Dan Brown's "Deception Point"

[_fish_a_holic_]

Hey guys,
Has anyone else here read Deception Point by Dan Brown?? (author of The Da Vinci Code)... I swear this is fish related!

Near the very end of the novel, the famous marine biologist (Michael Tolland) gives his new lover (Rachel Sexton, the heroine of the story) some fish...

She carefully opened the package, extracting the heavy contents. Inside was a large crystal bowl in which were swimming two ugly orange goldfish. Rachel stared in confused disappointment. "You're joking, right?"

"Helostoma temmincki," Tolland said proudly.
"You bought me fish?"
"Rare Chinese kissing fish. Very romantic."
"Fish are not romantic, Mike."
"Tell that to these guys. They'll kiss for hours."

Now, how many holes can we blow in the above excerpt???

• "large crystal bowl"???
• "ugly orange goldfish"???
• "Rare"???
• "Chinese"???
• "kiss for hours"???

Yeah yeah I know I have too much time on my hands. I love Dan Brown's work, and was soooo impressed with it up until the second-to-last page of Deception Point. Why oh why did he have to go stuff it up??? There's this world-renowned marine biologist and all these scientific facts peppered throughout the entire book, and he ends up messing up on the kissing gourami? Surely a quick search on Google would have pointed out that these fish weren't kept in bowls, weren't orange, weren't ugly (IMO), weren't goldfish, don't kiss for romantic reasons, and don't kiss for hours??? (Unless they were trying to fight each other, which is understandable if they were kept in this small bowl)

IMHO, the entire ending was way too soppy and a disappointment anyhow.

ARRRRGH!!!

I've tried to write to the author but no can do. He probably gets comments like this a lot. Teehee...

D'OH!
Irene

 

[houndour]

I'm trying not to read your post cos i'm about 200 pages into reading deception point! lol

 

[Ben]

lol, its just a book

DD

 

[guppygirl]

Yep, waaaaay too much time.
Go do a water change, you!!!!!!

 

[OohFeeshy]

You know, a while ago I was going to look them up.... Did you look for the latin name? Hmm... I wonder if anyone told them about cycling...

EDIT- whoops, I realised that WAS the latin name for kssing gouramis.

 

[pica_nuttalli]

i just hope there's not a mad rush to the stores b/c of it... kissing gouramis strike a special vein of distaste in me; i think of them in similar terms to chinese algae eaters. vicious little scale suckers....

 

[OohFeeshy]

Nah doubt it. Not many people read the book, its been out for a while and if you can be bothered to look up the latin name, you can probably be bothered to look for info on it.

 

[pica_nuttalli]

Nah doubt it. Not many people read the book, its been out for a while and if you can be bothered to look up the latin name, you can probably be bothered to look for info on it.

*does a wild dance of delight*

hates 'em we do, my preciousssss...

 

[sylvia]

In defence of the gouramies.. I love them ... They are great fishies. I'm not a big fan of the pink and balloon varieties but the original wild green is beautiful. They all have fine personalities too and can be very entertaining to watch.

I don't like CAEs though

Anyway, I was going to read that book Oh well... I'll just skip the bit about the fish when it comes to it or something.

 

[xanthianacid]

Hi Irene,

You put alot of investment into reading a book, and it's a real kick in the teeth when the author stuffs up like this. Do a review of it on Amazon, it gets heaps of coverage. Authors used to have their own commentary on their own books but that got scrapped when someone impersonated a very famous author very wrongly.

He might get to read it if it is on Amazon, I know some other authors will read comments there...

As for kissing Gourami,
I love Gourami of course, but not a big fan of the kissing variety.

All of those mistakes you pointed out are all valid. Its a bit unfortunate that he screwed it up so bad at the end. But, not having read the book its hardly on authority, maybe it was done for a reason. Not everyone would catch it up of course, only a select few in his readership, but it might have been a subtle 'thing' between characters, or alluding to something underlying. It might be a symbol in of something important. Or it could of course just been a stuff up - something that should have been corrected either by author or fact/spelling checkers. They have to go through a rather prolonged process, it might have been left for a reason is all I'm saying.

Cheers Xan