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Dan Brown's writing style is a mix of jargon, dark intrigues and everyday situations. Althouhg I haven't read all of Dan Brown's books, I cannot help but notice that he favours certain genres: thriller and drama with a taste of traveller's guides. From the beginning of his career, he has consistently written about puzzles, mazes, codes, cyphers and subjects that carry universal meaning and existential reflection. Dan Brown does not focus so much on religion or history, he is more interested in navigating the forgotten details and loopholes of our Humanities books.
In The Digital Fortress, Dan Brown tackles the issue of Cyber security and Cryptography (very relevant today with the emergence of The Blockchain technology) while in Deception point, he explores the world of Marine biology and Scientific agencies (also very significant nowadays with Big corporations' AI and Extraterrestrial ambitions). In the Langdon series, Dan Brown strives to revisit the academic heritage of the Greco-Roman civilisation through the numerous international trips of the Harvard professor: from the USA to France, to the United Kingdom, to Italy, and so on.
Style
A lot has been said about Dan Brown's clumsy writing and sentencious dialogues: some appreciate this lack of literary pretense, others will label it "uninspiring". It is true that Dan Brown is not an author, despite being an English teacher. If anything, his career in Education and his foray in the Arts would have convinced him that, to bring attention to the content of his books, he has to keep the words and the plot simple.
Dan Brown's ambition is not to become a Marcel Proust, a Samuel Beckett or a Tennessee Williams. He is more interested in giving pulse to his novels, keeping the readers on their toes, dazzling and teaching them about the reality that surrounds them and that rarely makes it to classrooms or TV channels. While reading, people can play guessing games, hypothesise, draw conclusions and revisit these as more facts, figures and data get presented to them.
Personally, I have found Dan Brown's first two novels very interesting, because they manage to make technical processes and professional jargon accessible and fascinating to most readers. However, I have to admit that most of the time, I was able to anticipate what was going to happen and which twists were going to be inserted where. After Deception Point, it became very obvious that Dan Brown wrote from a formulaic recipe that he is not interested in changing. This makes his novels great material for cinema adaptations, but also offputting to more demanding readers.
