Great Book, Not Great Fiction: The Da Vinci Code

I’ve started taking daily hour-long walks. As I did, I bought Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code from Audible.com to accompany me. Here are my thoughts on it. In short: do believe the hype, but don’t expect great fiction.

When the first season of 24 aired here, I watched each episode and eagerly awaited the next one. Still, I thought the dramaturgy was cheap and often silly. Stupid cliffhangers before every commercial break, and major ones at the end of each episode. Annoying, but it worked – until the ending. Then – when the finale had annoyed me to the extent that I didn’t care about the next season – I felt that the narrative didn’t quite hold, although the later explanations of previous events kind of did. Later I learned that the producers devised the plot as the series aired. Interesting in a way, but it didn’t work for me in the long run. It kept me watching, but afterwards I was unimpressed and disappointed.

After a few chapters I felt likewise about Brown’s book, with one important exception. I was aware that every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, but it still annoyed me, as well as kept me eager to continue listening. There are some turns in the narrative that caused disbelief, when things were revealed to be not quite what you thought. As in 24, Brown’s explanations of what actually happened a few chapters back made sense, but still made me want to listen again to those passages. Because I felt fooled – lied to, even – that there ought to be more clues to what actually was going on.

The important exception is that where 24 didn’t give you something worthwhile after the narrative had unfolded, The Da Vinci Code makes you want to read more about the lives of Leonardo Da Vinci and Jesus. This is a very well-researched book. Some reviews I’ve read dismiss this book as nothing out of the ordinary, but most books don’t contain this much on whatever the story is about. This is fictionalized popular history and despite the stupid dramaturgical devices employed, it works surprisingly well. Several of the characters – Robert Langdon and Sir Leigh Teabing most notably, but also others – are Experts explaining things to each other, so as the story unfolds you learn more and more about the history of Da Vinci, secret societies, the Knight’s Templar and so on. And it’s brilliant.

So it’s a great book, but not great fiction. One reason is the cheap dramaturgy. Another is that each of the characters are flat. They are perfect stereotypes of the Bold and the Beautiful variety. I never empathize or identify with any of the characters, which should be the case at least for the character Sophie Neveu, given her tragic past. Whenever the story is intended to be more emotional, it only gets embarrassing. A final reason why this book isn’t great fiction is that it sometimes feels too planned. Great fiction is spontaneous.

As I listened to the audio version of this book, I want to recommend it particularly because the narrator, Paul Michael, does such a good job. He is great at portraying different characters using different kinds of voices and accents. I am seriously considering listening to other books he has narrated.

A final note. Somewhere I read in a review, probably at Amazon.com, that the academic field of symbology, within which Brown’s character Robert Langdon is a well-renowned scholar, doesn’t exist. The reviewer claimed that Brown for some reason had chosen that term when he really meant semiotics. That isn’t true. Brown’s professor studies pagan and religious symbols and icons – what they mean and their history. Semiotics indeed is about the meaning of signs and symbols, but it is concerned with what it is about those signs that make them mean something to those confronted with them. It could no doubt be – and probably has been – applied to religious signs – but then it would focus on how those signs distinguish themselves from others, what characteristics are relevant to what they mean to people, and so on. I don’t know, though, if there is a distinct academic field called symbology, or whether it is part of some larger field. But I do know that it isn’t semiotics.

Update: Also, be sure to read the first entry in the FAQ about the book, where Brown answers the question of how much of the novel is “true.”