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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

The Da Vinci Code

06:09 / 26.08.04

Why is no-one talking about this book? Personally, i thought it was shite (was about ten steps ahead of the reader for most of the book), but its created controversy among the conservative readers for its theories on the Holy Grail, the Church, Jesus Christ and Mary Magdelene. No spoilers yet, but does anyone know whether there's any validation to even a quarter of the stuff this Dan Brown guy spouts?

10:32 / 26.08.04

from what i've heard it's basically an old and quite famous alter-history book called Holy blood Holy grail, put to an airport thriller backbeat.

if i think about it, i've probably not read much fiction from the past twenty years that hasn't had a smell of hbhg in it somewhere, and so it's quite weird to have this year's publishing sensation be 'wowzers, you mean, what if jesus didn't die? why didn't anyone think of that before?'

11:25 / 26.08.04

Why is no-one talking about this book? Personally, i thought it was shite

Perhaps the clue is in the first line of your post...

22:25 / 26.08.04

Bah. I thought it was good, dern it, and as a semi-official librarian, and all, I should know, shouldn't I? For a simple mainstream fiction novel it's practically genius, compared to all the absolute crap that's out there. I mean, sure, anyone with half the brain figures it out before the book gets there, but that's part of the fun. I very much liked it. And Angels & Demons was good, too. The only bit is, Brown starts every single book of his the same exact way: First there's a prologue where someone dies, and then in the first chapter a phone call wakes up the main character. I suppose it's just some kind of in-joke of his, but for all I know he's bloody Chuck Dixon.

22:57 / 26.08.04

I didn't like it. I really wanted to get into it, but stumbled very early on. It's just his writing style really grates. It's as though John Grisham has been in a horrific car crash and lost half of his brain, and is now forced to tap out his novels using a straw strapped to his head.

HBHG is one of those books that survived the purge of such books of the time as In God's Name because it itself became something of an airport novel.

I have a massive fondness for "conspiracy" or alternative history books, told either as fact or fiction, but the Da Vinci Code, I really couldn't get past the opening few chapters.

04:11 / 27.08.04

I was just disappointed the main villian was the guy I figured it was when he first showed up.

18:13 / 03.09.04

Yeah, it was pretty obvious; there were only two candidates, really, and the other one was such an obvious piece of misdirection that there wasn't much suspense on that score. And the writing itself was definitely far from literarily accomplished, to be nice about it.

Still, all things considered it was successful as an attempt at further spreading the Holy Blood, Holy Grail meme, which AFAIK really hasn't ever penetrated to airport thriller mainstreamness before--an AWFUL lot of people read this thing, and in fact it succeeded in propelling HBHG itself back onto the softcover bestseller list.

20:21 / 03.09.04

It was a silly book. Enjoyable in that trashy summer read kind of way, but certainly ridculous. A cryptologist who can't read a message written backwards?

All of which is just an excuse to repeat this conversation I overheard in an airport bookstore:
"It [the davinci code] was so good. I couldn't tell fact from fiction. I loved it."
(Here I considered saving the poor gullible looking teenager being told this lie, until she spoke.)
"But is it hard? I mean, am I going to understand it?"
"Well, it's not like it's War and Peace."
"What's that?"

12:03 / 06.09.04

Can anyone explain why it has been such a monstrous best seller? It has nothing to differentiate it from a thousand other genre thrillers so far as I can see but it has been phenomenally successful. Is it just the Holy Blood Holy Grail-tinged pseudo history at the back of it? It is a puzzlement. Wish I had the secret formula that Brown has discovered.

18:58 / 07.09.04

Is it just the Holy Blood Holy Grail-tinged pseudo history at the back of it?

Bingo. It's just a more accessible retelling of the ever-controversial "Jesus had sex with and children by that ho-bag Mary Magdalene" theory, in this case achieving sufficient mainstream penetration initially as to produce denunciations from religious leaders, leading to the kind of snowballing sales figures such denunciations always produce.

21:25 / 04.10.04

Basically the book is "conspiracy lite" for the masses.
For those that find Powells & Bergier or Lincoln & Childs too hard to digest but still want the thrill of a "true life X-Files", the books' a TV-dinner with all the right stuff in.

Silly, predictable, old (in the sense that it is not up to date) and all around bogus.
Certyfied bestseller formula.

12:41 / 06.10.04

I read this recently, and was distinctly unimpressed.
Whole sections of it were just characters spewing huge chunks of exposition at each other, the ‘puzzles’ were hardly difficult to solve (which undermines the idea of the main character as the clever-clever professor), the pacing was spotty, and there was very little of the ‘shocking’ stuff that wouldn’t have been familiar to someone who’d read a brief summary of any of the Rennes-le-Chateau stuff.
And is it just me, or is it a bit hmmm that the death that acts as the catalyst for the book is effectively that of Pierre Plantard, who I seem to recall did die recently ?

15:56 / 06.10.04

I liked how Brown's characters would suddenly drop several dozen IQ points when he needed the pace to slow a little. And the wishfulfilmentastic main character, gruff sexy fortysomething 'salt and pepper' bearded man that he is. The only good thing I can see about it is that hopefully authors with existing, superior historical quest narratives can get published. Or maybe we'll just get 1001 ' The Da Vinci code recipe book' type spinoffs and unhilarious knocked-off parodies( 'Da Vinnie Code', the exciting story of the secret equations contained within the wrinkly face flesh of a grumpy mafioso).

16:17 / 06.10.04

And if it was so bleedin’ clever, why isn’t it called ‘the Leonardo code’ ? And in fact, does Professor Clever refer to him as Leonardo, or Da Vinci ? I can’t remember. Shows how much I cared.
And I fear you’re right, plenty of knock-offs seem a likely prospect. Maybe I should write Dave’s Inky Code before someone else does…

12:52 / 11.10.04

I only read the last third. "Foucalt's Pendulum" treated those themes much better and years earlier. It also treated the Templars and their enemies as real people. I guess part of the appeal of the DVC is that simply by reading it you're philosophically Sticking It To The Man.

More concretely, my gripe is that history means more to me when someone can bring it to life. DVC doesn't; it peoples pseudo-history with cardboard characters past and present.

15:51 / 14.10.04

I like to go slumming every once in a while. I read a lot, almost compulsively, so I need to take breaks by reading something dumb and entertaining here and there. I've reasoned with myself that crap paperbacks are better than reading Cosmo.

So, my dad lent me DVC and I liked it all right. The characters were awful and the romantic plot string was pure *cringe*, but the "information" was diverting. It was Conspiracy Lite, also Art History Lite and Roman Architecture Lite and Apocryphal Christianity Lite and Cryptology Ultra Lite.

In other words, if the question is why so many people liked it, I suppose it's because, for a throwaway novel, it had more to it - it was rich, in a strictly relative sense - than other crap novels.

15:21 / 20.05.05

His books lacks character development for the reason that 'Sophie's World' lacked character development; they exist primarily to acquaint readers with theories which, irrespective of their status, I think he believes to be true.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

20:37 / 22.05.05

given what the book is, an airport/bus station/supermarket checkout thriller (even though I don't think it's out in paperback yet, but it's the genre I'm thinking of, not the format), it's not so bad.

sure, it has all the shortcomings that observant and tenacious 'lithers have noted in this thread. That's the nature of the genre. That's why we call it pulp. I wouldn't hold it up to the same standards as Thomas Pynchon or Julian Barnes.

as a pulp thriller, it's OK. As a work of literature, it's fairly lacking. As a cultural touchstone, it's made its mark (why else would we be talking about it?).

ta
pablo

ps much preferred "Foucault's Pendulum."

23:21 / 22.05.05

In case anyone hadn't noticed, next year will treat us to the movie version

Tom Hanks .... Robert Langdon
Ian McKellen .... Sir Leigh Teabing
Alfred Molina .... Bishop Aringarosa
Jean Reno .... Bezu Fache
Audrey Tautou .... Sophie Neveu

So far, so boring. Casting of Hanks smirkworthy in my mind; who's more qualified to play an entirely two-dimensional, middle-aged, slightly-unhappy-in-love-but-holding-out-hope professor who stumbles into an adventure beyond his dreams but nevertheless handles it with a sort of dull, flawless reaction?

15:00 / 23.05.05

are you kidding? this is to be made into a film?

01:14 / 24.05.05

See for yourself...

06:47 / 24.05.05

Hadn't really looked into this thread before. Anyway.

I didn't like it. I really wanted to get into it, but stumbled very early on. It's just his writing style really grates. It's as though John Grisham has been in a horrific car crash and lost half of his brain, and is now forced to tap out his novels using a straw strapped to his head.

He is a shit author. Extending what BillR said, it's not just the beginning of the books that are formulaic within Brown's writing, it's the whole damn thing. All of his books play out in pretty much the same fashion.

Admittedly, I enjoyed DvC enough on an initial reading. Fun, quickly forgotten. Amusement park elephant ear.

But reading some other of Brown's books (Digital Fortress in particular was really bad for making this noticeable) was, for me, like listening to Evanescence's lead singer, Amy Lee. I thought, "Y'know, the music is shit, but I really really like her voice," and then I heard a live concert on television, and found out she can't actually sing at all. AT ALL.

13:02 / 26.05.05

Maybe we could build a plot generator for a best seller:

-Male lead: middle-aged guy -usually a bachelor, often a brainy but unworldly college teacher (not unlike an author we all know and love?). His heterosexual love interest is a
- young woman, who has fought her way into a traditionally male profession, and lots of men fancy her. Her mother will be dead or otherwise absent, but she will be mentored by her
-father/father figure, who will also be a powerful expert of some sort. They live in fear of some sort of
-assassin, delineated from your standard WASP by some sort of stereotypically soi-disant villainous physical feature, people will think he's in the grips of the
-obviously unpleasant 'red herring' bad guy, but the real crook will turn out to be
-the man who seemed 'nice' all along.

I have to say I really enjoyed angels and demons, but didn't like the da vinci code at all.

20:21 / 31.05.05

I'm reading Angels and Demons right now. I also have a hard-on for religious conspiracies, et cetera. But holy shite does this book require some eye-rolling. Dan Brown just cannot piece together a beautiful sentence. Oh well.

I love the "history" lesson. By that I mean, even as an amateur history buff, I'm picking out mistakes left right and center. Even ones that matter to the whole of the plot. For example, in Angels and Demons, the whole Galileo thing is just plain wrong. Galileo was not put under house arrest for heresy; he was put under (loose) supervision because he promised he wouldn't talk about or propagate the heliocentric model of the universe. He worked with the Vatican's approval for most of his life. Oh well. It's a ripping good read.

03:16 / 01.06.05

Hey, you know who's a sort of mediocre, unoriginal writer, but sells lots of books?

05:09 / 01.06.05

i give up, who?

m.

--

15:26 / 01.06.05

Well, all I can say is, I wish it would drop OFF the bestseller's lists so they could finally release it in paperback (apparently publishers won't release a book in paperback if the hardcover is still on the bestsellers list... makes sense I suppose).

Seriously, I'm sick of people coming to where I work (Barnes & Noble) and asking me if we have the book in paperback. They always get pissy too when you tell them it's not out yet.

09:39 / 02.06.05

Actually, it's just in North America that they still only have it in hardcover... I saw it in the UK earlier this year in paperback.

I love that not only is it still selling for $40 in hardcover, but they've re-published Angels and Demons in hardcover for that extra cash grab!

Fritz K Driftwood

07:15 / 08.06.05

Yeah, a coworker picked this up in paperback in the Dublin airport when she was visiting her parents recently, otherwise I still wouldn't have read it yet. My partner's mother has been trying to get him to read it, she just loved it. I suspect that my mom would too. My partner is French and he went into convulsions when he heard the casting for this movie. I have to agree. I'm not crazy for Tatou, and the thought of Hanks as a sexy/smart/Harvard professor is pushing the "hard-to-believe" meter to 10. Luckily for all of us this didn't come out ten years ago, otherwise Harrison Ford would be the male lead.

I read it in a weekend, because I found that I could avoid long conversations that the characters where having about how to solve the various puzzles that they encounter. I'm no brainiac, but for a couple, & later a trio, of people who are experts in their fields, they didn't seem to have half a wit between them.

At first I was happy to see him mentioning the "sacred feminine" and the Church's longstanding crusade against it, but I never felt like he explained to his audience why the "sacred feminine" is important other than some references to balance. Maybe I missed it in the gliding that I was doing down the page, but I suspect that no reasons were ever spelled out.

I've never read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" but I knew most of the stuff that they talk about just because it is usually tied into some conspiracy theory or other. I see that "Angels & Demons", the author's other book with the same lead character, is about the RC Church & the Illuminati (as if they aren't one and the same!). Ugh. I will save myself the pain and just re-read the Illuminatus! trilogy. At least RAW has a sense of humor, though I suspect that Brown laughs every time he walks into a bank.