The Secret Of Secrets - Dan Brown
As I approached the end of Dan Brown's The Secret Of Secrets, I began to think about how I was going to review it and what I thought was worth talking about. I unapologetically love his first two non-Langdon novels, and I apologetically enjoy the first two Langdon books despite hating the self-insert protagonist and being able to recognise that Brown is, objectively, not a good prosaist.
I had planned to talk about how The Secret Of Secrets puts all of Browns worst habits as a writer on full display, how he tries to make a joke of his egregious overuse of ellipsis, how obnoxious it is that he quotes the opening line of Digital Fortress as "one of [Langdon's] favorite novels". I was going to talk about how characters get introduced only to be completely forgotten about by the denouement. But then, towards the end of the book, a chapter appeared that is very obviously an advertisement for Starbucks, and now that's the only thing I can think about.
Say what you want about Brown's writing, one thing he's always excelled at in the thriller form is making sure that every chapter reveals something new or propels the plot forward in some way. This is the formula that makes his often poorly-written books work. This is what makes them "page turners".
The chapter in question is perhaps a page and a half long (I read on Kindle, so it's hard to know exactly). In it, a minor character goes to Starbucks to buy coffee, taking "[a] heavenly sip of the creamiest flat white in the city". While he's there he remembers something Langdon told him about the Starbucks logo, which is printed on the page so we can look at it. And then the chapter ends.
That's it. That's the whole chapter.
I'm not naive. I know that product placement has appeared in film and TV practically since the dawn of the mediums. I hate it, but I accept it as a facet of the financial realities of producing film. And I guess I just thought that novels were safe from it. But no. Even in a novel, we now have to deal with stealth marketing.
Maybe this has been happening for a long time and I just haven't read the books that are doing it. Maybe even Brown has been doing it for years - the last Langdon novel I read was The Lost Symbol, which I thought was bad enough that I didn't pick up Inferno or Origin. But even if this isn't a particularly new horror, I absolutely hate it. What the fuck are we doing here?
The upshot is that The Secret Of Secrets will forever live in my mind as the book that tried to slip a Starbucks advert past me. And that pisses me off.