fajrdrako | The Da Vinci Code... (Reply)

I read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

It's a good read.

It is also fairly unsatisfying. Not as a thriller: it's a great page-turner. It's certainly fun. But it's wide rather than deep - scattered rather than focussed. It's over the top in a charmingly straightforward manner, as it leads the reader, though a murder mystery plot, through the whole Jesus-secret-society history as detailed in books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Leigh, Lincoln and Baigent.

This is a thriller that ought to have footnotes and bibliography. It's the kind of book you want to discuss with somebody. (Anyone?

blackbyrde? Marion?)

Good things about it: It made me want to reread the biography of Da Vinci on my bookshelves, and get back to medieval history just because of the many references in it whetting my appetite. At Costco this afternoon, I leafed though a book of Da Vinci's art (I would have bought it if it had been less than $40) to get a good look at The Last Supper. Unfortunately the picture is a mess, restored or otherwise (of course - it's famous for it) but it was fun to look at it after reading the comments in the book.

Though the protagonists of The Da Vinci Code were pretty bland, the villains were fun, particularly an albino religious-fanatic assassin called Silas.

Another good thing about it: I failed to guess the secret master villain. I was pretty sure it was one character; it turned out to be another I hadn't expected. Cool. I love a book that can surprise me.

Another good thing: I loved the idea of the cryptex, an ingenious Davincian device used significantly in the plot.

I loved the juxtaposition of the high-tech and the medieval.

Frustrating thing about it: I know the history (particularly of the medieval church and symbology) far too well to be surprised by any of it, especially having read some of the books that were no doubt sources for Brown's plot. In fact, I was usually interpreting clues before the protagonists did because they were annoyingly thick. Not just in matters of history. One protagonist is a historical semiotics expert; the other is a cryptographer; they follow a trail of clues of which symbols in Da Vinci's art are the beginning. But they can't recognize mirror-image handwriting in English: they think it's some sort of obscure Semitic alphabet. You'd think, with Da Vinci on their mind, they'd at least have some idea. At another point they need to get into a bank deposit box. They need a ten-digit account number. They are flummoxed. They don't have an account number. It isn't as if the murdered man hadn't written a ten-digit number for them on the floor beside himself in his last moment of life, or as if they hadn't seen it and wondered what it was only a couple of hours earlier.....

I tried to catch historical errors, but on the whole the history - even when questionable - isn't erroneous, though I caught one error - a bit of a technicality: the author refers to Godfroi de Bouillion as the first Crusader King of Jerusalem, but Godfroi was never king: he was offered the title, refused it, and took the title "Defender of the Holy Sepulchre".* I also didn't know what Brown was talking about when he talked in passing of the Grail Quest as being the reason for the Crusades. Say what? I could tell you a dozen reasons for the Crusades - there are many books and monographs on the subject - and that isn't high on the list, but I'm not sure what Brown meant by it. Since he doesn't have to explain anything if he doesn't want to, I see no reason to argue with the idea. The history here is fun, but simplistic. (For instance, few objects in medieval or Renaissance art had only one symbolic meaning. A many-petaled rose might well have meant Mary Magdelene, but it often meant God, as it does in T.S. Eliot.)

This one is bound to become a movie.

Oh, perhaps I should confess: I didn't understand the punchline in the last chapter, when the protagnist finds - essentially - the Grail, or at least, the object of the search. What was the significance of that?

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*If you guess from this that I am something of a fan of Godfroi de Bouillion, you'd be right.