Just Finished Reading- The Da Vinci Code

I've read several wonderful non-fiction books on the subjects you mention above (best being The Templar Revelation, a MUST read.)

I read these based off things that were discussed (in detail) in Foucault's Pendulum. (A novel I loved.)

It's my belief that The Da Vinci Code is simply a dumbed-down, simplified version of the Eco novel. Is this a fair assessment?

I wouldn't call it 'a dumbed-down' version of Eco's work (in general). Maybe you could say it's 'not as scholastic' or 'more plot-centric' (as opposed to a novel basically being 500 pages of regurgitated research). Dan Brown put a lot of research into The Da Vinci Code but equally blends it with suspense and murder.

The only negative thing I have to say about the book is that there are a couple references to current media (e.g. Tom Cruise and Eyes Wide Shut) and I thought this dated the book. But, who knows, maybe this book is just meant to be hott for a few years and then disappear into obscurity.

Can you speak a bit about the mentioning of Eyes Wide Shut? I'm very familiar with the novella it was based off of, and I'd be hard pressed to find something related to Jesus, Templars, etc. (I do hope it's not the orgy scene he's speaking about -- as if it was some sort of Masonic rite.)

I am sort of tempted to read it, even if just for fun.

The Da Vinci Code made the family rounds this Christmas, so I have a soft spot for it. It is, though, a bit lightweight compared to Foucault's Pendulum, in that the megaconspiracy theory's never subjected to any true skeptical inquiry--although maybe that comparison's not entirely fair, since FP's devoted to debunking conspiracies en masse, while DVC's providing a pulpy, Indian Jones-style romp framed by the Magdalene heresy. Anyways, DVC's a hell of a lot more fun of a read than FP. But it's no Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Ha ha ha, you're exactly right. Brown wrote that the specifics of Eyes Wide Shut wasn't correct, but that the... I guess, deeper fundamental reason for it was right. There wasn't a whole lot of Godess worship that I saw in the scene, but that should have been the reason for it.

He's not the best writer. In fact, he obviously hasn't been taught the basic rule 'show, don't tell' as most of the text is expository.

Other things that annoyed me are simple facts which he get wrong. An example being that England is the only country in Europe where cars are driven on the left side of the road. This is completely wrong as he obviously hasn't researched the side of the road they drive on in Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Malta, and Cyprus.

He also has an English character who talks about 'soccer' - no Englishmen anyone knows would call it that.

The anagrams and word associations that make up the characters' names is nice though. The main antagonist's being constructed from the surnames of two authors involved with 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail.'

All in all, the book is a film script written as prose. It's incomplete; it needs a musical score to give it any sort of emotion.

Really? That's so interesting. I'm going to have to check that out at home tonight.

My boyfriend assures me that Foucault's Pendulum is extremely dull, so I won't be bothering with it, but might start checking out a few conspiracy websites. I'm a total sucker for the spooky elements of catholicism.

What makes you say that?

And can I just comment on what a phenom this book is? I was at a surprise birthday party this weekend and it turns out that half the people there had read it... It kind of scared me a little.

Catholic exalted high-ranking murderous priest(s) willing to kill rather than let "dangerous" truth from ancient time/mithology ("nature of holy grail" and "Aristotele's pledge for laughter",respectively, and excuse my didascalic snobbish attitude WINK) come out.
Truth uncovered by cultivated detectives...

isn'tdad smart??

Regarding analogy with Foucault's pendulum, I could not get over page 100 (was I the only one to feel very annoyed by the book pretentious gimmicks ex. untraslated greek quotations??? geez...)

David Baddiel (I think it was him) was likening it to Dickens in one of the newspapers at the weekend and deploring the snobbish attitude of the literati to this book. Not that I give a toss what DB thinks, but it did have me ruminating on the (admittedly remote-seeming) possibility that this might be regarded as a good book at some point in the future, even though every cell in my brain was telling me it was rubbish when I was trying to read it.

(And in any case I'm regularly in bookshops/read the book pages etc and I only became aware of this book once it had already topped the bestseller lists for months - I couldn't have gone long without hearing about new book by, say, Salman Rushdie who won't be selling in TDVC numbers).

I think the key phrase is "well written". Josh is right: to most people with a taste for literature this is a badly written book. That leaves the mystery of its popularity. If Baddiel is right and it survives to be regarded as literature (that's a very big if, of course, but Baddiel is a reasonably bright guy and his suggestion doesn't have to be right to be interesting, it just has to be not obviously wrong) then what people like me think of as "well-written" is either wrong, or just irrelevant to whether a book is any good. Of course it's difficult for me to see that from where I'm standing. But there are plenty of examples in critical history of work that was regarded as vulgar rubbish by the cognoscenti being accepted as good or even great by later generations.

I just think this has touched on a suspicion that I increasingly have that being conventionally "well-written" is less important than we think, that there are many "well-written" books that are published and deservedly sink without trace every year as well as apparently ill-written books that turn out to be culturally important. I've been reading Don Quixote in translation, one of the great masterpieces of prose fiction, but I'm not convinced it could be described as "well written" as we understand the phrase nowadays. Some of the writing is extraordinarily clumsy but it doesn't detract from the greatness of the book.

(just not abt what you THINK they're credible abt!)

also i think way more ppl. are sympathetic to conspiracy theories at the moment than in the recent past -- esp. global and ancient ones.

i dunno what you mean by 'recent past', but i'd be interested to hear why you think that, sterling.

this happens with political screeds and slambooks alla time.

this happens with political screeds and slambooks alla time.

(kinda)

I'm in the UK and have only noticed one TV documentary about TDVC, which was predictably showing what an absurd piece of nonsense it is. TV execs would have made this programme because they knew audiences would take pleasure in having their suspicions confirmed and in laughing at and feeling superior to the credulous minority. I don't think the existence of documentaries like this is evidence that many readers take TDVC seriously any more seriously than James Bond.

YR FRIENDS ARE TOO SMART AND ITS SKEWING YR PERCEPTION OF SOCIETY AT LARGE.

I think it's the opposite - researchers for tv documentaries and the like are able to locate a credulous minority and make them seem more representative than they are. Which plays into the desire of people who are not taken in like to believe that they are in a relatively clever minority rather than just typical readers.

If the sub-Parsons/Hornby nonsense that was Time For Bed is anything to go by, David Baddiel knows less than most people about what makes a good book. He is, however, something of an authority on porn.

but if you do manage to whip up a time viewer that shows the college students of the future [studying blank] my reaction will be to weep for humanity, not rush out and buy crap.

You could replace that blank with lot of names of artists viewed as populist crap in their day but now taken pretty seriously, though. And perfectly encapsulate the confidence with which the arbiters of conventional good taste dismissed vulgarians like Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Dickens, any and every novel (not real literature like drama and poetry, dear boy), all cinema, all pop music, all jazz, yadda yadda.

even if the college students of the future were reading the da vinci code, that would just show that somehow 'we' had decided to start forcing that small group of people to try to take it to be culturally important. but how else are many things preserved for a hundred years, anyway? very few things with mass appeal - books, especially! - a hundred years ago retain that mass appeal now. there are new things for masses to find appealing now.

I wouldn't be surprised if college students of the future *do* end up studying it; but that doesn't mean it's crap, though.

At my university library, we had class sets of Jurassic Park and various Anne Rice novels, plus a fairly wide range of 1960s sci-fi, because that was what the English department had asked for. Just because those books were being taught at university doesn't mean that they are high quality.

"Appeals to an imagined critical judgement of an imagined future are always bad thinking"

appeals to an imagined literary web board elite can distort discussions of entertaining, non-experimental fiction

Actually I was talking about the kind of poor quality music criticism you hear which compares [name dull alt-rock act] to [name shiny pop act] and goes "I know which people will be listening to in 20 years time", which is just an absence of engagement really: don't say why you like it, just rely on a legion of imaginary people to back you up. And extrapolating my discomfort with that to literature. I think it still works but maybe I'm wrong.

Anyhow "TDVC" is already regarded as a good book, just not by everybody. It has this in common with every book ever written. (Is this true? I'm not quite sure. I don't suppose there's a book which everyone agrees is good. Whether there is a book which no-one thinks is good is more difficult. Perhaps I should have added a virtually.)

I haven't read it. I will, though. Maybe when it's less fashionable.

Sorry my mistake.

even if we could predict what people in the future would like, why would we care?

For the same reasons that we might care what *anyone* else thinks? Or don't you think we should?

I cited porn as a reason Baddiel might be in a position to comment on DVC. He's an expert on badly written cheap thrills with terrible dialogue, weak characters and stupidly contrived situations.

Since these future people remain imaginary, I find it hard to care what they like or don't (and I certainly don't think made-up opinions ascribed to them, by Baddiel or whoever, count for anything or tell us anything about what we think).

I can see how predicting future tastes would be a result for people who plan publishing schedules, though, and for people who like to speculate on modern first editions. Are there people who speculate on modern first editions? How much would a first edition TDVC cost me just now, I wonder?

Clearly you are not a mathematician. Those guys care a lot about things that are imaginary.

Having read TDVC I went on to read Angels and Demons, which was atrocious and not interesting in the least, despite having much more at stake. It did contain some interesting descriptions of particle accelerators and some nice chat about antimatter, but it didn't have the creepy overtones or the familiar locations of TDVC. I really do believe that people love a creepy Catholic conspiracy and Brown tapped into that really well. The Celestine Prophecies also sold by the bucketload, as did Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Not as much maybe, because they're not airport thrillers.
I would be curious to know when the buzz around this book really got going, as I too missed out on it until it was established. Anyone know?

(Mathematicians really do care about imaginary numbers, don't they? And that seems fair enough. I'm not sure that mathematicians, on the whole, care about imaginary people. I'm not sure they care about actual people either, but perhaps I need to gather more data on that subject.)

people, though, who needs those.

No, but some of what's good to talk about regarding books (particularly smash blockbusters like this) is why people like the books, and how this relates to other things. Are people more receptive to conspiracies? Less tolerant of Catholic perversions (by the way, m coleman, it wasn't the catholic church after all)? How does it compare with Left Behind Mania?

Most appeals to the future, though, assume that this web of culture will melt away with time, letting smart people see The Truth. This is of course more prevalent in music. I still consider this to be the classic example. This is also of course complete horseshit.

. Pointless flashbacks, to the point where it doesn't seem like any of the characters could spend more than five minutes without their mind drifting back to that time when blah blah blah. That the main characters flashback are to Dan Brown's previous book that no-one bought didn't help.
. Apalling pacing, so that every time it looked like two exciting things might happen in a row, the info-sphinchter opens and out drops another lengthy dollop of backstory. It's not even in dialogue form, just "The Priory of Zion was blah blah"
. Just complete nonsense, where the characters act against what little characterisation they've been given (I am here mainly think of the SO DARK THE CON OF MAN section)

On the other hand, I couldn't put it down. Not for reasons of novelty either: I've read both Foucault's Pendulum and Holy Blood Holy Grail beforehand. I really don't know or understand what perfect wave he caught, though I'm not surprised he didn't manage it a second or third (or zeroth) time.

Then, of course, word of mouth took over (much helped by the fact that they sent a free copy to practically everyone in the publishing and bookselling industries). But rather than the unknown-book-gets-great-word-of-mouth-and-becomes-bestseller model, this was a case of bestseller-gets-great-word-of-mouth-and-becomes-megabestseller.

(I thought it was crap, but I enjoyed it, and devoured it in a day, nonetheless.)

Does Brown's book really present this bit of old news as OMG SUPER-SECRET HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE THAT HAS BEEN SUPPRESSED BY THE PATRIARCHY? If so, fie on it.

The only thing that annoys me more than that case of mistaken identity is people who read The Da Vinci Code and then breathlessly repeat this tidbit as if they had spotted something new in the Zapruder film.

I've realised that the stuff I was talking about earlier regarding how it's compelling but not good, and how his other books aren't even that, reminds me a lot of Dracula.

What's annoying me most is that it's brought out the inner pedant in me that I had worked so hard to repress in order to keep hold of friends while watching films with lots of mistakes in them. It's not the "Jesus had a kid" or secret society stuff, it's the tiny details in the patronising explanations of the golden ratio, Egyptian gods and so on that crop up every 3 chapters or so. Does Dan Brown really think the ancient Egyptians went around saying they felt "horny", or does he think that the first thing someone thought of when they wanted to describe the feeling of being sexually turned on was "I feel turned on, like the ancient Egyptian god of masculine sexuality. Amon. He had horns. That's it, I feel horny". It's not too hard to find out where the word horny really came from. Or when the Mona Lisa was named, for that matter (it was after Leonardo died, I doubt he intended to send many messages through the name when he didn't even give the painting one). "Left wing" politics did not get the name because they're considered radical and radical things are bad and left handed things are bad, It was named after where people sat in the French court. Koyaanisqatsi has bugger all to do with a balance of masculinity/femininity, it's a balance of giving to/taking from the earth. Suspicion of left handed people predates Christianity, so it's unlikely to have come about because christians were mysogynists and the left was considered feminine (not the most famous of Christian beliefs itself, more a pagan one, and not one of the pagan ones that Christianity nicked. Christians worshipped on the Sabbath long before Pope Constantine decided that was the best day to do it.

I'm not sure if this is part of the fiction, but it seems like it's supposed to be truthful background info put in the book to educate, along with the paragraphs about measurememnts of buildings which I could have read in an encyclopeadia if I was that interested. I'm only two thirds of the way through the book and the pedant in me has had enough. And she survived watching Volcano the other day without opening her big gob once.

A pedant writes: you mean the first National Assembly :-)

Well, some did, but surely it the Council of Nicaea where that was codified? There were a lot of early Christian sects who believed things we would find odd and behaved in ways we wouldn't expect. I can't, in 10 seconds, google up anything one way or the other, though.

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about Dan Browns very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very boring & wastful time period. I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting details of someone's curriculum vitae into a complex modifiers on proper names and definite descriptions is what you do in a journalistic story about a death; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. 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 with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it 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 small screen 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 Heathrow trash bin? Because it seemed to me to be such a fund of lessons in how not to write.
Just plain and simple the "Da Vinci Code" is definitly pure fiction very poorly written.

Is Foucault's Pendulum a 'fun' read or fairly dense/serious/etc.?

i'm not sure it's any good tho.

Still, I remember it with fondness, and why should my third reaction be any more valid than my first two? Some books perhaps shouldn't be re-read too often.

good lord no

http://www.lime-light.org/xmb/images/smilies/roll.gif

You know, I loved the book but I'd never EVER recommend it. It's just throwaway. I'd prefer to recommend something more substantial to my friends. That said, I did recommend it to a friend of mine who, after reading 3/4th of the book, frothed at the mouth when I suggested it was a fun read, to be taken very lightly. (Maybe that's why I now say I'd never recommend it.)

You could say these books are necessary to regard books like... oh say... La Peste as classics. ;-)

So I tried (3 times), but it was just too terrible for me

Dude, by the time I would have wanted to quit, I would have finished it anyway. You can read this in a couple of hours easily. Coming from me, that's quite a feat as I usually take weeks to finish a book. You have to read it quickly as not to vomit all over the place. ;-)

Dan Brown gives the world...National Treasure fanfic!

It's a fact, at first I thought it was somehow the delayed novelization of the movie.

This thread's really good, I love that it took so long for people to get all cynical about the book. I also enjoyed this: "He's stuck similes in like a GCSE student who's been told to shove in as many similes as possible".

"Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish." His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. "It's ... Latin."

Dan Brown cribbed most of his material for Da Vinci Code from a non-fic book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by a committee of three authors named Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.

I have a collection of essays by Anthony Burgess, published in 1986, wherein he reviews this book soon after its publication. In his essay he wrote:

If their material had presented in a blockbuster novel like Irving Wallace's The Word...it would have been easier to take. (...) I can only see this as marvelous material for a novel. Perhaps Irving Wallace or Morris West is already writing it.

So there's an even chance Brown didn't even come up on his own with the idea of novelizing this stuff.

But you must give the devil his due; he clearly hit the sweet spot in terms of his potential audience. Kind of like Jean Auel and her caveman books. She is utter crap as a writer and I can't read more than a paragraph before I'm filled with horror and disgust. At least I could finish Da Vinci Code and even derived some wtf enjoyment from it.

Top Ten Adjectives In The Writing of Dan Brown:

dark
light
religious
grand
famous
secret
enormous
female
French
red

i should point out the above was in the paper and to the best of my knowledge isn't actually a joke

I just searched through a pdf of The Da Vinci Code, and there were 53 instances of 'enormous'. That's about once every seven pages. Not sure that 'grand' should count, since most of them are in the squillion mentions of the Grand Gallery.

Maybe since I have this pdf I should give it a read, give my high and mighty scoffing some justification.

It's a decent story! Angels and Demons is better, though.

I just searched through a pdf of The Da Vinci Code, and there were 53 instances of 'enormous'. That's about once every seven pages.
Still probably less frequent than the phrase "Every so often" appeared in "2666".

It's a brilliant story, whatever its flaws. Teachers should use it as the clearest demonstration that good plotting, good style and good writing are not the same thing, but I bet they don't.

it's really not a "good story" in any way

merdeyeux can you check if any of the uses of 'female' are as a noun?

quite a few, yeah, although there are a couple more 'female's than there are 'enormous'es, so maybe that's been taken into account.

78 instances of 'dark' or 'darkness, btw, more than once every five pages. Flicking through all of that male and female harmony hokum makes me kinda want to read it now, for some reason.

i haven't read these and I'm not gonna act like I'm better than them or something but some girl I worked with once was shocked that I hadn't when I told her I had written my thesis for art-school on "kinda religiously themed stuff"

she also said "have you read 'Angels and Demons' yet?"

Wordle of The Lost Symbol:

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4265/lostsymbol.png

Only 35 instances of 'enormous' in this one.

Is the 'Bellamy' Craig Bellamy?

David.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6194031/The-Lost-Symbol-and-The-Da-Vinci-Code-author-Dan-Browns-20-worst-sentences.html

Ugh. I had been pretty comfortable with the verdict that Brown is great with plots and awful with style, but that commentary has turned me into an all-round sympathiser.

I am halfway through The Lost Symbol and it is hard to shake the feeling that Dan Brown is a dick.

yeah that article has a lot of "who cares" and the occasional bit of "now you're just being a dick" to it. See esp. 'learning the ropes' bit. It's called a figure of speech, gaiz.

"whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes" - I kinda like this image! Although I'm imagining the eyes somehow punching through the paper. And it just being a sheet of paper instead of a face. So not that much.

This book was some grade-A bullshit, like beyond even what my low expectations were. Way to brutally murder some interesting ideas, you no-talent tool.

kinda funny what happens after the BIG POP HIT. dude is plugging along writing books then OH NO I IZ HUUUUUGE BETTER NOT FUCK UP and it takes him longer to follow up da vinci than it took him to crank out the three before it. how long did it take that cold mountain dude? ten years? it must be scary. (stephen king being the exception to the rule)

* Digital Fortress, 1998
* Angels & Demons, 2000
* Deception Point, 2001
* The Da Vinci Code, 2003
* The Lost Symbol, 2009

Part of me feels like he just took Digital Fortress and replaced every reference to cryptography with references to Masons.

"whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes" -- this is really not defensible; it's not the image, it's the confusion about what the second half is meant to modify

haven't read the article so don't know if it makes that point ah well

What they choose to complain about is 'precarious', which I guess Brown means to mean "precariously positioned":

"Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes."

But that's at best the third-worst howler there.

dark
light
religious
grand
famous
secret
enormous
female
French
red

repeating these words over and over again can only be effective in keeping people's attention

that reads like a Fiona Apple album title

The dark-skinned light fitter was religious, but his not-so-famous secret was that he liked enormous females and the odd glass of French red.

Someone give me a million dollar book contract.

Slightly overweight medical student Buck Mulligan walked up the historical stairs of the Martello tower

ha my very-forgiving-of-bad-prose wife is just as fed up with this book as I was

http://nymag.com/arts/books/bookclub/lost-symbol/

this was entertaining

"influential family dynasty"

i like how a leading symbologist and france's leading code cracker can't recognize what language a paragraph is in when it's just english printed backwards

out of all the shitty things in this (going ahead and mentioning how you can see the word "sex" in the lion king...omg), the shitty "codes" were the worst. all of them were way too obvious and suspension of disbelief was impossible. you can't help but think "these 'academics' are dumb, and the person who wrote this is dumb." the answers to all of them were immediately clear. if this were real, everyone and their fuckin mom would be showing up to get the grail.

i read this because i was stuck volunteering in a place and there was nothing to do, but a copy of this book was there.

i've only seen the moovie, but i think when yr big shock ending (okay i already knew what it was gonna be cos i'd read the source material but) is kinda "sfw? you were killing dudes over this??" then u have a problem too

"oh? jesus is my grandad? thanks for the info, i will get back to work now cheers"

otm. all the shit thats supposed to be shocking regarding religion is classic type 2 challops

it made me think about this a lot: what does it say about people that we WANT to believe in stupid conspiracy theories? is it about wanting to feel superior?

simplistic explanations for frightening randomness of life? sense that even tho yr life is mundane there is an exciting world hiding within reach? liking to be in on big secrets? not being real bright?

also maybe it's hard in a "secular age" for people to understand the complexities of how major religions became major and religious conspiracy theories provide a recognisable modern world reason, however ridiculous

that last point is pretty tangy, imo - i think that's a good explanation.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html

^ always a good read. this might be the most ridiculous set of sentences in any popular work of fiction:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

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.

I was surprised to open this thread and see it beginning with someone talking about how great the DVC is.

lol comparing it with eco

"The Templar Revelation, a MUST read"

also

I wouldn't call it 'a dumbed-down' version of Eco's work (in general). Maybe you could say it's 'not as scholastic' or 'more plot-centric' (as opposed to a novel basically being 500 pages of regurgitated research). Dan Brown put a lot of research into The Da Vinci Code but equally blends it with suspense and murder.

O_OOOOOOOO