Thank God that's over.
Let's start off with Lovely Wife Cheryl's four-word review of Matrix Revolutions. I finished the 500-page potboiler called The Da Vinci Code. LWC and I were scared off from seeing the movie by its universally terrible reviews. I got a left-handed recommendation when my son said I'd hate reading the thing but there were some interesting concepts therein. It was the worst book I've ever finished reading. More in the comments, I don't want to "spoil" anything.
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11 comments:
Dan Brown's writing style is the antithesis of everything I like. It's plot driven to the point of being devoid of characters. Every noun has an adjective or worse, an adverb. I like sparse, terse writing, and he likes phrases like, "As Langdon's taxi passed a Parisian apothecary, whose architect was born in Lyon in 1807..." Yes, I felt like he described the HISTORY of the ARCHITECT of every building the protagonist DROVE BY even if he didn't GO INSIDE! (Best read as if by Lewis Black.) Packed with unnecessary recitation of facts, like a Tiger Beat article: "Madonna, who is five foot four and hails from Ann Arbor, Michigan and just released her fifth album, played a concert in Miami..."
The symbology references drove me mad. Like Freudian psychologists, symbologists see symbols in everything. This was a whole extra layer of unnecessary pedantic encyclopedia regurgitation of facts that made the book painful to read. This wasn't a book, it was a 500-page Wikipedia article.
The police were idiots. The protagonists were idiots. When they were confronted with a numerical code at the Swiss Bank, it took them about ten pages to think of the Fibonacci numbers. I wanted to scream at the book. The anagrams were silly.
Mike Stackpole wrote an article for writers about "buttons," the little things you leave dangling at the end of a chapter to make the reader keep reading. But this is all Brown has to write with, and he does it over and over again. The characters creep up on a painting looking for a clue, and see six words... but we won't tell you what they are for two chapters. Have you ever seen a series of "cliffhanger" movie shorts in a row? It gets really annoying after a while.
And OH MY GOD, the ending! We have a puzzle leading to a puzzle leading to a puzzle leading to a secret... but that secret, Dear Reader, is best left unrevealed. Coitus interruptus! This is like the Stephen King detective novel in which he doesn't solve the crime. Stupid stupid stupid! You see it coming from far away too. You can see that Brown doesn't have the balls to go ahead and say what's in the Macguffin, because then he'd have to think up something besides an anagram.
Yes, I agree there were some interesting concepts put forth. The discussions of how women in the church have changed and why, and all the secret society stuff. I admit I want to see a good picture of The Last Supper. But I hated reading this book more than I hated the Potter book that was way too long. LWC said she'd never seen me read through something so fast. It was like a barbed hook stuck in my flesh, and I had to work it to get it out. And it hurt, too.
Also note that almost everything described as "fact" is actually false. Read everything as theorgy. For example, Opus Dei is, in fact, a personal prelature of the Pope, but so are other organizations, and to say that Opus Dei has massive influence over the Catholic church is stretching things quite a bit.
The descriptions of the paintings are accurate, but he also states things as fact which kind of aren't. For example, go and find a decently high res image of Madonna of the Rocks. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Alright, first off, the statement that there are two versions of the painting is half-correct, there's actually three. The painting was not recommissioned because it was offensive, but because it was popular. Since one could not photocopy a painting back in those days, he had to redo it, thus creating the versions in Paris, London, and one other which I think is in the states.
A lot of the "threatening" gestures are pretty harmless. The whole "Mary holding head, Uriel cutting neck" thing is pretty silly when you look at the picture, considering, like, Uriel's forearm's where the neck would be. Also, the thought that John is blessing Jesus in the painting comes from the fact that John is the one by Mary, rather than Jesus (one would assume Jesus would be closer to Mary.) This was part of the reasoning for some of the changes in the painting referred to as "Virgin of the Rocks," which is London.
There's a lot of stuff littered all over the place like that, which he presents as fact but isn't. I think if he would have stated almost everything as theory, and presented it appropriately, the book would have been more of a thought-provoking deal, and more interesting. Instead he tried to put it across as fact, which makes him look kinda silly.
And as for the movie, the one time or two I saw clips from the movie, I was like "that is so dumb," like massively forced drama where there is none, changing what little character development there is in the book (in the movie, Langdon kinda figures out the Madonna of the Rocks analogy, which Sophie figures out in the books.)
So, it's an interesting read, I guess. Like I said to the Silver Fox, some things are interesting about it, but the writing is terrible.
Is it really Dan Brown's fault that people take everything he says in The Da Vinci Code (the paintings, the church societies, etc.) to be true? I'll grant that he may right authroitatively about them in the book, but isn't it pretty clear that it's all a work of fiction?
I haven't read Da Vinci Code, but I read another Dan Brown book, Digital Fortress. This book takes many liberties with how computers and encryption work. Being that I know about that stuff, I was a little ticked that he was being so free with it, but I got over it because it was all just done for dramatic effect.
Of course, all this is beside the point that a lot of the writing was crap...
For me, it's not whether the facts are accurate or not, it just that there are too damned many of them! Way way way over the top. It's nice to know that somewhere Mary Magdalene is happy whenever I bid a red suit in Bridge, but for God's sake, STOP THE INSANITY!
I can hope, but I'll probably fail at this... (It's not meant to be insulting to the Family Kallenbach, if anything, I'm trying to pay a compliment with this, and I'm tossing in a little devil's advocate)...
The books obviously are aimed much "dumber" than you guys. It's like you're watching a sitcom and pointing out how annoying the laugh track is (I submit that the definition of a good sitcom is that it has a laugh track, but you never really notice it, usually because the show is actually funny enough that you're always already laughing over the fake laughter -- sorry, tangential)
I think the reason he makes the puzzles so simplistic is for the same reason that so many television shows these days go so out of their way to telegraph the story ahead of itself. It's so that Joe Lunchbox can get up in the middle and grab another beer, return a few minutes later, and not get "lost" about where he was in the story. It's so that people can feel really clever "figuring it out" on their own, and feel a measure of self-satisfaction; all while not really having to "work" mentally: this is after-all escapism, and most (many? too many?) people just want to relax and be entertained, not to think, while watching "the tube."
I submit that the popularity of this work is due in no small part because he made it so accessible, as such an escapist novel. "I felt like I was there! I figured out the puzzles ahead of the expert! I think it's going to be controversial for the church, so I felt a little naughty reading it! And it moved so fast; I could hardly catch my breath!"
I agree with the criticism of the novel. It was uneven; far too plot-driven; lacking any sense of a true mystery or inventive puzzles to be solved (the entire thing is an insult to the intelligence of humanity as a whole if puzzles of that caliber have kept the armchair enthusiasts described in the book at bay for all these years, unable to discover the "truth"). But it makes for decent cookie-cutter escapism. A good read over a long plane flight (with the attendant airport sitting and such), not much more.
Also, if The Church could control itself and stop giving the thing so much free press (and implied validity), it probably wouldn't even be on most folks' radar.
I agree with all that assessment (no offense taken, I'm seeing a compliment in there), but I just wish the guy wasn't such an awful writer. I suppose I've been reading so much good stuff in the past year or so that bad writing like this disgusts me more than it should. I wish I could write that badly and make money that well.
It's an airport book - pick it up at one end, read it on the flight, and then leave it at the other end. Rinse, lather, repeat.
It's got way too much press including the 2 idiots who sued him. And the church - but I've given up having any high hopes for them.
OMG...there are a lot of words in this comment section.
By the way, I firmly believe that if you use the words "Davinci" and "Code" in your blog, you'll get hit by a half dozen annonymous and previously unknown posters. I mentioned it once and people came out of the wordwork. I can only assume that it's a popular blog search.
As for the book, I haven't read it but agree with shocho that it's drivel. What really cracked me up, is an interview I saw with Dan Brown where on one hand he says "it's fiction" but in damn near the same breath says "but it's nice to see that people have open minds to explore new evidence and formulate new possibilities". He so desperately WANTS people to believe it's fact so people continue to buy and talk about it.
He aint getting my $8. Maybe I'll find one on a plane someday.
WAIT just a DANG MINUTE!
Are you accusing me of being a drive-by blog sniper?
Why I outta!..
Well, I am acting as anonymous coward, so I guess I deserve that presumption. (but I'm not random!) :)
-- same anon coward as above
BTW, is there anything more annoying than someone who posts anonymous, yet knows personal things, such as last names? Kind creepy stalker vibe going.
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