The Da Vinci Code Pdf Archive

[Cora Devries]

Regrettablyneither Barbara nor I are ableto claim that the third non-reader is one of us. What can I say byway of excuse for this? I found the book was on sale really cheap in CostCo when we were about to leave on a trip to Europe. I bought it for the long, long flights that lay ahead of us, without knowing much about it except that it was supposed to be an intellectual mystery with cryptography and symbology and stuffand the blurbs said it was great. I didn't open it, I just grabbed oneoff a pallet of about 500 copies.Barbara was between mysteries at the time, so she grabbed it from meand rapidly read it over the next couple of daysbefore we even left for the airport. I asked hopefully what it was like. She scowled and said something about the Hardy Boys.My heart sank; I understood her to mean it was pathetic butpossibly of interest to the 11-year-old market. By the time we wereon our plane she had made sure thather flight bag contained a new novel byMenking Hannell, and over southern Oregon she told me it was great asusual. Unfortunately I had no better idea of what to do with my time,so I opened The Da Vinci Code.

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of justwhat it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word,that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever writtenthat begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraphwith which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under thechapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunire staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-oldman heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spenda number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in thehistory of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalisticstories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonabletext for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of anaction sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here.It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunire isfleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarmsystem and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he wascurating at the Louvre.

The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and wordchoice blunders in almost every paragraph (sometimes every line). Look at the phrase "the seventy-six-year-old man".It's a complete let-down: we knew he was a man — the anaphoric pronoun "he" had just been used to refer to him. (This is perhaps where "curator" could have been slipped in for thefirst time, without "renowned", if the passage were rewritten.)Look at "heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas." We don't need to know it's a masterpiece (it's a Caravaggio hanging in the Louvre, that should be enough in the way of credentials, for heaven's sake). Surely "toward him" feels better than "toward himself" (though I guess both are grammatical here). Surely "tore from the wall" shouldbe "tore away from the wall". Surely a single man can't fall into aheap (there's only him, that's not a heap). And why repeat the name"Saunire" here instead of the pronoun "he"? Who else is around? (Caravaggio hasn't been mentioned; "aCaravaggio" uses the name as an attributive modifier with conventionallyelided head noun "painting". That isn't a mention of the man.)

Well, actually, there is someone else around, but we only learn thatthree paragraphs down, after "a thundering iron gate" has fallen (by theway, it's the fall that makes a thundering noise: there's no such thingas a thundering gate)."The curator" (his profession is now named a second time in case you missed it) "...crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous spacefor someplace to hide" (the colloquial American "someplace" seems very odd here as compared with standard "somewhere"). Then:

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here.A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with."Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to betold his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if hehas frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarilyceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouettedoes not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunire can see the man'spale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet),the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily,thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared withalternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, andit never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a smallscreen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why.And why did I keep the book instead of dropping it into a Heathrowtrash bin? Because it seemed to me to be such a fund of lessonsin how not to write.

I don't think I'd want to say these things about a first-time novelist, it would seem a cruel blow to a budding career. But Dan Brown is all over the best-seller lists now. In paperback and hardback, and in manylanguages, he is a phenomenon. He is up there with the Stephen Kingsand the John Grishams and nothing I say can conceivably harm him. He isa huge, blockbuster, worldwide success who can go anywhere he wants andneed never work again. And he writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching. Never mind the ridiculous plot and the stupid anagrams and puzzle clues as the book proceeds, this is a terrible, terrible example of the thriller-writer's craft.

Which brings us to the question of the blurbs. "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and most accomplished writers in thecountry," said Nelson DeMille, a bestselling author who has himselfhit the #1 spot in the New York Times list. Unbelievablemendacity.And there are four other similar pieces of praise on the back cover.Together those blurbs convinced me to put this piece of garbageon the CostCo cartalong with the the 72-pack of toiletrolls. Thriller writers must have a code of honor that requiresthat they all praise each other's new novels, a kind of omertathat enjoins them to silence about the fact that some fellow memberof the guild has given evidence oftotal stylistic cluelessness. A fraternal code of silence. We couldcall it... the Da Vinci code; or the Dan Brown code.

*The third non-reader was unknown when this post wasfirst drafted, but it has since been edited, and as of today (May 2, 2004)I can confirm that Bill Poser and Danny Yee are both claiming not to haveread The Da Vinci Code. Fair enough. So at least four peoplehave not read it. I just wish one of them was me.

The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard, written by Akiva Goldsman, and based on Dan Brown's 2003 novel of the same name. The first in the Robert Langdon film series, the film stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jrgen Prochnow, Jean Reno and Paul Bettany. In the film, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious symbology from Harvard University, is the prime suspect in the grisly and unusual murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunire. On the body, the police find a disconcerting cipher and start an investigation.[3] Langdon escapes with the assistance of police cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and they begin a quest for the legendary Holy Grail. A noted British Grail historian, Sir Leigh Teabing, tells them that the actual Holy Grail is explicitly encoded in Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting, The Last Supper. Also searching for the Grail is a secret cabal within Opus Dei, an actual prelature of the Holy See, who wish to keep the true Grail a secret to prevent the destruction of Christianity.

The film, like the book, was considered controversial. It was met with especially harsh criticism by the Catholic Church for the accusation that it is behind a two-thousand-year-old cover-up concerning what the Holy Grail really is and the concept that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married, producing a daughter, as well as its treatment of the organizations Priory of Sion and Opus Dei. Many members urged the laity to boycott the film. In the book, Dan Brown states that the Priory of Sion and "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

Jacques Saunire, a Louvre curator, is pursued by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who demands the location of the "keystone" to find and destroy the Holy Grail. Saunire gives him a false lead and is murdered. The police find his body posed like Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Police captain Bezu Fache summons American symbologist Robert Langdon, who is in Paris for a lecture on the interpretation of symbols, to examine Saunire's body.

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