| Product: |
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown |
| Date: |
25.06.06 (190 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Um. Well I read it pretty fast.
Disadvantages: Stunningly bad on every level
I’m genuinely puzzled by this. I decided to give this book a shot on the grounds that I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next chap, and a tawdry thriller is a perfectly decent way to kill a few hours. And I figured it couldn’t possibly be *that* bad, given how well it’s sold.
I was stunned when I realised just how bad it is. Seriously, this book is bad; badly written, badly plotted. Bad. Which makes me wonder what on earth its appeal is – how did it sell so well, why is there a huge blockbuster film, and why is everyone so worked up about it?
The curator of the Louvre gets murdered by a sinister albino monk. As he dies, he sets up a series of cryptic clues about a monumental secret of which he was custodian. An American symbologist, Robert Langdon, is called in to help. The aggressive police inspector believes Langdon is the murderer (we never find out why), and he finds himself on the run with Sophie, a pretty French cryptologist, who happens to be the granddaughter of the murdered man. She needs Robert’s help to find out what her granddad was hiding.
Which all sounds quite promising. The innocent man being pursued by the police (*and* by the secret organisation who were really responsible for the murders) is the plot of several of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, after all. The problem is twofold. First, there’s no excitement or suspense at all. Second, while in Hitchcock’s films the ultimate secret was just a plot device that served to get the embattled hero from one fraught situation to the next, here it is very much to the fore.
It’s all about the search for the Holy Grail. But the Grail isn’t just the cup that Jesus used at the last supper, nosirree. It’s the bloodline that Jesus left when he fathered a child on Mary Magdalene before he died – a secret that could blow the entire Catholic church apart! (This isn’t really giving anything away, as it’s made pretty clear very early on.)
Of course, given that this is meant to be a thriller, it doesn’t help that every so often the characters have to take time out to have 50-page conversations about the Grail, goddess worship and cryptograms. As is fairly well known, the book lifts its central idea pretty much unchanged from the 1980s bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. (Two of the authors unsuccessfully sued Dan Brown for plagiarism recently.) It’s a nice idea from a conspiracy theory point of view, although I believe it’s been pretty thoroughly discredited. But basically, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, among other things, give us clues about the truth of Jesus’ life.
This is fine and all, but not the stuff to get one’s pulse racing. Robert and Sophie, helped by English historian Sir Leigh Teabing, try to piece together clues to find the Grail before the evil Catholic sect Opus Dei. (Quite why it’s only the Catholics who want to find the Grail is unclear. Opus Dei is a real organisation; I doubt they employ murderous albino monks to do their dirty work.) Frankly I never got the impression that the characters were in any kind of danger at all. Brown structures the book in such a way that it’s obvious that the Grail stuff is more important than the plot. But because he can’t give away all the details of the Grail at once, you know nothing bad can happen to any of the major characters until the secret is revealed. This makes for a distinctly un-thrilling thriller.
The characterisation of the main characters is stunningly poor. All we really learn about Robert is that he’s handsome, and occasionally yearns for love. The flashbacks to him lecturing at Harvard (a dreadfully clumsy device to get across plot exposition) try to make him out to be a witty, wise and well-loved teacher, but frankly he just comes across as creepy and weird. Sophie, in spite of apparently being a world-class cryptologist, is basically just there for the men to explain things to – she serves much the same plot function as a Doctor Who companion. And Sir Leigh… well, imagine a really bad American writer trying to create an English ‘eccentric’. Think how bad that would be. Then multiply it by infinity. That’s how bad Sir Leigh is. Apart from his stupid name (his surname is an anagram of Baigent, so he’s named after two of the Holy Blood authors), he talks about tea, misquotes Shakespeare and occasionally uses words like ‘todger’ – just like all English people do. And beyond that, there’s nothing to him, except that he knows a lot about the Grail.
The characterisation and lack of suspense would be just about OK if the plot was fiendishly complicated, but it isn’t at all. In spite of the supposed genius of the three main characters, I figured out what was going on usually about three pages before they did (except one plot twist that I’d written off as too obvious). What kind of idiot can’t recognise mirror writing at first glance? It’s a classic example of a writer trying to create characters who are cleverer than he is and failing. It reminded me a bit of Thomas Harris – we’re constantly being told what a genius Hannibal Lecter is, but ultimately he never really does anything terribly clever – it’s exactly the same in the Da Vinci Code.
And the standard of writing is absolutely shocking! Here are a few of my favourite snippets: ‘Langdon knew her contention was logical, and yet intuitively he could not possibly accept it.’ ‘Moreover, with my grandfather’s love of symbolism and codes, it seems to follow that he would have chosen an account number that had meaning to him.’ ‘Langdon’s thoughts raced as he tried to assemble the implications of what all this meant.’ I was absolutely delighted with ‘Langdon’s eyes widened further’. You’re left with the impression of someone who thinks that using horrible syntax and unnecessary long words is better than just saying what he means in the most direct way.
Which leaves the awkward question of why the hell this abominable piece of crap has sold so well. Is it the religious conspiracy theory? That’s the only thing I can think of – and since a whole mini-industry of books about the Da Vinci Code is now feeding off it, presumably that’s what’s going on. Which is odd, because these ideas have been in the public domain for years. The Catholic Church’s peculiar behaviour must have helped – I can’t understand why there’s so much vocal condemnation of such a poor book from high-level Catholics. Surely something this bad can’t be a threat to anyone’s faith, can it? There isn’t even any sex (although there are occasional references, as if Mr Brown has a whole seething melange of secret little fantasies that he doesn’t quite dare to write out in full – he seems particularly interested in transvestites.) Say what you like about James Herbert, at least he knows how to throw in a totally gratuitous sex scene.
Maybe the answer lies in the hero. Time was, thrillers had two-fisted macho types as their heroes – Dennis Waterman types, love-em-and-leave-em hard men who drank a lot and drove flashy cars. Perhaps Langdon is a mid-life crisis hero for all the accountants and pen-pushers out there. Maybe all men in their forties wake up at some point and think ‘Gosh, I’ve never been in a fist fight or betrayed my wife. I’m a failure as a man!’ But then we get a hero whose professional skills don’t extend much further than art criticism who ends up unravelling the oldest secret known to man simply by working out a few anagrams. This is bound to make people feel better about themselves. ‘Yes, dammit. My skills as an estate agent could come in handy in a similar situation. And I’ll get to cop off with a fit French cryptographer. Woohoo!’ Maybe I’m just too young. Maybe in ten years time someone will publish a rubbish thriller about a heroic proofreader who saves the world and I’ll really identify with it. I don’t know.
Really, this is awful. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade used the search for the Holy Grail as a means to explore the relationship between the hero and his father – and was a rollicking good film to boot. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco uses much the same ideas, but does so with immense wit and a level of imagination very much not on display here. The graphic novel From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, has an insane freemasonic Jack the Ripper encoding his hideous wider purpose in the mutilation of his murder victims. There’s so much you can do with ideas like these. Sadly, the Da Vinci Code does none of them. I can’t understand its popularity, or its controversy. Frankly, it’s cube leg rift rink.
It’s almost 600 pages long, although it takes very little time to read. You can get it for practically nothing on Amazon. Don’t bother.
Summary: Why on earth is this drivel so popular?
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