Dragoness Eclectic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragoness_e) wrote2008-10-12 09:16 am
dragoness_e) wrote2008-10-12 09:16 am
Entry tags:
Short Book Review: The Da Vinci Code
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.
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.