I'm not normally one of those people who can always guess the ending of a movie. My dad is one of those people. He has a disturbingly uncanny ability to guess the plot twist within the first five minutes of a film. Probably comes from too many Saturdays spent in the comfortable darkness of the Atlanta movie theaters in his youth...
Suffice to say, however, that I did not inherit his gift. Imagine my surprise and disappointment then, when I guessed almost every plot twist and turn in the much vaunted bestseller, The Da Vinci Code.
I have been wanting to read The Da Vinci Code for quite a while now, but didn't want to buy it in hardback, and didn't want to get into the three-year-long queue for it at the library. Thus, when I received two free audiobooks as a trial at audible.com, I thought it was as good a chance as any to experience the phenomenon. Alas, as is so often the case, the product did not live up to the hype.
The ideas behind the story in The Da Vinci Code are, nevertheless, fascinating. Dan Brown's exploration of the idea of the lost goddess as she relates to Christianity, the pagan and ancient religious symbology he references, the descriptions of the clues in Da Vinci's paintings create a scholarly web of intrigue that casts back thousands of years and catches the reader entirely off guard. It's too bad he couldn't have left out the main characters and the action thriller plot line and just have written a scholarly work. It probably would have been more interesting.
In The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon is called from his bed in the Hotel Ritz in Paris to a crime scene at the Louvre. The curator of the Louvre has been murdered, and his body has been arranged in a most unusual way. The Paris police, however, believe he was not left this way by his killer, but that he arranged his own bizarre crime scene. And he has left a message which the police believe implicates Robert Langdon as his murderer.
From this first chain of events, the entire plot is contrived and manipulated by the author in such a way that his hero, Robert Langdon, is always one step ahead of everyone else, even under the most improbable circumstances. Rather than arresting him on the spot when they find him asleep at the Ritz, the Paris police go through an elaborate charade, calling him to the Louvre, showing him the crime scene, and asking his "expert opinion" as a renowned symbologist. Ridiculously, this is all explained as an interrogation device, used in the hopes that Langdon will incriminate himself, while in actuality, it is a clumsy attempt at explication and suspense.
Article comments
1 - Bernie Cullen
I found the book annoying, the characters shallow, and the premise far fetched. I agree with the reviewer's comments about its predictablity, and I thought its chief virtue was with the description of the cities involved. Thanks for an honest review of this over-hyped work
2 - Mickey
Funny...I loved it ...blame me for my poor taste....
3 - Toledotastic
I think the operative point regarding the book is that it isn't a scholarly book - the things listed as facts are 99% fiction.
There's a reprint of a good review of it posted on my blog if you're interested.
http://toledotastic.blogspot.com/2005/07/da-vinci-code.html
4 - pelham brown
Great book in my opinion!!!! How many weeks has it been on the best seller list????
5 - Bowler
It's on the best seller's list and kept our intrigue because of the religious "revelations" and possible implications, not because of the Brown's ability as a fiction writer.
6 - Michael W. Domoretsky
Nice book ,but repeated as always,like all the other authors,over and over again. Now for the truth and new discoveries one must visit the site of Lionardo from Vinci and see for yourself the new discoveries mad within Leonardo's masterpieces, seen for the first time in 500 years.