Ok let me expand on the last post. Last week I started reading the ‘Da Vinci Code’. I swallowed my prejudices, told myself I was being a snob and took it down off the shelf (my mum gave it to me) half expecting to be swept up in the whole thing (50 Million people can’t be wrong). That didn’t happen, not even slightly, I had to stop at page 30 or so, such was the degree of the fuck-wittery stained onto every page. Not only is the whole thing absurdly pompous, self important and incredibly stupid (I knew that allready) but most of the time it just doesn’t make any sense.
Look:
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.
- Voices don’t speak, people speak, using voices.
- If you’re frozen you can’t turn your head, not even slowly.
- Fifteen feet away, behind a sealed iron gate. Is that chillingly close?
- How could you see the irises of a sihlouette? From fiteen feet away? Through an iron gate?
This isn’t an isolated example, the whole thing is like this, any kind of attempt to create consistent setting or characters, you know the basic stuff you expect from a novel, is totally absent.
Look I read a lot of trashy comics and pulp sci-fi but this is so stupid it makes the DC spin offs like ‘Superman’s Girlfriend Louis Lane‘ look like, oh I don’t know, Umberto Eco* or something.
Summary: 50,000,000 people can be wrong if they’re idiots (sorry mum). Dan Brown is an idiot. If you like this book you are an idiot and you should read at least one other book before recommending the Da Vinci Code to all your stupid friends.
*Foucault’s Pendulum does the knights templar/techno thriller conspiracy thing really well, with style and intelligence, maybe you should read that. Actually Eco is a professor of semiotics (sometimes called semiology) which is probably the word Brown was searching for when he came up with the afforementioned symbology.
And then Neil said:
Thanks Tom, you’ve just removed the last vestige of interest that I had in reading this book, and have also made me feel extremely smug in having read Foucault’s Pendulum!
And then KateG said:How many man-hours have been wasted by 50m people reading that book? You can’t get it back, people. I openly sneer at people reading it, and in fact had an argument with Pete on the barge holiday for claiming it was well-written. He is dead to me.
And then kate b said:I was thinking of reading it in spanish but as it clearly doesn’t make any sense in English I’m never going to understand it…
And then tom said:Translation into a foreign language can only improve this book. esp. if it’s one youcan’t read, like Chinese or something.
And then Charlie said:Yes, it’s pretty rubbish, although the amateurish writing style isn’t my main point of criticism; it’s more the way he deliberately intermingles lots of references to vague conspiracies in order to make the conspiracy plausible. I can’t think of a specific example, but they usually went something like this:
“On the other side of the Place de la Concorde a small child squinted up at the sun, holding the mooring of a kite that danced to the light Parisian breeze. Four sides to a kite, four, the only number in the English language whose number of letters is equal to the number itself, the smallest composite number that is equal to the sum of its primes, the number of evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the four horseman of the apocalypse, the same number as the number of suits in playing cards (the suits themselves having deep links to Templar iconography), etc.”
There’s a really good bit in Foucault’s Pendulum describing the numerological patterns in the dimension of an ice-cream van, I think. Eco just does it for a joke, but it’s about a thousand times more sophisticated than the childish way Brown crowbars in conspiracy theories and patterns into his narrative.
Having said all that, you should still all read it, it takes about half an evening to pound through, and then when you’re sneerily sounding off about it to someone, you won’t fall into the old “you haven’t read it so I can dismiss your views” trap. And anyway, I’ve read much worse books, there was a Sidney Sheldon aliens-among-us book called the Doomsday Conspiracy, and that was ATROCIOUS. People only get uppity about The Da Vinci Code because it’s so successful.
And then tom said:Yeah it’s true, it’s the fact that it’s so successful that makes it so annoying for me (c.f. Crazy Frog, Big Brother etc.) If it wasn’t so successful I could just ignore it, as it is 50% of my closest bookshop seems to be devoted to the Da Vinci Code or it’s spin offs and band wagon riders (’the rule of four’ etc.). I was in there a couple of days ago and there was a big promotion for special film tie in editions of the book, like the book needs any more promotion. There was exactly one Ursula Le Guin book in the whole shop and I found it by mistake in the travel section (it was ‘changing planes’ so I guess that’s sort of understandable).
Also: ‘The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy‘ is another entertaining conspiracy theory book.
And then Charlie said:You know, that whole “confluence of symbols” trick just reminded me that that’s exactly what Alan Moore did in From Hell, when Gull is taking Netley around London showing him the masonic and pagan significance of all the Hawksmoor churches.
Except when Alan Moore did it, it was good, of course. And it was coming from the voice of a character, not the narrator. There was still something a little bit irritating about it though.
And then Andrew said:_Digital Fortress_ isn’t much better. In fact it’s so bad I’ve finally signed up for an account on your blog (seemed the done thing) so I could plug:
http://bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=07/2005#27
In fact, _Digital Fortress_ is so bad that I’m getting angry just even thinking of it. Grr.
And then nick talbot said:I tried to read ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’. I had to stop ten pages in, admitting that Umberto Eco is too clever for me. With the Da Vinci Code i had the pleasure of stopping after ten pages, confident Dan Brown is too stupid for me.
And then tom said:I’ve not been able to get into any other Umberto Eco stuff, Foucault’s Pendulum has a computer program fairly near the start and that was enough to get me going. Maybe there’s some kind of conspiracy literature axis; Dan Brown at one end Umberto Eco at the other.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Login [ « ] [ » ]