The Da Vinci Code: Sorry, you knew it was inevitable!

Since everyone else is talking about Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, I may as well too. I can justify it since Book Club B selected the book for discussion last Friday night.

Our consensus? It’s fast-paced, lots of action, will probably make an exciting movie (in fact, I predict the movie will be a lot more interesting than the book). But as literature? We found the characters stock, static, and not very believable. (Langdon is “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed”? How should I describe my fictitious character? Hey, I know, I’ll say he looks like another fictitious character.) The plot construction is obvious enough to trip over. Most of us solved the riddles before the characters did and were shouting at them like you do at a horror movie (instead of “No! Don’t open the door!” it was “Hello! Hold it up to a mirror!”).

In contrast to our collective opinion, the discussion questions Brown provides on his website reveal something about his estimation of the book. For example, “What is the novel’s theme?” (If you change “theme” to “agenda,” you get a question you can answer. I have no idea what “theme” Brown believes he has contributed to—this is not about loss or redemption or coming-of-age or other universal human experiences. And even if it was, the characters are so flat, you wouldn’t empathize with them anyway.)

Another question: “Would you rather live in a world without religion or a world without science?” (As though the two are mutually exclusive. This is one of many propositions that Brown’s characters state as fact without the slightest attempt to justify their positions.)

Or how about this: “Will you look at the artwork of Da Vinci any differently now that you know more about his ‘secret life?’” (While we chatted Friday night, Karen surfed the web and found a hysterical link by Fred Sanders that debunks nine “art bloopers” in the book. Here’s point #8: “The person to Jesus’ right in the Last Supper is not a woman. It’s John the Evangelist, and if you look at a handful of disciple paintings from the centuries around Leonardo, you’ll see he’s always portrayed young and pretty. That may say something about Renaissance Italy’s standards of male beauty, but it doesn’t say anything at all about Leonardo hiding secret messages about Mary Magdalene in his painting. Brown gets a lot of mileage out of the ‘dude look like a lady’ routine, but what it reveals is that he’s not spending enough time in the Renaissance room at the Louvre or anywhere else.” Read the rest here.)

Finally, one of the FAQs on Brown’s website asks him to comment on how the novel is “very empowering to women.” No one in our all-woman discussion group found anything empowering about his treatment of the “sacred feminine”; in fact, we felt the opposite was true. (There’s a discussion about this over at The Scroll.)

At least we can give Brown credit for creative subject matter, right? Nope. Many others have pointed out that Brown’s religious ideas are just thinly-disguised Gnosticism (character Sophie Neveu’s unsubtle name means “new wisdom”). He’s certainly not the first to suggest that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene (remember The Last Temptation of Christ?).

Nina pointed out that the blatant mix of fact and fiction is obvious even before we get to page 1. “All of the characters and events in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” declares the copyright page. “Fact:…All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” declares the prologue. That it’s-made-up-no-it’s-true ping-pong match pretty much describes the rest of the book. (Since plenty of other resources debunk the historical and theological flaws, I’m not going to go into those details.)

So, if this purported to be a history or religion textbook, we could run Brown out of town. Question is, is anything fair game in a novel? Is there anything inherent in the genre that requires a certain amount of research integrity? Are thriller readers just looking for a good story, or do they care if the author gets his facts straight? Should they?

A curious question, posed by Diana in our discussion, is how this work maintained bestseller status for 3 years in hardcover (the paperback released only a few weeks ago). Why has such a lackluster book become so popular? How has the Christian church’s overall negative reaction influenced sales? (Was that the point of writing a controversial novel in the first place?)

If, like me, you put off reading this as long as you could but you really want to know what the fuss is about, just read it and get it over with. But if you’re shopping for a good international thriller, chuck The Da Vinci Code and pick up a volume by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I recommend The Seville Communion, about a priest who—despite looking nothing like Harrison Ford—is secretly appointed by the Vatican to investigate several mysterious deaths involving a computer-hacker named Vespers and a Spanish church slated for demolition…

01. May 2006 by Mindy
Categories: Reviews | 4 comments

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