This attitude just slays me. Is it really so much to ask that if you’re going to write a book, you try to close most of the starship-sized plot holes in it?
You know, I really wanted to like this book. I read “Foucault’s Pendulum” this summer and was blown away. When I mentioned it to a friend, they said, “Oh, then you have to read ‘The DaVinci Code!’” I thought, hmmm… okay, so I used my gift certificate and bought it.
My initial reaction was the same as I felt after reading “Snowcrash” (I haven’t read “Cryptonomicon” so I might have to check it out) and “Neverwhere.” All three read like they were either going to be or had been tv shows. Turned out “Snowcrash” was supposed to be a graphic novel, “Neverwhere” was actually a show first, and I figure in about 3 years “The DaVinci Code” will be a movie.
I think it was the way Brown put in the flashback scenes - they felt like, “Ooh… I better explain some back history on this. I’ll just make (insert character name here) for some reason think back on some unrelated experience.”
It was an interesting attempt, but I agree with rexnervous: he’s a crazy, loosely based parallel universe away from Eco. Thankfully I have “The Name of the Rose” to keep me going.
If you think there are plot holes now, just wait. They’re making it into a movie! 
Personally, I enjoyed the book. I wasn’t looking for anything to mind-blowing though, just a good quick read while I was socked with the flu.
I ended up reading Angels and Demons after I finished TDC, and I thought it was good too.
There’s a comic book, Preacher, that explores this theme.
In it, the “Holy Grail” is the bloodline of Christ, and a secret society within the Catholic Church has spent centuries forcing Christ’s descendents to interbreed, to “keep the bloodline pure.” By the end of the twentieth century, Christ’s direct descendent is a profoundly retarded teenager with magical powers. He dies when a morbidly obese bishop is dropped on him from a helicopter.
I just finished the book last night. I enjoyed it, but I did feel the writing, especially the dialog, was sub-par. He has a bad case of “as you know” syndrome that his editor should’ve excised. The puzzles were fine for me, but that’s because I am intensely puzzle-challenged.
It did make me intensely curious about how much of what he wrote was based on fact and how much was pure fiction. It also got me interested in finding an interesting biography of Da Vinci. If anyone has a suggestion for one not written in a dry biography-like tone, I’d be interested.
Yep, the “Widow’s son” is a well-known Masonic reference. I think I’d develop very stong eye-rolling muscles if I read this author’s stuff.
Christ, that series actually managed to get WEIRDER after I stopped reading? (pun intended)
I just finished the book in two and a half days. Whatever else you may say about it, it is definitely a page-turner, as far as plot structure.
I agree with many of the nitpicks regarding exposition and character inconsistency, and in another book, I might have found some of the factual holes more objectionable, but for some reason they just didn’t bother me here.
Perhaps it’s because I was willing to suspend disbelief to the extent that I bought the book’s underlying premise:
That a doctorate in semiotics would EVER have ANY practical uses outside of a University setting.
For those who can not explain the book’s popularity, I strongly recommend going going by others’ opinions than by the bestseller lists, for this reason.
About 13 years ago, I worked in a book store, and found out that the New York Times beststeller list was compiled, not based on POS numbers, but by the number of books the publisher shipped. The logic is that they would only ship what has been requested, which would be based on what a store needed to keep up with demand, and getting figures from one publisher was easier than from thousands of book stores.
Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how easily manipulable this system was, especially when you consider that most chain bookstores get their books from the same wholesaler, Ingram .
The way it worked was, the publisher would dump tens of thousands of copies on Ingram (generating a line item in the NYT), who would, in the interests of clearing their warehouses, turn around and tell the bookstores that there was a minimum order on certain books. You couldn’t order 2, 3, or 10, you had to order 30, for example. So the customer sees the NYT bestsellers, sees that the shelves are LOADED with copies, presumably to keep up with demand, and thinks there’s a real phenomenon going on. At least until they read the book
Of course, this system was the reason that I spent a great deal of my time on that job packing up (for unsold returns, which don’t get reflected in NYT) dozens of copies of the almost universally loathed bestseller crapfest, “The Bridges of Madison County”. We’d sell a couple of copies a week, but couldn’t order less than about 35.
Now I don’t follow the industry anymore, and they may have incorporated some sort of system along the lines of SoundScan, which revolutionized the Billboard music charts, but to this day I take what I see in ANY bestseller list with a pillar of salt.
That’s interesting (the NYT Bestseller info). If that’s true then the Amazon.com sales rank is probably a better barometer since they don’t ship anything unless it’s sold.
I’m reading that right now and am completely awestruck at how similar the beginnings are between those two books. Couldn’t Dan Brown have figured a different way to set up the plot?
Robert Langdon is awoken from a deep sleep. He is summoned to the scene of a murder - an old man has been killed. But there’s more to this murder, as he will come to find when he sees the bizarre crime scene. Enter a young female relative of the victim. Together, she and Langdon must race against the clock to stop a fiendish plot - before it’s too late.
Gee, I wonder how the next book is going to start?
Damn it, interface2x! I see on preview that you had one of the exact same thoughts in your post that I have in mine! Anyway:
I read the Da Vinci Code.
A man wakes up and is thrust into an extraordinary adventure. The protagonist is compelled to help solve a murder mystery, one which few if any other people are qualified to tackle. The murder victim is the most important male figure in the life of a gorgeous, brilliant young woman who ends up helping the hero. Despite the woman’s brilliance, she shows herself to be rather dumb. Despite the intense grief she experiences, she doesn’t act like anybody who has just lost a loved one. The man and woman have a crazy adventure in which a secret organization that probably doesn’t exist in real life are trying to kill them. At the end of the adventure, the hero and his brilliant sidekick who needs everything explained to her find the answer to an ancient riddle. Now, presumably, nothing will be the same. Where have I read this before? Oh yeah, Dan Brown’s last novel.
So if sucked so much, why did I read it? Well, my mom gave it to me for Christmas, for one. Everybody’s talking about it, for another. Also, the Holy Grail is just fun to read about. Da Vinci’s kind of neat, too. Also, it was a light, quick, and easy read, probably because Dan Brown throws a succession of neat problems and ideas and explanations at you in some very short chapters. And really, it wasn’t that bad. But still . . .
Random thoughts:
[ul][li]Too often in this book, I felt like I was stuck in a history (or symbology?) lecture rather than a novel.[/li]
[li]I didn’t like the book because it was supposed to be this extremely well-researched and super-accurate, and it turned out that this wasn’t the case. If it had come to me advertised as “a fun little adventure novel,” I wouldn’t have been disappointed.[/li]
[li]I didn’t think of the ice trick like Fenris did, but I did think, with modern technology, that it would be pretty easy to examine and extract the contents of the cryptex.[/li]
[li]I accidently half-ripped a toe nail off my foot, once. The strangeness of the situation and the pain made it difficult for me to figure out just what to do about the matter. Boy, did that curator guy sure have a lot of presence of mind, what with being gutshot and all, to sound the alarm, write a secret message in blood, and otherwise arrange his body and its surroundings so perfectly. [/li]
[li]Who cares if Langdon is claustrophobic? That has what to do with what in the book?[/li]
[li]Opus Dei was kind of scary. I wonder if they’re really that bad, though? I have a book about this “cult within the Church” laying around somewhere. I shall have to dig it out and read it, I guess.[/li]
[li]I’m pretty sure the Church never burned 5 million people. I wrote a short paper on the subject once and came up with a number closer to . . . 50, 000? I think that’s right. I do remember my primary source, however: historian Brian Levack’s The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe; I thought this book seemed more credible than Brown’s (I got an A, by the way).[/li]
[li]Many times in this book, Brown said things that raised red flags. I didn’t go running to look much up, but I have the feeling my history and art teachers could pick Dan Brown and his books to pieces. My English teachers might have a problem or two with Brown, as well.[/li]
[li]I’m not really sure what to think about the Priory of Sion. I’ve come across this organization from time-to-time in my reading. Evidently, it was or is a real organization, or so I’ve been led to believe. Never, though, have I seen it presented as something associated with “nature worship” or “veneration of the feminine” or whatever, at least not that I remember. Perhaps it’s time to take Holy Blood, Holy Grail back off the shelf. [/li]
[li]The characters in Dan Brown’s books (at least the two I have read) act nothing like people I know in real life. [/li]
[li]The entrances to all those old churches are really, um, vaginas and stuff? [/li]
[li]I think the whole idea that the Grail is the bloodline of Christ is pretty neat; if you agree, you should read the aforementioned non-fiction book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (though this is loaded with craziness, conspiracies, and controversy as well). I read it years ago and enjoyed it. [/li]
[li]I kind of miss the days when the Holy Grail was a magical cup for Sir Galahad–-or even the Professors Jones–-to find.[/ul][/li]Also:
Evidently, Eco isn’t marketed as aggressively. I guess. Also, aren’t Eco’s books hard to understand? I’ve never read any of his stuff, but I get the impression that they’re rather difficult to read, whereas Brown’s stuff really isn’t. In other words, Umberto Eco makes you feel stupid (because you can’t get it), while Dan Brown makes you feel smart (because he gives you all this “obscure” stuff that you can understand). I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve read Dan Brown’s work, but not Umberto Eco’s.
Wow. This really turned into a much longer post than I thought it would be.
Yeah, GAPING plot holes. I have not read DaVinci, but I did read Angels and Demons.
Alright, there is a massive, dangerous bomb hidden and counting down. It is new technology and therefore undetectable. I’ll accept that. It’s just a MacGuffin to get the plot rolling.
My problem is that they know there is a bomb because THREE FEET away from it is a wireless camera broadcasting a signal that they are picking up! Yet nobody comes up with the bright idea of triangulating that signal.
That pretty much ruined most of the book for me. The characters are racing around defying death, when one guy with a signal receiver would find the bomb in about twenty minutes.
All I wanted was some explanation for why that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t even have to be plausible, it could just be another MacGuffin. (Kind of like the two paragraph explanation in most sci-fi about how faster than light travel is possible.)
The reason our heroine of the book does not seem affected by her grandfather’s death is that her only purpose is to serve as a conduit of information from the author to the reader.
here is every scene in the book:
Person A talks to Person B , while Female A listens to their conversation. Person A tells Person B to explain the conversation to Female A, who should know all this stuff anyway, since she is Europe’s greatest code breaker (or whatever).
The whole book is so dumbed down I actually HATE the book…I want to burn it.
How could anyone, with any sort of mathmatically inclined mind whatsoever, NOT recognize the numbers left by the priest as a fibronacci sequence(out of order)?? No wonder France wants to stay out of conflict, if French cryptoanalysis is so poor that it took them hours to realize it. And then everytime a plot point is realized we have to find someone to act like a blathering idiot so we can explain it to them.
Neal Stephenson did this in Cryptonomicon with the Pontifex code system (when Enoch explained it in the Phillipine jail), but at least that code system is sufficiently difficult to require explaining.
In the book didn’t Professor Langdon of Symbol-itude says that Jesus wasn’t divine, that the Church made that up in the third century? If that were true, then why would the Brotherhood want to worship Mary Magdalene??? 
Another thing: wouldn’t it have been easier to just kidnap Sophie’s grandfather and inject him with sodium pentathol to find out the location of the Grail? Wouldn’t that work better that gut-shooting him? :smack:
Mephisto: back atcha.
Doh. I wish I had read this thread before I plunked down any cash for * The DaVinci Code*, but I was avoiding the spoilers. Merde.
I also got The Da Vinci Code for Christmas and was thrilled, because I’ve heard so much about it – how great it is and how entertaining and how thought-provoking and explosive the plot. So maybe my expectations were too high, but . . .
My verdict is: Hugely overrated. Sure, it’s a fast read – how couldn’t it be, when many of the “chapters” are one or one and a half pages long? And the hook is a good one, I’ll give him that – the dead guy leaving clues to his own demise, followed by the classic “chase across the face of Europe” by the authorities.
But the writing is stilted and cliched – “I’ll help you if you stop calling me Mr. Langdon and call me Robert.” (Rakish smile.) Ugh! The puzzles were very easy – Sophie must be the dumbest cryptographer in the world not to have figured out most of them. SPOILERS FOLLOW: I’m not an expert on English history, but when I read “A knight in London was by a Pope interred,” I immediately thought “well, the only Pope I know of in England was Alexander.” And then when you find out the knight was Newton, it’s pretty clear what the orb must be.
And it bothered me that the book is historically inaccurate – consistently referred to the early Catholic church as “the Vatican,” and overlooked the time of the popes in Avignon.
And I thought the symbolism got really carried away: The star is a pagan symbol! As is the star of david! And the chevron! And the inverted chevron! And the triangle! And the inverted triangle! And the short-armed cross! And the entrance to cathedral’s being symbolic of a woman’s genetalia, complete with carved labia to the sides and a symbolic clitoris over the door? Please. Just how far are we supposed to suspend our disbelief, anyway? “Mona Lisa” is an anagram of “Amon L’Isa.” Well, guess what? It’s also an anagram of “Noam Sail.” I think the late Noam Chompsky could have explained what that means, but now he’s dead. Coincidence? I think not!
So I can’t be one of the zillions of people who think this is the Best. Book. Ever. It took me less than a day to read and, while I’m not complaining that I’d like that day back, it’s also a book I’ll have no trouble forgetting.
Oh, and the message “hidden” on the book jacket is actually “Is there no help for the widows son.” Maybe I had a good copy, but the bolding of the various letters was in my copy so obvious that the first thing I did (before reading the book) was sit down and write out that “message.” So then to find out that it had absolutely nothing to do with the book pissed me off – I kept waiting for him to explain the reference, which he never did, and it turns out the reason he never did was because there isn’t one.
I noticed this right away when I picked up the book at Barnes & Noble. (Didn’t buy it at the time. Just saw the big display when the hype was starting, and I picked it up to see what it was about.) I cracked the book and checked the interior flaps for the summary, and noticed the boldfaced letters immediately. “Hmm, let’s see… Is… Here… Wait, there’s a T… Is there… No… Help…” Two or three minutes later, I put the book back down, rolling my eyes at the Freemason/Illuminati reference.
Some “hidden” message. Cryptography for morons.
Eight or ten months later, my wife picked up Brown’s whole canon. I read the first third of Angels & Demons and gave up. I find it hugely depressing that the general public would consider this stuff so “interesting” and “well-researched” and “detailed.” It’s just Encyclopedia Brown with an honorary Harvard degree, in my opinion.
Was thinking of reading the ‘DaV C,’ and asked the gal in a bookstore about it.
“Oh, you’ll LOOOOOVE it, but you should really read ‘Angels & Demons’ first!”
And what’s that one about?
“Oh, it’s about the Church, and the Illuminati are involved and the Masons are persecuting it; and everything’s based on fact–the author says so–and my son told me that they really DO have antimatter…” Illuminati… anti-matter… it’s all true…? Must… escape!!
Wouldn’t have bothered reading the ‘Code’ had not a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic friends whose opinions I generally respect (as well as several I don’t) swore it’d be absolutely down my alley because I read mysteries, know about art and religion, and do cryptograms & crossword puzzles; I’d love it. “And there’s just time enough to read it for our next book club–we can hardly wait to hear what you say!”
So I tried. Really really hard, and kept forcing myself to keep slogging along, knee-deep in dreck. But the guy pretty much lost me at the first sentence of Chapter Two, when he introduces the hulking albino named Silas: there’s gotta be a limerick in there somewhere! Not to mention Robert Langdon and Sopie Neveu, Bezu Fache with his large crux gemmata, museum director Sauniere who was honored with the Croix de Guerre, Bishop Manuel Aringarosa [ring-a-ringarosa, pockets full-a posa], and the many possibilities of chalice/phallus/malice/callous… Never wrote more’n a coupla-three lines, but it made a welcome diversion from the actual novel.
Forced myself to plug along as far as p. 281 when I decided there were FAR better ways to waste time… I could hardly have cared less about the cardboard characters, the simplistic anagrams and codes, the alleged mysteries, the contrived situations, the terrible act Sophie’s father had committed (by then I could guess) or the identity of the arch-villain (by then I could guess.) Others here have almost sufficiently expatiated on what an utterly atrocious hack-written hunk of tripe it is: thank you, thank you, thank you! Everyone else I know who read it “just couldn’t put it down,” had never heard any Mary M./Jesus speculations, and were just amazed to learn all these “truths.” <shudder> Other than that, they’re wonderful folks & I love 'em.
The mind boggles.
A few minutes of thought yields:
The hulking albino named Silas
Would never break into a smile as
He offed all the foes
Opus Dei’d oppose;
Just wince grimly and tighten his cilice.
Bezu Fache, sporting a crux gemmata,
Went for suspects based on suspect data.
His faith they’d defile;
They were evil and vile,
And supremely deserving of slata.
C’mon, folks, help me out here: you can do MUCH better than these!