Dan Brown writes rather well, but he writes for television more than for a reading audience. It is irritating. Chapters limited to 4 to 6 pages are such thin slices of baloney that we seem to be fed some light and thin sandwiches with not much inside the bun. Reading is better when the chapters are healthily thick. Dan Brown is showing off his "culture," which is, in fact, nowadays, ChatGPT collecting data on one particular scientific and more often pseudo-scientific topics. He does not give that data without some explanation, which means we have, now and then, one long university lecture on the topic. That too is not fictional. Systematically, the evil people and their evil objectives are positioned in Europe, either from some European confused and distorted criminal-minded people, even if the action is in Turkey, or from some Americans using Europe as a criminal playground. That's the case in his last or latest novel. In other words, Dan Brown shows us what Europe would be if MAGA were ever dominant in the world. Yesterday night, January 23, 2026, we had a full demonstration at an official dinner at Davos. The Secretary for Commerce from Washington DC, who must have a name but it will be forgotten if it is not already erased from our memories and replaced by the ghost Trump, or is it Grump, that inhabited him; caused the European Central Bank's Chairperson to leave the table, then several other people did the same, and the Patrons who wert paying for the dinner decided to punish this dumb American by cancelling the dinner BEFORE DESSERT. Treated like a little, small, tiny, miniature, capricious, and malevolent child, Mr. Secretary for Commerce. Dan Brown is more or less showing with great zest, zeal, and dynamism what Europe would be if the CIA and the Americans were authorized to play hooligans in Europe. He has one or two characters who are more ethical, but they are also powerless, and anyway, manipulated like puppets on a puppet stage. It is popular for sure, I mean the books are, but the brandishing of I don't know what menaces from Russia or China, not to speak of Iran, does not make the fictitious and malicious political fiction palatable. Especially when we see how Trump backed down with Iran, how he is running backward in the Ukrainian case, how he is trying to short-circuit the United Nations in Gaza, and yet only gets little-significant people who are finished, dead in many ways, like Tony Blair. If he could, he would bring Kissinger back on the stage directly from his tomb. And in Greenland, Big Brother is, as the Belgians would say, a diminutive fox running away, his tail – you can see what I mean – well crushed between his legs. Dan Brown could do a lot better, and used to do a lot better, but the MAGA audience is so ripe for fictional exploitation that he cannot resist. Dan Brown, the author, is a transcriber of the plot-paranoia of standard Americans. It appears so vividly when you follow Dan Brown from 2003 to 2026. Imagine Trump making fun of Macron, who will not last very long now, and not making fun of a certain Trump who might lose his mid-term elections even before Macron is out, and this Trump would be out of the White House hardly one and a half years after Macron, in January 2029 Authors of fiction should know they must not mix up politics and literature. It is a highly inflammable cocktail, and it is the books and their authors who are autodafé-ed. And Grumpy might very well be railroaded to some psychiatric hospital before for Delirium Paranoidens.
Jacques COULARDEAU (Fri,) studied this question.