my doctor allows me is “one small glass of red wine a day”.  I would like to see any self-respecting Welshman stick to that!

     And I am now, after a number of YEARS of alcohol denial, more and more convinced that cold, pure, water is unbeatable as an all-round drink.  Honestly!

 

 

What guilty pleasure?

 

There are some things that you do that you know are questionable, but you do them all the same.  Because sometimes you simply want to fall, or should that be Fall?  We are, after all, only human.

     Perhaps I am making too much of my current weakness, but I do feel that it is a guilty pleasure.

     The source of my self-indulgent unease is a book.  Not a book that I have bought (for once) but I book that I have been loaned.  It is a substantial book, with a rather fine cover featuring an overview of the city of Barcelona with the instantly recognizable structure of La Sagrada Familia taking centre stage. though in my reading so far, the action has taken place in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

 

 

 

The title of the book is Origin, and the author is Dan Brown, he of The Da Vinci Code, and it is Book 5 in the series featuring his academic enigma solving professor Robert Langdon.  And should I be reading it?

     The fact that I am even asking myself the question is significant.  Why shouldn’t I read something that has sold, with his other books, over 200 million copies?  Or is it because he has sold over 200 million copies that I should shun his work as being far too popular for my fastidious taste?

     There is a sort of snobbery over best-sellers that posits that if the appeal is so wide-ranging then it must perforce be somewhat infra dig to be seen paddling in such muddy overcrowded waters!

 

      

 

 

     One of my favourite quotations is taken from Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain and concerns someone sneering at another character whom he accuses of talking in clichés, the response from the accused is, “I got nothing against clichés, son. It’s the quickest method of communication yet invented, but I get you.”  Which nicely puts the supposed superiority of the sneerer in place, and yet at the same time recognizes that while the efficiency of the communication via cliché might be unparalleled, there is an element of style that is lacking.

 

 

 

     I have only just started reading Origin and I am already hooked.  Yes, I can see that the structure of the novel is formulaic and yes Brown is serving up all the old tropes from religion, secrets, codes and mystery that has served him well, not well, most handsomely in his previous books, but if you are wheeling out Robert Langdon (again) then you just about know what to expect in terms of subject matter (just as you do with James Bond) but the delight is finding out how the old tune has been jazzed up to keep you reading.

     Brown is a safe pair of narrative hands, and the action fairly bounces along.  I am not expecting to find the equivalent of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann in his pages, but I am expecting to be intrigued.  It also helps that the locations in Spain that he has chosen for the action so far are all ones that I have visited, and therefore feel a personal link with them.

     And, anyway, I should point out that I am a person who has read ALL the space adventure Lucky Starr novels written by Isaac Asimov under a different name (Paul French) purely for money.  They are awful, and I devoured them.  To be fair, these novels were written for a juvenile audience, and there was a hope that the series would be picked up by a television company and produced, but they never were.  To give a flavour of the book, I could cite just one of the snappy titles, Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, and the writing matches the banality of the title.  And remember, I’ve read it, and the rest of them.

     I justified to myself the reading of the Lucky Starr series because I was on a sort of project to read all the sci-fi stories and novels that Asimov had ever written, so I had to read the Lucky Starr novels to achieve completion.  Did they have the profundity of Nightfall or The Foundation Trilogy?  No, of course they didn’t, but they were not attempting to match those.  And I enjoyed them.  All of them.

     Brown was quoted as saying of The da Vinci Code that he hoped it would be “an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate” and from what I have read in Origin so far, he could claim with some justification that same statement as a tag line for the novel.

     And what, after all, is wrong with “an entertaining story” at any time!