Short Book Review: The Da Vinci Code

[dragoness_e]

I finally picked up Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code cheap at a used booksale and read it. I had been curious to see for myself why, on the one hand, did writers slam the book as atrocious writing, while on the other hand, it was a worldwide best-seller. If it was so bad, how could it appeal to so many people?

No, it wasn't cumulative bad taste by the public.

Short answer: Dan Brown wrote a very well-done, tightly-plotted story that engages the reader until the end, and has a satisfactory ending.


Cons:

Brown wields the English language like a rusty tire iron. Some of his prose flat-out clunks, and there's some horrifying misplaced modifiers and abused metaphors every now and then. The worst of them popped up in the first chapter or so, which suggests that either (a) I got sucked into the story after than and didn't notice the bad prose, or (b) he wrote the first few chapters much earlier than the rest of the book (the classic "three chapters and an outline" proposal) and got better at writing later on.

I found the major history-rape much more grating than his occasionally clunky prose. There's some flat-out fiction that is presented in-story as 'fact', and that bothers me. I'm not sure why; yes, there's the worry that people will believe fiction as historical fact, yet I have no problems with science-fiction writers who put outright fiction in their stories. (No, there aren't ancient Martian civilizations with canals and never were, and sci-fi writers were and are writing them into stories well after it was known that there's no such thing on Mars. Why? Because it makes for fun stories).

Why does Brown taking the utter crack that is the Gnostic Gospels and treating it as actual secret history and theology bother me? Why does it bother me that he has a conspiracy theorist's romp with major intellectuals and secret societies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance--the same romp that several other authors who wrote stories about the Illuminati or the Cthulhu Mythos or whatever did? It didn't bother me when H. P. Lovecraft played fast and loose with certain Renaissance societies, books and characters--why does it bother me that Dan Brown did?

Pros:

The story is an engaging, tightly-plotted thriller. It's fast-paced, written in classic pulp fiction style; like Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the author of Doc Savage, he ends chapters on minor cliff-hangars and keeps the threats to our heroes constantly coming, so they--and the reader--never have time to slow down and get bored. The puzzles and codes keep that hint of mystery dangling in front of the reader--what's the big secret, how do our heroes solve this one, what's really going on?--that tantalizes and drags the reader ever deeper. Quick looks at what the 'bad guys' are doing ups the threat level to our heroes and keeps dangling the big question of 'What the heck is really going on? Who is on whose side? How are they going to escape this?' in front of the reader, encouraging him ever onward.

Tension ratchets up to a classic thriller climax, with things and characters turning out not to be what they seemed to be at first and our heroes confronting a ruthless, Machiavellian villain. The resolution is just about right, I think--trying to avoid spoilers, I'll say that it avoids extremes of revealing and resolving either too much or too little.

The plot twists unfold naturally from what goes before: what appeared to be an obvious, perhaps cliched situation turns out to be anything but, yet all the clues were laid in beforehand. A sharp, suspicious reader might see some of them coming, yet even I didn't see all of them--yet in retrospect, there's a certain, "Oh, of course. That all makes sense now!" That's how a well-implemented plot-twist should unfold.

Also, like a classic pulp thriller, the protagonists are male and female, and there's that whiff of romance between the pretty girl and the brave hero throughout the story, and the conclusion is also satisfactory in that regard. Dan Brown, like Burroughs and L'Amour and Doc Smith and other classic pulp-era writers understands that both men and women like a story where the hero saves the day and wins the heart of the girl.

Comments

[ravynfyre.livejournal.com]

Why does Brown taking the utter crack that is the Gnostic Gospels and treating it as actual secret history and theology bother me? Why does it bother me that he has a conspiracy theorist's romp with major intellectuals and secret societies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance--the same romp that several other authors who wrote stories about the Illuminati or the Cthulhu Mythos or whatever did? It didn't bother me when H. P. Lovecraft played fast and loose with certain Renaissance societies, books and characters--why does it bother me that Dan Brown did?

Because when those other authors did so, they were not really presenting their stories as fact. It was clearly understood that their pieces were true fiction, were written as fiction, and were presented as fiction, with their backgrounds understood to be fact in that fantasy setting and not in the real world.

Dan Brown did no such thing, and did, initially, attempt to pass his fiction off as "romanticized fact". He has been seen in interviews attempting to claim that he researched real facts which he presented in his book to bolster the story, when, in fact, he made these things up whole cloth, and simply tossed in njust enough reality to make his fantasy plausible.

In short, he was trying to pull a fast one on the public in an effort to boost sales. The other authors were simply good, and didn't need to trick the public into thinking that their work was "real" ro sell their product. They were a bit more honest about their lying.

[jill-dragon.livejournal.com]

But who's to say it's crack? After all, the Bible itself has been 'edited' and revised so many times who knows what the original truth was? I don't think we should discount anything new simply because it doesn't fit within the original parameters. But maybe that's the blasphemous scientist in me speaking. ;)

As for the book itself I enjoyed the plot but the characters came across as been rather flat and caricaturized. Essentially they were just props to move the story forwards. I tend to prefer books when I can get into a character's head and see their thoughts and what motivates their actions.

[ravynfyre.livejournal.com]

*is also a "blasphemous scientist"* Of course, I'm also a pagan, too, so I'm just screwed on all counts.

Thing is, it isn't the lack of being able to fit within theoriginal parameters which makes it crack. It's the fact that pretty much everything in the book which can be researched in this day and age has been, and has pretty much been disproven by other historians and scientists with no religious axe to grind.

The points about the translations, those have merit. There are many instances within the bible which historians and language experts have realized have been mis-translated - "red sea" versus "reed sea" for one prime example.

Conspiracies and such, however, lack real basis in verifiable - or at least not-already-disproven - fact. Not that I doubt that the roman church doesn't have their fair share of conspiracies, but this? Ain't one of them. At least not as Brown presents in his book.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

I've read some translations of some of the Gnostic gospels, and gotten an overview of Gnostic Theology. The theology suffers from the same problems as Platonic cycles and epicycles--since they insisted on sticking with their base premise even when it is a bad fit, and trying to modify it to fit instead of questioning their base logic, it got so convoluted and self-contradictory as to become completely absurd. To top it off, because Gnosticism was a very esoteric, secret religion where the whole point was that the upper ranks, the 'illuminati' if you will, had 'special' knowledge that lay people didn't, everything is covered under symbols and metaphors, or explained as such.

As a result, the Gnostic gospels read like someone was smoking something really good when they wrote it.

[jill-dragon.livejournal.com]

"There are many instances within the bible which historians and language experts have realized have been mis-translated - "red sea" versus "reed sea" for one prime example."

So instead of Moses parting the 'Red Sea' maybe he parted the 'reed sea' - which is a lot more plausible all practical things considered. ;)

I'm not taking what Brown wrote in his book as fact, but the book is clearly fiction and his ideas about religion make for an interesting read. I _do_ admire the fact that he had the guts to write about such a touchy subject in such a controversial way.

My knowledge of theology is fairly basic, but I do get tired of people who believe in the traditional interpretation of the Bible word for word and who are too close-minded to considered that it might not be the _only_ interpretation or the only 'truth'. It's people like that, not just in christianity, but in every religion that seem to cause so many problems and strife in our society, now and in the past.