The Dan Brown Code

I've been re-reading The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. Well, okay, I re-read it Sunday night; now I'm re-reading the prequel, Angels and Demons.

The criticism I've heard most often is that "it's a fun book for the most part, an interesting mystery novel with a lot of factual errors." And that's true in part. But I've harped on elsewhere about his absolute lack of fact checking before (i.e. citing over 80 gnostic gospels ...and apparently locating some of them in the Dead Sea scrolls -- which all scholars seem to think are devoid of anything remotely related to new testament gnosticism, not to mention containing absolutely no gospels or gospel fragments of any sort, and which he claims were discovered "in the 50s," I think.) Anyhow, I have other opinions, too -- which may or may not involve spoilers.

The story is, in general, pretty entertaining. Except that it's been done. To death. And by much more talented authors. Umberto Eco, for instance, wrote Foucault's Pendulum back in 1989, I think. Heck, even The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves, an unsupported fabrication of the 1870's from which Brown gets most of his "information" about where Christianity supposedly drew most of the characteristics claimed to be unique in the life of Christ is a better work of fiction.

Robert Langdon, the protagonist, is a relatively well-developed character, though sometimes dense as London fog -- maybe it's part of his charm. But I think that the character is three-dimensional because Brown is writing himself largely into the role. And it's interesting to note that the character doesn't mind notariety even of the infamous sort -- and neither will his editor -- because book sales will jump. Given Brown's past assertions, this seems revealing.

His villians are lacking. The albino monk, Silas, is at one point incredibly sinister and evidences a devious cunning -- and in another breath shows all the intestinal fortitude of a mango, being both imbecilic and a 'victim of circumstance.' Poor disillusioned guy...

His plots are formulaic. It's as though he took Angels and Demons, shortened it, changed most of the names of the characters and moved it to Paris instead of Geneva. The puzzles really should not have kept him and his cohort busy for the entire length of the book if he is indeed a "Harvard Symbologist" and she a professional cryptologist.

It is an intertaining book. But is it worthy of all the attention it's garnered? No. Not in my opinion. There are far better books -- on equally controversial themes, if one really needs that sort of thing. There are far more entertaining books much better written, researched and plotted. There are books out there which contain actual surprises.

This is not one of them.

So I think I've decided to write the next blockbusting best-seller. I'm not sure what I'm going to call it, but I promise not to do any research and to try to tick off as many people as possible somewhere near the middle and promote as many ludicrous theories as I possibly can -- and even some I can't.