Da Vinci Code Analysis

[Kandy Swartzel]

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 Catholic Church saw the ability of individuals to experience the divine on their own, with women, as a threat to its existence and demonized women (i.e., the sex provider) and persecuted everyone having anything to do with the Knights or the Priory.

As a counter to the misinformation given in the movie and book, I recommend readers visit one of the many sites which debunk in detail each assertion. Here are two excellent sites:

Protestant site:

Catholic site: _da_vinci_code.asp

In 2005, he was one of the 100 most influential people list on The Time magazine. They credited him with keeping the business enterprise trade afloat, spiking touristry in France and Rome, revitalizing interests in Symbolism and early Christian History, and way more.

While on business in Paris, Professor Langdon receives a late-night phone call. The elderly curator of the famous museum of France, the Louvre, has been murdered in cold blood inside the museum. He soon realizes why the police summoned him to the murder site.

Alongside the body, the police found a series of baffling codes and symbols. In this story, Professor Langdon and his side-kick, cryptologist Sophie Neveu, follow a massive trail of historical myths, facts, and logos to find a religious truth that can shake the foundations of Christianity itself

The Da Vinci Code is the perfect mixture of paranoid thriller, art history lessons, chase story, and religious symbology lectures. It succeeds in being a part of the mystery-thriller category and educational text.

My feminist self was screaming inside. When reading, you may feel attacked, but you must remember, it is just fiction. You should choose to believe what you want to, no matter how convincing Dan Brown makes it sound.

This makes it even more haunting and thrilling to read it. This is one of those handfuls of books with enough twists and turns to have you gasping every few pages. You will simply not be able to put it down once you pick it up.

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