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[Review] Book - The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
Dan Brown
Rating:
(2.5 out of 5 stars)
Suspense leading me around by the nose? No thanks. Worth a read, but barely.
I confess that I waited to read this book until the hype died down so that strangers wouldn't stop me in the street, eager to discuss the book's contents in hushed tones full of awe and wonderment. Or so I assumed would be my fate if I dared parade in public with a book so full of secrets in the heyday of the Da Vinci Code hype. There seems to be some truth to the myth — the girl at my local Starbucks did ask if I was reading it again (I told her no, it was my first time). Of course, she's no stranger, as my addiction to Frappucinos and chocolate croissants has oft diverted me to that corporate palace of guilty pleasure. So I guess my mission — avoiding the hype — was a success.
So what was the hype about?
Well, frankly — something that's not that impressive.
The novel is fast-paced and rife with archaeological details and mini-lectures on symbology, cryptography, and history. The story has a tendency to tease, building up to a revelation and then quickly cutting away to some other part of the story, making the reader wait and turn page after page to discover the next secret. Though Sophie and Robert hog the spotlight, from the very start the novel also collects points of view from various allies, enemies, and secondary and minor characters. Besides wandering from person to person, the novel also skips around in time a bit, quite suddenly delving into conveniently timed flashbacks provided by various characters and just as suddenly jumping back into the main narrative. Such devices usually serve to develop suspense, enrich a narrative and round out the cast, providing inflections of motivation, insights from different characters, and background and back story. However, successfully mixing all of these together — information dumps on obscure fields of study, coy withholding of information, frequent jumps in point of view, flashbacks in the middle of the narrative — requires a grace and balance that Dan Brown honestly lacks.
Let's start with the suspense. The point of a suspense novel is to intrigue and disturb the reader to the point that they must know what happens next — to unravel the mystery, to settle their own minds, to assure themselves that it all ends well, or at least that it all ends. Truly successful suspense is subtle, pulling gently and insistently on the reader's string, teasing them with merciless grace. Okay, so maybe my standards are high, but I'm pretty sure that by anyone's standard of subtlety, on a scale from "barely noticeable" to "slapped in the face with a brick", The Da Vinci Code rates somewhere around "like a speeding train careening towards the helpless SUV stalled on the tracks, honking madly". It's a pet peeve, I guess: I don't appreciate being forcibly led around by the nose. Aside from my personal dislike for overly obvious suspense, I do believe this was an honest narrative failure. True, the device Brown uses — repeatedly, constantly — of leading you by the hand (and I'll get to his problem with hand-holding narration in a minute) right up to the threshold of the next big revelation and then slamming the door in your face and going "Neener, neener, gotta read on to find out!" worked. I turned the pages, I read the book. I wanted to know what in God's name the fuss was about. But it was so awkward, so obvious, and, possibly worst of all, so unnecessary. It was also inconsistent. Some of the biggest revelations of the entire story were disgorged in tremendous information dumps stitched right into the narrative, while many tiny or less important mysteries simply had to be cut away from right before the climax. And when the information was finally revealed, a flashback and three POV switches later, my reaction about half the time was, "...So what?"
The story itself is interesting and suspenseful, but it seems Dan Brown was either very insecure about his plot or just plain lacking grace. On its own steam, with fewer glaringly obvious suspense-cuts and a more subtle handling overall, the story would have been far more successful at intrigue, mystery, and that wonderful feeling of aching to know more. As it stands, the cuts are jarring, frustrating, and often unnecessary or poorly placed.
While the use of suspense-cuts in the main narrative was rather annoying, what really stuck out for me was their use in flashbacks. The incongruous chopping up of stream-of-consciousness thought to serve the purpose of manufacturing suspense was extremely awkwardly handled. Since the story is told in third person personal, the reader expects flashback to be memories, often involuntarily recalled, and just cutting them off right as the narrative approaches the core of the memory felt jarring and very artificial. Instead of helping me to sympathize with the character and learn more about them, such cuts jarred me right of of rapport with the POV character.
Speaking of rapport with characters, there really wasn't much of that to spread around. Sadly, the characters for whom I often felt most sympathy, whose story affected me most, were a handful of minor and secondary characters making cameo appearances — they were the only ones with any charm or mystery to them. This was due largely to a ridiculous imbalance of telling over showing. Just as Dan Brown led me forcibly through the jarring leaps of his suspense, so does he hold my hand through the characters' motivations and characterizations. Perhaps the author was attempting to affect that sparse, frank style that makes suspense novels like The Silence of the Lambs so effective. If this was the case, then Brown missed the most important point: part of the fun, part of the entire idea of a mystery or suspense is to make readers work for it. That's what makes the genre a success: adrenaline highs and the thrill of participation — guessing the answers, mentally yelling at the characters to turn back, don't open that door, don't believe his lies. While Brown's bald revelation of every character's motivations makes for easy, obvious reading, he has deprived his readers of the experience of trying to understand for themselves. It's much more satisfying to solve a problem on your own than to be told the answer, isn't it? Teasing out a character's motivations is a tremendous part of getting to know them well enough to love or hate them — the key to pulling an emotional response from the reader. This is the ultimate goal of writing for me, and Dan Brown, with his ham-handed approach to characterization, has failed at it utterly.
Of course, not all the cards can be played so close in a suspense novel. Another tenet of the genre is the teaching of lore, particulars, and specialties. Detective work and mystery-solving of most kinds involves specialized knowledge and learning the secrets of trades is usually a large part of the enjoyment derived from the mystery genre. And there is plenty of that kind of lore in this book, and it's surprisingly well-handed — sometimes. About half of the information dumps come from character dialogue, and these are usually engaging, informative, and fit well into the narrative around them. The other half, however, comes from the narrative itself, and is awkward yet interesting at best. The transition to pedagogical exposition is often jarring and comes out of nowhere, and again suffers from a surfeit of the obvious. As an example, there a number of times where a character performs an action that is habitual for them, and yet the narrative goes through the trouble of explaining the ritual or procedure in detail. In such an intimate third-person narrative, why in the world would characters' thoughts digress into pondering in detail, for no reason, something they do every day? There are better ways to handle the need to trickle information to the reader. Such digressions are more forgivable in Robert's case — he is, after all, a professor and a teacher first, and this is one for the few character traits conveyed with any degree of charm. Though never stated literally, his quiet delight in teaching and in his field of study is the one bit of characterization that managed to get from the page to my head without Dan Brown standing in the way pointing at it and waving his arms about.
That said, the information itself was interesting as it was revealed. I won't go into discussing the alleged balance of fact and fiction in the book — I'm viewing it as a work of literature, and that's all. Whatever the degree of truth to the various conspiracy theories featured here, they are at first glance intriguing and plausible. The descriptions of artwork, architecture, symbology, cryptology, and history, while often awkwardly delivered, do well to intrigue, entice, and induce wonder. However, after a constant bombardment of the importance of the central secret of the story and how it was the main motivation for most of the characters, by the time the end of the novel approached I found myself caring about it surprisingly little. The tidbits of information, true or false, were indeed interesting, but prolonged exposure wore away the shine of the most important one.
Aside from almost complete failure in the four most common elements on the novel's storytelling (suspense, flashbacks, character POVs, and information dumps), there's also a grab bag of remaining points. The descriptions were hit-or-miss, sometimes descending into the dreamy amethyst realm of purple prose, and once in a startling while hitting an idea square on the head with no frills or fancy but plenty of image to carry it along. The author was also prone to a peculiar grammatical device wherein a description would trail off with an ellipsis... only to reveal something startling or deep! Or so I assume was the intended effect. It occurred frequently in the first chapters of the book then dropped off, thankfully. Its overuse in the beginning was a distraction. There was a sprinkling of plot points both yawn-inducingly predictable and honestly surprising. The repeated references to Langdon being from Harvard got annoying after a while -- yes, Dan, we get it, he's supposed to be smart. The romance (you knew there'd be romance, right?) was extremely awkwardly handled, popping up out of nowhere, forgotten for five chapters, then rearing its head again for a sentence before lurking in the shadows for another hundred pages. There was no buildup of romantic or sexual tension, and the few references to any feelings between the two characters before the last few chapters were ham-handedly obvious and out-of-place.
Disparaging diatribes and mixed miscellany aside, I feel compelled to end on a note of grace. The novel is a wild chase across two countries and through many eras of history, and as I watched the number of remaining pages dwindling, I did wonder how the author could possibly wrap this up. Considering the rest of the novel, my hopes were not high — but Dan Brown surprised me. The novel does wrap up in a very satisfying manner in which it is easy to find a smile and a measure of peace.
Overall, despite large marks off for poorly-handled storytelling, I think this story is worth reading if you're in the mood for some easy and (forcibly) compelling reading with a generous dollop of intriguing facts and theories and a satisfying conclusion.
(Cover image courtesy of Half.com. This book is available from Amazon.com.)
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That's a helluva review; detailed, professional, and entertaining.
A review of a review - trippy.
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And who could forget “Harrison Ford in tweed”? This guy is a hack—and a rich one, at that. See Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html) for the lawlz.
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However! Well. Yes. I agree. Some of the worst writing I've seen published. The story, the premise, was pretty good, but the execution was just HORRIBLE. The only things that saved this book for me were the various facts/theories, a few infrequent literary graces, and an ending that I liked.
Beyond that, though -- who EDITED this tripe? Who let this kind of writing go? Isn't this kind of thing shot in the wild rather than taken into captivity?
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Well, I'm pretty sure I'll read Angels and Demons -- AFTER SUNSHINE WHICH ARRIVED TODAY >.>
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*breathes*
Again, I look at Dan Brown books as "brain candy", but hell, a lot of my reading is "brain candy". XD
And, again, YES. I will comment that Sunshine is a book with such awesome worldbuilding that it's almost necessary to read twice to pick up on everything.
<333333
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When you say "Sunshine", are you referring to the book of that title by Robin McKinley? Because if so, I agree with
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Seriously, who edited this?
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On that note, may I friend you? I've been thinking about doing it anyway, and the prospect of entertaining book reviews seals the deal.
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And thanks, too! I hope to do more reviews, although not just on books -- I've been meaning to review a couple of games and movies as well =)
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As for the rest? It’s hard for me to believe this book was even seriously edited. I think only the most egregious blunders were removed prior to publishing. That the publishers were willing to expend so little effort suggests they were surprised by how much money the book went on to make.
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But the odd thing is it wasn't his first novel -- Angels and Demons was published before, yes? I await to see how the editing in that one seems to have gone >.>
Also! May I possibly ask if you have any other language-related links? I have a small set of my own resources, but I'm a complete amateur and until a few months ago I didn't try to keep up with it much. Now I'm interested to see what others have to say about the language. I hope you don't mind my asking!
tons!
I’ve heard Angels and Demons is the same book, done even worse.
Re: tons!
In other words, I love the last link plenty.
(It's fun times in my head between descriptivism and prescriptivism XD)