The Hot Potato School of Writing Ludicrously Successful Books

We succumbed. Or rather, Skribe did. He bought the Da Vinci Code and we're reading it in turns.

Twenty-odd chapters in, I don't get it. Maybe it improves later?

Yes, it's competent. But that's all it is. It's a good example of good pulp writing. Punchy plotting, filmic settings, cliched characters, what more do you want in popcorn literature? Reminded me of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in fact. Another fine example of competent writing, etc... Plus fun wordplay, which fact alone endears Rowlings to me over Dan Brown any day.

But neither of them are particularly fantastic writers, nor do they tell particularly interesting stories. So why are they so phenomenally successful? It can't just be PR.

There's only one real explanation: the world's become less literate.

Something like the Da Vinci Code - whose core ideas I first encountered in dog-eared old conspiracy paperbacks during the 70s and which had evolved into source material for vampire role-playing games in the 90s - offered nothing new. (And if I wasn't scandalised as an impressionable Catholic schoolgirl, I sure as hell am not going to be outraged now). Similarly, Harry Potter rehashed so many old children's fantasy books I grew up on that I didn't so much read the book as play spot-the-originals.

I mean, kudos to Rowlings and Brown for getting people to read again. But, honestly, there are better writers and more interesting books out there. I'm sure of it. The fact that grown-ups are devouring the Harry potter books, and the mainstream public are intrigued by the "dangerous" ideas in the Da Vinci Code is something that genuinely surprises me. What have you been reading that any of this is new to you? C'mon, world, stop scaring me already.

Skribe describes the success of Rowlings and Brown as "doing an Eddings", except even Eddings didn't become a media celebrity. He was twenty years too early, apparently, and more to the point, his style of ludicrously successful bookwriting featured characters over plot, and what plot there was consisted of travelling from point A to point B and so on down the alphabet, and then doing it again. Nobody read the Belgariad for its plot, and subsequently, nobody would ever have considered wanting the film rights to it.

Which is where Rowlings and Brown, alas, get it right. Plot, however hackneyed, sells. Characterisation, on the other hand, is something only the actors will have to worry about.

And ideas? They kept telling me in uni that there are no new ideas, only new ways to tell old stories. Rowlings and Brown are certainly proving it. Disappointing, really. Some day, we're going to look back at this era, and hold up these books as the great literature of our day, and that's just tragic.