Da Vinci Code

Posted by Sappho on January 17th, 2004 filed in Gnosticism and Nag Hammadi

I have to admit, I enjoyed it. Graham Greene it isn’t, nor does the treatment of conspiracies match that of a book like Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Neither the writing nor the historical background is particularly impressive. Nevertheless, I liked the puzzle-solving aspect of it, the pace was right, and there were enough characters of uncertain allegiance to allow for entertaining speculation about just who would prove to be involved in what conspiracy. Of course, The Da Vinci Code being the phenomenon that it is right now, I suppose I can’t just leave it at that, and say that it was a flawed, but fun thriller.

Peter Sean Bradley said, in his comments on my earlier post, that Brown uses adjectives to sell the story, and resorts to characterization by physical description. He’s right. You know that storytelling advice you get in high school English classes, “Show, don’t tell”? Brown ignores it, and routinely tells rather than showing. For example, Langdon knows immediately, on looking at Sophie Neuve, that she is “healthy with an unembellished beauty and genuineness that radiated a striking personal confidence.” (Lucky for him, I guess, that he’s able to see one person’s genuineness at a glance; after all, he’s caught in a plot where he’ll spend the rest of the book not knowing whom he can trust.) He also uses a few literary devices over and over (the “Langdon remembers a lecture to fill in background” device, the “I will allude to something that shocks a character and then make you wait a few chapters to tell you what it is” device, etc.), so, if you happen to dislike any of these devices (as Peter dislikes the lecture device), you’ll have lots of opportunity to get tired of it.

I actually liked the lecture device OK, given that the most obvious alternative would have been to drag a clueless character around (as is done with the therapist character in the movie Twister) and give that character all the lectures. When DVC finally drops the lecture remembering device in favor of having Robert Langdon actually tell Sophie Neuve the history and symbolism, Sophie is obliged to become extraordinarily stupid. (Hey, I know you’ve been telling me about pagan symbolism in Christian art for the past few chapters, but still, I’m surprised when, in this chapter, you tell me that an actual Christian church might have actual pagan symbols in it.)

This stupidity on Sophie’s part is not so unfeminist as it may sound, though, not just because Sophie can, after all, be smart and gutsy when the plot allows, but also because, well, everyone in the book gets the opportunity to be really dumb, on one occasion or another (how many chapters is it going to take the police chief to think to check his own cell phone?). To be completely fair, the characters’ mistakes and slowness at picking up some clues would actually make more sense if you were in the book, rather than reading it. After all, the characters, A) don’t know that they are in a book named The Da Vinci Code (which I suppose explains why everyone is so slow to pick up on the first reference to a Da Vinci painting, right at the beginning of the book) and B) are all either running for their lives or in hot pursuit of someone, which presumably would distract them and could put a crimp in their puzzle-solving ability.

At any rate, despite the weaknesses in writing and characterization, I found myself liking and sympathizing with Sophie (maybe it’s just that the way her grandfather set puzzles for her reminded me of the logical puzzles my own father used to give me), enjoying the different twists and turns, and, in particular, liking the treasure hunt, puzzle solving aspect of the novel. The puzzles are generally ones that a reader can solve along with the characters (though occasionally you have to wait for a character to remember a “fact” about the Priory of Sion or some other piece of lore before a puzzle makes sense). I have to confess, one made me aware of a gap in my own knowledge (the characters were looking for the grave of a knight, and I realized that I have so little memory for who was or wasn’t knighted that the only non-legendary knight I could think of off the top of my head was Sir Mick Jagger).

The math and cryptography proved to be better than I expected, but with a major caveat: my expectations had been extremely low. I had, you see, based my expectations on how I have seen math and cryptography addressed in movies. Swordfish advertised that they had consulted with RSA Laboratories, a company which really does know its stuff on cryptography, but, watching the movie, I had to wonder why, for their cryptography consisted of handwaving: the hero would sit down at a computer and announce what size of key he was cracking (no mention of what the cipher was, without which the key size is not all that meaningful). The movie Jurassic Park not only contained the improbability of two paleontologists who had never heard of chaos theory (couldn’t one of the children have asked the mathematician about it?), it also, well, didn’t actually have any real chaos theory; it just used the words to allow its mathematician to make moral points (the book, to be fair to Crichton, tried harder). And A Beautiful Mind, while it did nicely at giving a sense of the excitement of mathematical discovery, didn’t actually show Nash’s real contributions to game theory. So, I was expecting handwaving.

What Brown delivered, instead, was really simple, and largely correct, cryptography. I did notice one mistake – the cryptex is described in the book as a rudimentary form of public key encryption, when in fact public key encryption has an entirely different meaning in modern cryptography – but otherwise, the book references really simple math (things like the Fibonacci series and Divine Proportion – high school level), really simple principles of encryption by substitution and transposition, basic history about cryptography like the facts about Caesar and Mary, Queen of Scots that you’d get in any introductory history on the topic, and handles these simple facts with tolerable accuracy. Maybe I was setting my expectations too low by using movies, and not books, for my standard of comparison; at any rate, Brown handily exceeded the low expectations I had set for him.

The history was another matter. The impression the book gives is of research which was broadranging, but shallow. So, you get all kinds of facts about Opus Dei, the Templars, Constantine, etc., but no particular grounds for confidence that these facts are accurate. Where I happened to know the history in question, the novel would prove to be at best skewed and simplistic, or even wrong. A large chunk of the plot, of course, is based on making the assumption that the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail is right, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and a bloodline that went on to intermarry with the Merovingian kings of France, and that the Priory of Sion is a secret society protecting that bloodline. This assumption is then tied with a bunch of stuff about goddess worship and the divine feminine (which isn’t in Holy Blood, Holy Grail – that book just posits an ordinary mortal royal family which happens to be descended from Jesus and hopes to get some cachet from that fact).

The history looks as if it’s pulled together from sometimes contradictory sources without any attempt to reconcile them; this makes for some odd combinations. The Catholic Church erred in making Jesus a God, to suit Constantine’s political need to accomodate paganism, and it also erred in suppressing nice, woman-friendly, goddess-worshipping paganism. Jesus is no God, but a man, and Mary Magdalene is an instance of the divine feminine. The picture that emerges sort of looks like a Wicca meets The Two Babylons take on the Catholic Church. Is history actually the point? Maybe not. For as the novel progresses, parallel with the quest for the Grail, another question begins to play out in the characters’ minds and conversation: if there actually is evidence that proves Catholicism wrong, ought one to publish it?

At any rate, the answer to the question people raise on the web, whether the DVC is in some sense true, is, it’s a novel, which certainly alludes to some actual history (e.g. the banking system set up by the Templars, the witch hunting book Malleus Mallificarum, the Arian controversy at the First Council of Nicaea), but which doesn’t try particularly hard to get its history right. In the process, it raises questions that a lot of people are asking and that are worth serious attention (e.g. given how many gospels there are that didn’t make it into the Bible, why should we trust the ones that did make it in more?), but isn’t itself a reliable source of facts.

Since I enjoy weird conspiracies in fiction as much as I dislike people believing in them in real life, none of this prevented me from suspending belief and enjoying the book. I think, though, that rather than assess its history point by point, I’ll continue to blog on the topic planned (which do, insofar as I’m blogging about Gnosticism, overlap with the terrain covered by the DVC). I might, though, pull a few topics from the history lectures in the book for further blogging.

Here are a few relevant links:

Sandra Miesel’s critique of the Da Vinci Code

Amy Welborn has been blogging a lot on the topic.

About.com’s set of Priory of Sion links