CBC’s Words at Large has a really great podcast interview with Khaled Hosseini about The Kite Runner on January 31, 2007 (no important spoilers). Slavery, War, and Canada Reads:
The Khaled Hosseini portion of the podcast begins at about 25:00 and lasts about 21 minutes. If you liked The Kite Runner, listen to it. If you haven’t read The Kite Runner, why are you wasting time reading my blog when you could be reading that instead?
36. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Suspense thriller)
The first thing to remember is that this novel is a suspense thriller: nothing more, nothing less. There are genres I’m less interested in - Westerns, for instance - but not many. Still, it provided my with a few hours of amusement, without being half as annoying as I thought it would be.
Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor and internationally-recognized symbologist, is summoned to the Louvre in the middle of the night by the French police to assist them in a murder enquiry.
The plot of The Da Vinci Code isn’t bad, although it’s weak in several places, and it was suspenseful enough to maintain my interest through to the end. The characters were uninteresting, but given the nature of the genre, that was only to be expected.
[spoilers]
My problem with the plot began with Robert and Sophie’s “escape” from the Louvre, which was like something from a children’s cartoon. To investigate the murder of a prominent man in France’s most famous museum, Fache would certainly have enough officers to chase down Langdon and leave a full complement of guards on the museum. Especially since the alarm had not yet been reset. There was absolutely no reason for Sophie to believe that throwing the GPS tracker onto a truck would leave the Grand Gallery deserted.
From the moment Robert and Sophie left the Louvre, I was fairly sure that the trail would end there. Dan Brown made such a point of mentioning the inverted pyramid that when the blade and chalice symbols came up later on, I knew that was where Mary Magdalene’s body would be. I also guessed that Teabing was the Teacher relatively early, since it simply couldn’t have been anyone else who’d been introduced.
I was extremely relieved when Robert told Sophie that there was no way she could be one of the descendants of Jesus Christ, and very disappointed in Dan Brown when it turned out that she was. It was obvious that Brown knew that everyone would immediately guess that Sophie was one of the Grail descendants, and that conversation with Robert was a really clumsy attempt to throw everyone off the track.
Unfortunately, Brown constantly uses the narrative device of switching POV characters at critical moments in order to build suspense. It’s cheap, and it’s annoying. So is his habit of having his characters see and react to astonishing things without describing them to the reader, for much the same reason, and with the same effect on me.
I wasn’t impressed with Dan Brown’s writing, either. A lot of the exposition was awkward and obtrusive, and the emotional scenes were so clumsy they didn’t raise so much as a twinge of sympathy in me. None of the characters had any depth to them; the ones who weren’t stock fanatics all seemed like cardboard cut-outs.
My biggest problem with The Da Vinci Code, however, is with the central plot points and the “facts” that are used to support it. Dan Brown has a way of using real people, places, and organizations and twisting the facts about them into something that fits his plot. That, I’m actually reasonably okay with, although I would be much happier if he had a page or two at the back explaining which of the things presented as “facts” in the book are actually true, or at least supported by reputable scholars. I don’t think he has any obligation to do so, but I can certainly see why his book has misled so many people.
My problem with the book’s central conspiracy theory is that no one with even the most basic knowledge of the classical period could possibly believe it. The explanations given by supposed academics were laughably simplistic, and a lot of the “evidence” that Langdon and Teabing used to support the theory, especially the linguistic evidence, simply didn’t make sense. I couldn’t entirely suspend my disbelief, because I couldn’t believe in Langdon as a respected academic.
I also wasn’t impressed by the cult of the “sacred feminine”, mostly because although Dan Brown tried to present it as a religion in which men and women were equal, the discussions of it in the book were all masculine-centred. For example, in explaining Hieros Gamos, Langdon says:
Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis - knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven.
So women are a kind of sexual tool men can use to get closer to God? Nice. Brown’s late explanation that although the sénéchaux were always men, the Grand Master could be a man or a woman, seems like a half-hearted, last-minute attempt to resolve the obvious gender inequality in the religion.
[/spoilers]
Although I know I’ve made it sound like it, The Da Vinci Code wasn’t a bad book at all. It was genuinely suspenseful and exciting, even when I wasn’t entirely able to suspend my disbelief, and even when I thought I knew how it was going to end. The puzzles were all interesting and well plotted. For a suspense thriller, it was pretty good, and I might even borrow Angels and Demons from the library.
The first thing to remember is that this novel is a suspense thriller: nothing more, nothing less. There are genres I’m less interested in - Westerns, for instance - but not many. Still, it provided my with a few hours of amusement, without being half as annoying as I thought it would be.