The Da Vinci Code Review

Although I'm an avid reader - family lore has it that I learned to read at the tender age of two - and have read maybe over 1,000 books (I'm guessing here), there are some genres that I simply don't enjoy much.

 For instance, I'm quite certain I'll never read anything by Alexandra Ripley, the romance writer tapped by Warner Books to write Scarlett, the authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 best-selling novel Gone With the Wind.  My mom, a GWTW fan who saw the movie 10 times or so and thinks it's great, bought a copy of Scarlett when it was published in 1989 and was, to be honest, underwhelmed by Ripley's writing.  I - not a GWTW fan at all - tried browsing through it and was also not impressed.

 Another genre I don't read much is the mystery/suspense thriller.  I've read a few, of course, but they always make me feel stupid, or, if I figure out "whodunit" too easily, bore me to near-catatonic levels of ennui.  There are, of course, exceptions to this; I did read and enjoy Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, but I can count those on the fingers of one hand,

 Still, when Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code became, to use a cliche, "all the rage" and was a New York Times Top 10 Best Seller for more than two years, my curiosity was piqued by its phenomenal success. 

 After all, I'd been pleasantly surprised when a less-hyped insurance salesman-turned-novelist from Maryland became an almost-overnight success when the Naval Institute Press published The Hunt for Red October in 1984 and began the transformation of Tom Clancy into a brand name and builder of a multi-media empire.  I'd read Hunt in 1985 at the behest of one of my college professors and liked most of his subsequent novels, so I figured, if this Dan Brown is so popular and The Da Vinci Code is becoming so popular that even the History Channel is doing related documentaries, why not give that novel a try?

Now that I've managed to slog through the novel's 454 pages, I still can't figure out why this book is so popular.

The novel begins, as many thrillers must, with a murder. In this case, the victim is Jacques Saurniere, a 76-year-old curator who works at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Shot in the belly by a huge albino who has pursued him all the way into the museum's Grand Gallery, Saurniere desperately needs to find some way to pass on the secret for which he has been shot to the one person he trusts -- his granddaughter Sophie Neveu, a cryptographer in the Paris police department. Among many bizarre details the dying man leaves behind is this inscription:

13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
O, Draconian Devil!
Oh, lame saint!
P.S. Find Robert Langdon

To Paris police Capt. Fache, the inscription is apparently nonsense except for the last bit, which would seem to be a dying man's ID of his killer. To Langdon and Sophie, however, Saurniere's desperate code is merely the first of many clues to a centuries-old mystery involving not one but two secretive societies, the hidden messages left behind by a great artist inside one of his masterpieces, and a religious revelation so explosive that it might forever alter the teachings of the Catholic Church.

To explain further would, of course, spoil The Da Vinci Code for maybe the last five or six bibliophiles who may not have read either the novel or any reviews here (or elsewhere). Let's just say that Robert Langdon and Sophie's late night meeting at the Louvre is the start of a race against time, as well as Capt. Fache, the albino, and "other interested parties" who'll stop at nothing -- not even murder and intimidation -- to prevent a "new truth" about Jesus Christ and his followers from being revealed to the world.

Had the novel been written by a better writer of prose -- or a better storyteller -- I probably would have enjoyed The Da Vinci Code more than I did. I have in the past forgiven authors such as Tom Clancy for not being wonderful wordsmiths because they compensate by crafting good and compelling storylines. Brown, however, is neither a good storyteller nor a writer whose style is rich and refreshingly original; on the contrary, it's rather dry and somewhat sparse, so minimal that it almost reads like a screenplay clumsily expanded to novel form:

The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock. I am still alive. He crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for someplace to hide.

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

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

Considering the blandness of Brown's prose, I can only guess that the success of The Da Vinci Code stems from its pseudo-intellectual ruminations about two secretive societies, one made up of intellectuals and artists, the other representing the more conservative branches of the Catholic Church. Clearly, the novel's "revelation" has created a lot of buzz, as ardent Catholics and other Christians seem to be alarmed by the book's fascination with the feminine divine and the supposedly "true" meaning of the Holy Grail