The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown

New York: Doubleday, 2003; ISBN: 0-385-50420-9; Pp. 454.

It was inevitable that I should eventually read this book. Too many people talking about it, too many books gracing the shelves of Borders and B&N, and, of course, the curiosity: what could be so marketable that it would command the NYT best-seller list for so long? Notice that I asked about "marketability," not "literary quality." I am not naive.

So I read Mr. Brown's book, and it is bad. It is mediocre literature at best, it is offensive to the thinking reader, and it is as condescending as it is stupid. In case someone has any doubts, I did not like the book one bit. I am not even going to offer the tired stab at being good-humored: it's not even a good mindless thriller.

Much ink has been spilled on Mr. Brown's supposedly deep research. Why would anyone treat the book as more than the fiction that it is, is anyone's guess, but perhaps it has something to do with its author's preposterous claims to factuality that stare at us on page one. Now, I am not an art historian, I am not any sort of historian whatsoever, but I do know a little bit about some of the matters the book touches. I swallowed them on my way of trying to enjoy it as a novel, so I am not going to belabor the obvious. Suffice to say that Mr. Brown's "research" boils down to plagiarizing conspiracy theories from two books, one of which, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I had the misfortune to read very recently.

What is even worse, most of the preposterous claims Mr. Brown makes fail the get-your-ass-out-of-the-chair test: anyone who would bother spending a few minutes online, at the local bookstore, or at a library, would immediately notice the glaring discrepancies and flat out lies in the book. Let me illustrate with the Leonardo paintings.

Since I do not remember The Last Supper that well, I schlepped myself over to Borders and pulled down a book on Leonardo's art that has reproductions of almost all of his paintings. I looked at TLS. Okay, so the figure to the right of Jesus does look vaguely feminine, and the colors do mirror his. No hint of any bosom whatsoever, though. I then flip to another page and come across a painting of St. John the Baptist, who looks... quite feminine! Weird. So I read a bit and it turns out this style of painting male youths was quite common at the time. Well, I go back to TLS: I see no real V shape. What I do see are twelve apostles in four groups of three. Nice compositional balance. I also note that the guy who is supposedly Mary is leaning toward the guy who is supposedly Peter making a threatening gesture. To me it looks like he's tapping the leaning guy on his shoulder, trying perhaps to draw his attention to something he is saying. There's no M shape, in fact, it looks more like a W shape, and I am sure this is another occult sign of something. A disembodied hand? Please, anyone can easily see that the hand with the knife belongs to Peter (and does not point toward John who is supposedly the Magdalene but away from him). Oh, well... so much for this idea.

The other paintings turn out to be equally misrepresented. Take The Virgin on the Rocks. The reference tells me that contra Mr. Brown, the figure Mary touches is that of John the Baptist, not Jesus, and the figure the angel Uriel touches is that of Jesus. So, Jesus is blessing John, as one would expect, not vice versa. And Mary is certainly not holding any invisible heads that Uriel is threatening to slice the throats of (in the original painting). As for the reason there are two paintings, I am told of a monetary dispute between Leonardo and the monks (not "nuns" as Mr. Brown would have it) that lasted for about a decade and ended with Leonardo delivering the second version, having previously sold the original.

The list could go on, but the above probably explains why Mr. Brown never included actual reproductions of the paintings in his book. There are many other historical misstatements and lies in the novel. For anyone interested in the pathetic attempt by one French guy named Plantard to claim for himself Merovingian descent by forging documents and running a fake secret society called the Priory of Sion, one can read at length online (and now in print too, see The Da Vinci Hoax). If you are concpiracy-minded, you will find references to your favorite Templars in roles that have nothing to do with what we know about them.

Instead of going through the laundry list of everything that's historically wrong with Mr. Brown's novel, let's look at it as literature. First, it is not a good thriller. It has a very linear plot, with zero-dimensional characters, stilted dialogue, and seemingly clever puzzles that are invariably solved by a miraculous insight by the implausibly erudite, yet surprisingly uninformed, protagonists. Most of the "historical" stuff that presumably makes the novel more of a regular pulp fiction is delivered in a series of rather bland lectures by Langdon and Teabing, the two main male characters. It is so sophomoric and boring, that it would be laughable if people were not finding it intriguing.

Mr. Brown follows the tired formula of boy-meets-girl, they get in trouble, boy-lectures-girl-quit-a-bit, they get out of trouble, they fall in love. I nearly puked at the ending. (But at least I acquired a new line: "Hey, babe, wanna go to Florence and 'watch art' for a week?") The suspense is driven mostly by (a) the characters knowing more than the reader, and (b) various puzzles. Now, anyone should know that (a) is very bad form because it is artificial. When we are told that Langdon is shown something on the Louvre floor and we are told of his reaction, we naturally want to know what it is that he has seen. But the author does not tell us until later, skipping instead to the story of that albino guy. That is such a transparent way to create suspense that only truly bad authors ever stoop to it.

On the other hand, (b) is the bigger problem. The puzzles are, well, uninspiring. How many possible meanings can "P.S." have? And the characters get all of them? In a matter of hours? And the guy who came up with the initials was dying? And he thought of all possible meanings? Please! Or the password "Sophie": I don't care whether they decoded it with Hebrew letters (why, by the way, Hebrew when the stuff was in the Roman alphabet) or with supercomputers: the password is the dead guy's grand-daughter's name! Everyone knows that you should never use anything that transparent as your password. Langdon could have simply tried something like this: ok, what's your granddaddy's favorite pet name? his first car? his daughter's name? your name? Very bad. The worst, of course, is that characters perpetually stumble across puzzles that they claim to be clever and difficult, and yet they decipher them within minutes after thoughtfully staring out a window. No idea about the clues that would lead them to such miraculous insights. And they never make a wrong guess. Boring.

Finally, let's take Mr. Brown's entire premise in perspective. He hates the Catholic Church. That's fine, everyone is entitled to his opinion. For the record, I am an atheist and I think religion is harmful. Yet, I would not spin tall tales about supposed suppression of the "sacred feminine" or some such nonsense. Mr. Brown is, in fact, pandering quite shamelessly to the feminist neo-pagan crowd that is as pathetic as the self-help books promising high self-esteem to people who weigh 300 lbs. So, church doorways are really symbolic vaginas? Any doorway looks like that to me, and so I am symbolically fucking my fridge every time I reach in to get the milk out. Oops, I think I have now carried the metaphor too far.

Putting aside my severe distaste for a return to something that never was (the gnostic gospels on which Mr. Brown's research rests are actually not quite pro-female as he would have it; one of them ends with Jesus saying that he will make the woman a man so she can be saved), I have to question Mr. Brown's own sincerity here. For all the grandiose talk about the power of the female, the one woman in the novel, Sophie, shows up to be shepherded around by Langdon, lectured by the two males, her entire role reduced to "Wow, I had never thought of that!" and "Wow, you are so clever" stuff. Hardly an affirmative view of women. Mr. Brown in the end offers yet another male-dominated salvation of the feminine.

I am astounded that anyone could take this novel for anything other than a poorly scripted conspiracy theory. It is replete with factual mistakes, historical lies (five million witches burned in Europe? what? by the Church? double-what?), and twists of well-known facts. Its supposedly pro-feminist message is nothing but a rehash of extremist theories that explain all human history through the mystery of the vagina. With all due respect to female sexuality which I like a lot, there is more to history than the the power of the penis and the sanctity of the vulva. And I don't care how much Dworkin crap you've swallowed.

A non-thought-provoking, badly plotted cliche, Mr. Brown's book is guaranteed to appeal to every lazy reader who would not bother opening a legitimate reference work and seeing for himself or herself just how factual Mr. Brown's "facts" really are. What disturbs me most is that some people have managed to get their faith shaken without apparently doing the five-minute research that it would take to discredit the novel. I am not a Christian, but it is disturbing to know that people are so easily misled.

August 29, 2004