A Blithe Spirit - Books - The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

February 18th 2004
The End

Well, that's it for me and Dan Brown! I began this book with some trepidation, after reading Angels & Demons and finding it seriously lacking in skill and style, but when I hit the actual story I couldn't hide my dislike for this book. The problem was that the legend of the Holy Grail, and in particular the Knight's Templar aspect of the legend, is something I've studied extensively and this book did it no favours.

In this sequel Harvard Symbolist Robert Langdon is summoned to the murder scene of an eminent religious art historian with whom he had a meeting that night. On arrival he is shocked to find that the man has used his dying moments to arrange his body in some kind of code that Langdon, and the murdered man's granddaughter Sophie, must solve in order to find his murderer and uncover the secret he gave his life to protect.

Don't read any further if you're planning to read this book, heavy spoliers are a-coming. Skip right to the overall grade, reconsider reading and then nip back to find out why it's not a good plan.

I should probably start by saying that I've been interested in, and have studied Egyptology since I first read Howard Carter's first hand account of the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb when I was about 8. From that moment on I wanted to be an archaeologist, though it hasn't happened yet for obvious reasons. I haven't given up though, and since then my interest has broadened, from Egyptology through biblical history and it's relation to Ancient Egypt, including it's symbolism, which naturally led onto an interest in religious mythology and specifically the origins of Christianity. I gained a love of church architecture and history from my father and grandparents but the discovery and subsequent translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, amongst other finds (the tomb of Christ's son etc.) has really sparked my curiosity for that field, and so about 8 years ago I began studying various areas of Christian and early medieval history related to, but not exclusively, the Knights Templar, The Holy Grail and The Turin Shroud. Without getting too deep, the various alternative stories about the life of Jesus gave me more respect and understanding of His message, and it's relation to every day life. It cleared up many nagging doubts and discrepancies I'd found when reading biblical texts.

So as I read the first threads of the story, as told by Dan Brown, my heart began to sink. In Angels and Demons I'd known about the Illuminati in a borderline, sketchy way, but the Grail legend...and particularly the tale of the Priory of Sion and the Sangreal, was subject matter I was intimately familiar with. From reading about the Knights Templar I also understood Da Vinci's significance to the legend.

The main issue involved here is the Grail. Not 'where is the grail?' but 'what is the grail?'. Instead of the cup that Jesus and the disciples drank from at The Last Super, and that later caught Christ's blood as he died on the cross, the Sangreal legend takes a leap in a different direction. The grail is not a cup, but a person, Mary Magdelane. The blood, a direct lifeline of Christ's family. The story suggests that after Jesus' death Mary, his wife and most trusted disciple, fled to France where she gave birth to a daughter, Sarah. There she, and her protectors (The Priory of Sion) collected together information about Christ's mortal life and his ministry. As the church of Christianity grew it depended more and more on the divine nature of Jesus, and so elements that spoke of him as a man were debunked, lost and obliterated until the bible we have today makes no mention of his wife. There's the whole dominance of males trying to eliminate the early reverence of women tied into it, with the demonisation of women via original sin and demanding celibacy of priests. In Dan Brown's book he concentrates heavily on this element.

The main problem reading this book was that not only had Dan Brown clearly read much of the same material I had he hadn't really investigated the background beyond the superficial needs of the book. What you're left with is great chunks of paraphrased text book material, clumsily written into character's thought bubbles, and huge leaps of logic that have no rationale. The most irritating part of the delivery was the smugness that the backstory was presented with. Langdon, a character clearly the author's alter ego as no one else would consider him laudable, intelligent and charming, delivers the Magdalene story as if it were a new theory, when it's been a fairly common story amongst history fans since The Blood and The Grail was published in the early 80s. That one of France's top Cryptographers wouldn't already be aware of the Sangreal and it's various links is just madness, making yet another Dan Brown character implausible and dumb.

The first third of the book builds with tiny hints at the story about to be uncovered, giving me enough to know exactly where he was going but enough to hook anyone who hadn't heard the tale. Then suddenly Brown introduces a new character from nowhere and, in two small chapters, out pours the entire abbreviated Magdalene legend. After the build up it was a huge anti-climax. From that point on the book lost all connection with the past, beyond one or two minor references, and became another tedious treasure hunt almost identical to the one in Angels and Demons. No mention of Da Vinci again, or any real Priory of Sion symbology, which is a real shame as I would have enjoyed Langdon and Sophie decrypting Jean Cocteau's Notre-Dame de France in London.

The second serious flaw with the book is the cop chasing our heroic twosome. The first half of the book he is written extremely well. He's driven, ambitious and misogynistic. His loathing of Landon and Sophie springs off the page and is a welcome counterpoint to events. Then suddenly he vanishes, only to pop up at the end with a conciliatory smile and a 'so sorry, I was wrong, let's all be friends and have coffee'. That just sucked! I don't care how much additional information he had, a person's entire character doesn't change in the space of a few hours. Someone that prideful and focused would probably have taken the loss very badly, and aggressively. As it stood it was deeply unconvincing.

As was Sir Leigh Teabing (whose name always read to me as Surly Teabag, or just Teabag to use the familiar). On his initial introduction he was the stereotypical English eccentric, all bluster and verbosity with ample quantities of good humour and honour. Then he is revealed as the Big Bad, and almost immediately his speech patterns, behaviour and psychosis change (hey, I warned you not to continue if you hadn't read the book, so don't blame me for spoiling the end!). Inconsistency of character really pisses me off, as it's the only thing you have in a book to relate to another human being. If it chops and changes you can never know the person, and so can't care about their fate.

Ok, down to the crux of the matter. The moment I realised that the Sangreal was the goal in this Grail quest, I knew without question that Sophie would turn out to be a descendant of Christ. It was more predictable than the sun rising in the morning, and it was also inevitable that Langdon would want to bed her. There really is something deeply Freaudian about wanting to bang the son of God, indirectly of course, and I found that aspect more than a little disturbing. It's like some deeply horrible shippy fan fiction, where the author's writing in order that they can screw their idol. The worst published case of this I've read prior to this book was The Mummy by Anne Rice, which seemed like a cobbled together story that enabled Ramese the Great (a personal favourite of mine) to fuck Cleopatra VII. The contrivance in this book was equally ridiculous.

The bottom line with this book is that an author read a cool pop science history, and got so swept up in the idea that he had to throw himself into the middle of it. In my opinion this was a really bad move, and it beats me why unskilled storytellers use such huge and well known subjects to tell their stories with. If you don't know the story then I'm sure it's an intriguing new idea, but it is far better told in many, many other books than this. If you do know the tale it is so predictable it spoils what is a fairly harmless pulp fiction novel, baring remarkable similarity to an Indiana Jones Chronicle but without the cool special effects and beautiful vistas. For me, it was a deeply unsatisfying read, that I felt did no justice to the real legend of Mary Magdalene. That of a wonderful love affair between the Greatest Man who ever lived and his devoted and loving wife, who stood by him and his legacy far past his death. This story tries to boil everything down to a sexual symbolism that obfuscates the humanity of these people as much as the Church's smear campaign ever did.

This has been received very well by other readers, and it's being made into a movie soon will no doubt exacerbate that. I just hope that it doesn't spawn endless bad history/science books proving this that and the other about the life of Jesus.