Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

One of my favourite Bloom County cartoons has Opus reviewing a film. "Bad acting," he complains. "Bad effects. Bad everything. This bad film simply oozed rottenness from every bad scene. Simply bad beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness." Long pause. "Well, maybe not that bad, but Lord, it wasn't good."

The Da Vinci Code is like that. Bad plotting. Bad writing. Bad "brainy" bits. Somehow, it manages to be not as bad as that -- after all, I did manage to finish it -- but Lord, it isn't good.

Let's start with the brainy bits, as these are what supposedly lift this out of the ordinary. The book is crammed with excursus on art, architecture, cryptography, mathematics, Christian mysticism and secret societies. Most of these are lifted directly from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, though this is forgivable as most people won't have read this. The purpose of these excursus appears to be threefold: (a) pad out the book; (b) prove that Brown has done lots of research; and (c) break up any tension or pace that Brown manages to establish. For example, in the middle of our heroes' escape from the Louvre, Brown breaks off for 5 (five!) pages to deliver a lecture on the golden ratio. Not only is this a completely inappropriate time and a completely excessive length, the concept and the examples that Brown trots out are completely irrelevant to the story as a whole.

Most annoyingly, the "brainy bits" exhibit galloping Foucault's Pendulum syndrome. In Eco's book, "Everything is connected to the Templars" was a self-adopted challenge to the main characters as well as a satire on conspiracy thinking; Brown seems to have missed the joke. His characters are all to eager to take anything and everything he foists upon them and reveal that -- wow -- it is connected to the sacred feminine. Or the Templars. Or the number five. Or Leonardo da Vinci. Or-- well, you get the point. Once Brown's heroes have achieved "connnection critical mass" they can link any old cod to something on the list of "things connected to the sacred feminine," and thereby to everything on the list.

Then there's the fact that the plot is founded on a nonsense. And I'm not talking about any dispute as to the plausibility of the underlying mystery of the novel: on the contrary, I've been at home that that particular theory for twenty years. And that familiarity is exactly why the plot falls fundamentally apart. The crux of the story is that there is a secret which, if revealed, would precipitate the greatest crisis in the history of the Christian church. The problem is that when this secret was revealed some twenty years ago, the church remained conspicuously unrocked. Brown even cites the book and TV show which publicised the secret, and admits that the controversy was a nine days' wonder. But if the revelation of the secret was a non-issue then, why would it be a big deal now?

Finally, there's the writing. Normally I wouldn't worry about the quality of writing in a thriller. After all, what we look for in a thriller is to be efficiently transported out of our drab little lives for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, Brown's writing is so bad that the imagination continually stalls as it tries to take flight. One is the predilection for inopportune product placement: our heroine actually stops during their escape from the Louvre to tell our hero what mileage she gets from her SmartCar (tm). Another is character naming. I can forgive "Bishop Aringarosa" as merely infelicitous (the playground rhyme "a-ring-a-ring-a-roses" makes the name distracting and silly to British readers, but this is just a local quirk). But naming a major character "Leigh Teabing" was a fatal mistake. As a tribute to Leigh and Baigent, two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, it would have been a nice touch for a minor character. Assigned to a major character, the clearly artificial moniker becomes a continual irritating reminder of the author's presence.

But the worst part of the writing, by far, is the dialogue. Oh God, the dialogue. Even I could write better dialogue while having my nadgers sanded down with a box jellyfish, though this is not intended as a boast: anyone could write better dialogue by copying their video recorder manual inside a pair of quotation marks. Here's a sample of our hero's conversational style: "The documents had long since been entrusted to the Templars' shadowy architects, whose veil of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican's onslaught." Acceptable, if a little purple, as populist historical exposition, but this is meant to be dialogue. Try prefixing it with "As I was saying to Brian in the pub the other day," and tell me this is anything less than ludicrous. Every other time a character opened their mouth I had to put the book down in disbelief and go for a walk.

And this is the fundamental problem with The Da Vinci Code. Nobody should expect great writing from an airport thriller, but we are entitled to expect that the writing shouldn't break our suspension of disbelief. That, not literary quality, is the sole benchmark of escapist literature. But the writing and plotting in The Da Vinci Code are so obviously broken -- so intrusive, so distracting and so cringeworthy -- that it is impossible to relax into it and get carried away.

So there is really no reason to read The Da Vinci Code rather than Foucault's Pendulum or The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Even if all you want is a page-turner tastily spiced with art, history and mysticism, the originals are far more absorbing as well as more convincing. This is a bad book, and it oozes rottenness from every bad page. Please, please do not buy this book. Even at airports.