The DaVinci Code

I am going to bother many people with this (my wife is about ready to disown me already), but here it goes.

Let me begin with my general feeling. This novel is a good read, and that, I hope, explains its popularity. It was a fast read—easy and well paced. In some ways that is good, though I am always wary of the book that doesn't beg to be examined more closely. I would recommend the book to anyone looking for a couple days' entertainment, but don't expect any deep or challenging puzzles.

While the characters are strongly defined (once Brown stops trying to describe everything in minute detail), and the Brown has devised what can only be describes as a hermetic plot, there are probems. Robert Langdon is a symbologist who teaches at Harvard, and Sophie Neveau is a brilliant cryptographer. Well, that is what we are told. Neither displays the mental prowess to have a high school diploma when dealing with some of the simpler puzzles, though. While both have amazing stores of knowledge, they seem to lack, often for many chapters at a stretch, the capacity for reason that would ostensibly justify the standing that either holds in the world.

I won't detail the frustrating grammatical errors, as those are truly within the scope of an editor's job to correct. Suffice it to say that the errors that appear within the novel are frustrating, in part because they are being passed on to readers who may not recognize them. And people wonder why the English language is in such a state. Below are a couple of things that irked me, though. If these are problems for you, and if you have not read the novel, it may be better to stay away. If, on the other hand, you read these and think I am being too critical, have at it.

I have not read such gratuitous use of irrelevant description since the days in which I read Hardy Boys books. That is not entirely fair, actually: the description in Hardy Boys books was not as gratuitous as much of Dan Brown's.

Can someone explain why 3rd person omniscient is of value here? Does it matter what some nun who takes care of a church thinks? Can't we see her nod, hear her speak? Do we have to enter her head for a paragraph that amounts to a long-winded internal "yes"?

While the idea that the apple is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil has its roots in artwork, not in the Bible or the ancient flora of what is modern day Iraq, the connection of the novel to art and its symbols cannot excuse Brown's use of that image in exposition. I can see the reason for using this, but it is one of the novel's weaker crutches. Given certain information about one character, crutches are better off when they are strong or unnecessary.

Chapter 42 contains, for a novel so richly researched, a glaring error that echoes public belief, though not the truth. Swiss banking regulations do NOT protect depositors' identities from law enforcement agencies. The Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce provides some information on its site about this, though for more detailed information, check this site (an administrative assistant for the SACC was kind enough to provide this link to me in response to a query I sent in April of 2004 while I was designing an adventure for an espionage role playing game). If it seems to some that I am picking nits here, consider the audience for this novel: errors of this magnitude, on which might hinge key plot elements, are not only sloppy, they are, to my mind anyway, irresponsible.

It gets worse. In chapter 82, he writes about how the "skyline of London [had] . . . once [been] dominated by Big Ben and Tower Bridge . . ." That's a neat trick, given that Big Ben is a bell hidden from view to those outside. Once more, he perpetuates a popular misconception as he relies upon it. Shameful.

I am sure there are other things I skipped over in dealing with these matters, but this should be sufficient to give an overview of some of the more obvious problems. There are others, but discussing them would involve revealing key plot points (which may not be revealing much, given how transparent many are).

I will catch hell for this post, I know, but there it all is. Fire at will. I'll take it all.