Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction?

The Millennium trilogy and Da Vinci Code authors sell millions – but according to novelist Edward Docx their books are 'amateurish'.
Here, he argues that even good genre fiction doesn't bear comparison with works of true literary merit
Edward Docx, The Observer, Sunday 12 December 2010

Stieg Larsson creation Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Photograph: Knut Koivisto

On my way back to London the other day, I was clawing my way toward the buffet car when I noticed with a shock that more or less the entire train carriage was reading… novels. This cheered me up immensely: partly because I have begun to fear that we are living in some kind of Cowellian nightmare, and partly because I make a good part of my living writing them. Where were the Heats and the Closers, I wondered? The Maxims and the Cosmos? Where the iPads, the iPhones, the Blackberrys and the Game Boys, the Dingoos and the Zunes? Why neither the ding of texts, nor the dong of mail? Barely anyone was even on the phone, for Christ's sake. They were all reading. Quietly, attentively, reading.

My cheer modulated into something, well, less cheerful (but still quite cheerful) when I realised that they were all, in fact, reading the same book. Yes, you've guessed it: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo who Played With Fire and who, some time later we are lead to believe, Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
In the next three carriages it was the same story – men, women, toddlers. A glance out of the window revealed that even the cows were at it – nose deep, hay forgotten. And when, finally, I arrived at the buffet car, I was greeted with a sigh and a how-dare-you raise of the eyebrows. Why? Because in order to effectively conjure my cup of lactescent silt into existence, the barrista in question would have to put down his… Stieg Larsson.

In terms of sales, 2010 has been the year of the Larsson. Again. His three books have been the three bestselling fiction titles on Amazon UK. Along with Dan Brown, he has conquered the world. The success of the Millennium trilogy is a tale of unimaginable public appetite, staggering international sales, big-screen boosts, perplexed publishers and (let's face it) not-that-originally-reformulated formula fiction.
Not least among the reasons for the bafflement of the industry (and fellow writers) is the amateurishness of the books – something, curiously, that Larsson has in common with Brown. Readers, publishers and writers alike can agree that John Grisham, Robert Harris, Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel build up their massive readerships by knowing precisely what they are doing; they are master practitioners of their highly skilled craft. Conversely, Brown and Larsson – in their different ways – are mesmerisingly bad.

Here is Dan Brown, for example, describing – without flinching – how women find his hero's voice like "chocolate for their ears" before having said hero muse to himself that "he knew what came next" – "some ridiculous line about 'Harrison Ford in Harrison Tweed'". Leaving aside the queasiness of the gender politics (another communality with Larsson is the cod feminism), ridiculous is not the word we're after here. Larsson, meanwhile, opens Part 1 ("Incentive") of his first book with the most tedious acronym-packed exchange – not a conversation, not dialogue – that I have ever read.
His two characters sit stranded in harbour because one of them can't start his engine (no joke) and begin "to explore what was ethically satisfactory in certain golden parachute agreements during the 90s". Says character "B": ''The AIA obtained government guarantees for a number of projects… The Swedish Trade Union Confederation, LO, also joined in… [and] Wennerström presented a plan, seemingly backed by interests in Poland, which aimed at establishing an industry for the manufacture of packaging food stuffs." Pause for a line or two to take this in before – again without irony – says character "A" in reply: "This is starting to get interesting." No it isn't.

I realise we are sailing into choppy waters here. With Larsson now dead and so decent a chap, how dare I go up on deck and start explaining – amid the storms of publicity and howl of Hollywood and the relentless sluicing of the sales – that his work is not very good even by the standards of his genre? Well because, in my view, we need urgently to remind ourselves of – for want of better terminology – the difference between literary and genre fiction; because, to misquote the literary essayist Isaac D'Israeli, "it seems to me a wretched national compulsion to be gratified by mediocrity when the excellent lies before us".

The full piece at The Observer