Book reviews

The Da Vinci Code is a bestseller, and has been translated into over forty languages, and thus the rating given the book here may surprise.

The story opens with the murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière, an obvious nod to the name of Bérenger Saunière, the curé of Rennes-le-Château (which was the subject of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail from which Dan Brown took much of his inspiration and “information”). The body lies in a position immediately obvious to Robert Langdon, the “hero” of the novel and a Professor of Religious Symbology, as a deliberate reference to Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian Man.

The body's position is a clue to another clue, a deliberate arrangement of his own body by the dying Saunière, designed to be picked up by both Robert Langdon (whom the curator knew was in Paris) and his estranged granddaughter Sophie, a professional cryptographer. Langdon is ostensibly called to help the police figure out the meaning of this peculiar body arrangement, but is unaware he's the hot suspect in the murder, and the police intend to charge him and extract a confession. Enter Sophie, who joins forces with the hapless Robert in getting him out of the Louvre and onto the path of further clue-seeking.

One clue after another leads to increasingly uninformative information, as the alert reader will realise. Truly encrypted information does not reveal nonsense – it is encrypted because its plain-text message must be kept secret from the “enemy” or those for whom the message is not intended. The clues here are like puzzles in a game. They make sense as entertainment value, but not as real clues. Spoiler In particular, the mirror-writing clue is a classic example of truly ludicrous “encryption”. Brown expects his readers not to recognise within one second that a plate reproduced in his book contains a letter written in plain English but notated in reverse writing. The “clue” is blazingly obvious, and made even more ridiculous by the text of the novel which has professional cryptographers shaking their heads over the writing, saying, “Oh dear! What could this be? It's not Arabic, is it?” They do work out what it is after examining it very carefully, but the reader is led to believe this is an astounding and visionary breakthrough. It is possibly the worst offender in Brown’s stable of clues. Leonardo da Vinci, as everyone must surely know, had the habit of writing his notes in mirror-writing, yes. But he wrote in Italian, not English, so the connection between Leonardo da Vinci and the clue is laboured at best. Furthermore, English writing written mirror-style can be recognised as such with a single glance by any amateur. It requires no cryptographer.

In a series of breathtaking leaps of illogic with clue following clue, the adventures continue for Sophie and Robert, now on the run. Their investigations lead them to mathematical sequences hiding a numeric password to a bank deposit, to mysteries involving the Templars, Rosicrucians, Opus Dei (the Catholic church is the villain in the novel), and the Priory of Sion, which Brown assumed to be a real organisation, not having done his much-vaunted research to reveal that the organisation was an invention of Pierre Plantard in a well-known and debunked prank involving the Rennes-le-Château myth.

Involving feminist-pleasing concepts of the “sacred feminine”, relating Mary Magdalene to the Holy Grail, playing on folk etymology and anagrams, The Da Vinci Code has appealed to millions of readers in spite of being badly written, historically inaccurate in spite of Brown’s claims to accuracy, and without any depth of characterisation. One finds the occasional chapter no longer than two pages, words that are primarily monosyllabic, and a writing style that exhibits no mastery of wordcraft. In technical terms, the novel is poorly written. Its appeal must lie in the subject matter, which of course entices many readers, particularly those who are confused by Dan Brown’s notes at the front of the book where he claims that much of what he writes is factual, not fictional.

The book was given to me, and the premise – clues being decrypted to solve a tremendous mystery, particularly with the clues being touted as esoteric, literary, intellectual, etc. – sounded wonderful. Within two pages, I knew the book was going to be a major disappointment. It had no literary merit and the characters were worse than two-dimensional; finishing the book was a labour of determination.

This review will not, of course, convince those who liked the book. It will probably not prevent those who haven’t read the book from going ahead and reading it. But perhaps it will add a voice of logic to the balance that is tipped over so far on the side of uncritical liking that one wonders where people’s critical facilities have gone.

In terms of the story elements, there are several that could have worked very nicely in the hands of a more capable writer. Fans of the Gabriel Knight series will recognise the Rennes-le-Château elements and the use of the RLC myths, only Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight games, is far more able to create a stunning mystery based upon these elements than Dan Brown. Not only that, but Ms Jensen’s depth of research is obvious in comparison to the “I leave that sort of thing to my wife” excuse that Brown used in court recently (March 2006).

Not recommended for those who like their books to have literary merit or believable plots. And if you think this review is harsh, it is suggested you read what Salman Rushdie and Stephen Fry have to say about the book.