Book review: "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown

Official site:

http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/

There are no essential spoilers in this review.

Dan Brown's most popular book to date, "The Da Vinci Code" continues the author's tradition of clever, fast-paced thrillers, with hairball-style plots and lots of unexpected turns. It plays upon popular conspiracy-theory beliefs related to The Knights Templar, secret societies, Jesus, The Holy Grail, The Catholic Church, and... well... i guess only the kitchen sink is missing.

It may well be that this is Brown's best written book. It is certainly the richest in details, up to an eerie baroque level. The author undoubtedly spent aweful amounts of time and effort to gather the information required to put together all those tiny unexpected details that literally blind the reader: little-known facts about the lives of famous artists, rich descriptions of major architectural sites in Europe, unexpected factoids about obscure religious sects and rituals, etc.

This baroque richness is one of the book's strongest parts. It was designed to blow your mind, and it is visible that the author slaved and toiled almost killing himself with exhaustion in the process. It is not unique in that regard, by any stretch of imagination, if you place it against the broad background of all literary works of all times. But within the genre's rather narrow borders it really is a masterpiece.

Unfortunately, not all of the author's documentation work was accurate. He got a few facts wrong. The tetragrammaton - YHWH - does not derive from "Jehovah" since the latter is a middle-age english construct. The merovingians did not found Paris - it was a gallic village long before that. The Inquisition could not possibly kill 5 million women - i don't know what's the accurate number, but it's probably one if not two orders of magnitude smaller (and they also killed men, not just women).

So, while the quantity of the details is certainly impressive, the quality still has room for improvement. There was obvious much effort required to do that - it's a pity that the errors cast a shadow upon that remarkable work.

I liked the ending. Not only all plot lines are neatly tied up together and solved, but there's a certain emotional vibration that's absent in the earlier D.B. novels. I must say this time the villain was easier to guess :-) but i think that does not matter much - it actually gave me some kind of juvenile satisfaction that i was able to figure that out. In actual fact, the book felt like a hybrid between a thriller and something more profound; if you remove the thriller bits, what remains is pretty viable all by itself.

Several times, the characters kind of tried to go beyond the mere caricatural state of typical thriller figures. I liked that, even though the attempt was not really successful. But hey, we're giving bonus points for mere attempts. :-)

Silas the assassin, for example, was linear but convincingly built. Too bad bishop Aringarosa sort of spent a lot of time just wandering about, while other characters were doing all kinds of interesting things; that character had a lot of potential, which was left unused - and i'm speaking about character-building potential, not about plot-twisting potential which, by Zeus, the book has plenty plus ten metric tons! Langdon, arguably the main character, is merely efficient (which is the polite version for "bland"). Sophie is smart, cute and surrounded by a certain silent sex-appeal aura - but of course, she's french! :-) (talk about stereotypes) Jacques Sauniere dies after the first couple page turns (no, this is not really a spoiler, you know someone must die in the first chapter of a book by Dan Brown), but manages to drive the action efficiently nevertheless, and it's actually more interesting than the biggest two or three characters. Leigh Teabing is a gentleman extraordinaire and eccentric to the point of pathological - but of course, he's british and a knight! :-)

There are some embarassing blunders besides the "historical factoid error" bunch, such as when Napoleon is called a "diminutive insecure leader" and that's not by a character, which could serve as an excuse, but by the author himself. Several times, it's almost like the book lowers itself to certain petty pre-conceptions about foreign cultures. Hopefully it was intentional, so as to resonate with a certain type of readers among which politically-spiced thrillers are popular, and therefore increase the sales.

Overall, it's a good thriller. However...

I couldn't stop myself from comparing it to another book, one that i hold in high and dear regard. I'm speaking about "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco. And this is were we start skating on really thin ice...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

Eco is a writer of fiction popular in Europe for his complex novels that can be read on many levels - you can read them as mere thrillers, you can read them as conspiracy-theory books, you can read them as historical frescos, or as smart intellectual novels, or even as philosophical essays disguised as literary works.

But he is also one of the biggest authorities in modern day semiotics - he teaches it at the University of Bologna in Italy. Semiotics is "the science of signs and their meanings" in the most general fashion (signs = words, images, sounds, etc.), and Eco's books are surely full of parallel levels of interpretation of meanings. When younger, he was the adept of the theory of "infinite semiosis" which, in a nutshell, asserts that the meanings that can be derived from a series of signs (a text, a picture, a gesture, anything that means something) are illimited; in more recent times he revised his conceptions and abandoned the theory. However, the "infinite semiosis" definitely hovers above his books, at least in the staggeringly diverse ways one can read them.

"Foucault's Pendulum" has superficially the same plot lines as "The Da Vinci Code" - secret societies in seach for the ultimate mistery and secret and power sometimes known as The Holy Grail, some other times known under different names. But the ressemblance ends here.
The "Pendulum" holds its own against any kind of critique on any imaginable level. There is no way one could look condescendently upon this book, except by not understanding it maybe. I said the "Code" is complex - well, the "Pendulum" has the same complexity on several different levels that interact with each other. It's like tic-tac-toe versus chess.
The characters in the "Pendulum" are real, not merely sketches like in a typical thriller. What in the "Code" stands for the book's summit of cleverness and intelectuality, in the "Pendulum" is a mere foundation for more complex developments.
The "Code" is a thriller masterpiece with a thin skin of baroque details. The "Pendulum" is a thriller as much as it is an intellectual novel, as much as it is a philosophical novel. One can read it strictly at one particular level, and it's still viable. I was in college when i've found it, and i read it within 48 hours despite the fact that it's a huge book (bigger than the "Code") - it was so engrossing i couldn't put it down (read, eat, read, sleep, read... well, you get the idea). I still get back to it from time to time and, as you can see, i can't stop myself from measuring other books against it. A pretty good "benchmark" i would say. :-)

Oh, yeah, the "Pendulum" has no embarassing research errors. That alone speaks volumes, if you pardon the pun, about the class difference between the two books.

After reading the "Pendulum" i saw a web site which defined it as the thinking man's "The Da Vinci Code" and that describes exactly what i felt while reading the "Code". It's kind of ironic that the "Code" is so hugely popular, while the "Pendulum" is relatively unknown, but i guess this is how things are.

But it looks like i just kept on beating the dead horse of an unfair comparison, so let's move on.

Finally, there's an amusing aspect of "The Da Vinci Code". It generated a lot of related literature, some of it focused on the "mysteries" alluded to in the book, some of it of a rather emotionally-charged nature - i'm speaking about the attacks from religious fundamentalists against some allegations in the book. It seems like certain people cannot see the difference between a book of fiction and non-fictional literature. "The Da Vinci Code" is fiction. The allegations contained within are unsubstantiated (although they have a rather large conspiracy-theory "cult followers") and they're not even original - "Foucault's Pendulum" has ten times the amount!

For those who know "Foucault's Pendulum": if you recall how the main character (the author) distances himself with irony and, at the same time, sadness from the bunch of crazy people in search for pies in the skies - that's pretty much how i felt while reading the irate religious ramblings about "The Da Vinci Code". Dudes, it's fiction, it's a thriller, it's a book written to sell millions, and it has quite a few errors on top of that. If your god feels offended by that book, perhaps you have to search for another, more mature and emotionally robust superbeing.

(I apologize to my fellow human beings who are religious yet do not think "The Da Vinci Code" is offensive. The words above were not directed to you. They were directed towards people who believe that using their minds is optional.)

Overall, a pretty good book, as far as thrillers go. If my intuition is correct, it looks like Dan Brown can write more than mere thrillers. But if that's true, i guess we have to wait until the next one to find out.