The Da Vinci Code

(P528): Please tell me the Teacher isn’t going to be Teabing…
(P532): Oh god…
(P533): Yes…yes, he is.

Those are the notes I scrawled to myself as I read some of the latter chapters of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Now that I’ve had a little time to look up some of the references I wasn’t sure about and find out some of the true history behind the organisations described, I think it’s high time to put down some of my thoughts on this minor publishing phenomenon, since I finished it a little while back, now.

It was an entertaining little page-turner, no better or worse written than the average children’s book, and if it inspires some interest in art and religious history (both areas of great fascination for me since I was a small boy – a much smaller boy than I am now, I mean!), then that is surely something positive. However, the book is also an extremely frustrating one.

Firstly, we have to fully accept that the characters are all incredibly stupid. Harvard Professors, Police Chiefs and professional cryptographers alike are idiots. Not only are they incapable of detecting a blindingly obvious anagram like ‘O Draconian Devil’ beside a mimicry of the Vitruvian Man, but they quite fail to notice what is blatantly mirror-writing for several pages. Even worse, a man who keeps the most important secret in the world encodes his ‘cryptex’ with the name of his own granddaughter! That’s not good encryption practice, now, is it? This would all be much more forgivable if Dan Brown did not insist on having his idiotic characters marvelling at how terribly clever all this is at every new revelation.

As you can tell from my little notes, I figured out who the ‘bad guy’ was going to be a few pages before he was revealed. I hoped it wouldn’t be him, and the French accent threw me off the scent for a while, but his pulling rank, and his blatant ‘last-person-you’d-suspect’ status made it inevitable – and rather underwhelming. Not only this, but I wish Brown had bothered to do some research into English speech. Sure, he throws in some todgers, some crisps, but really – no Brit refers to university as ‘school’, and these Anglophile French would be very unlikely to say anyone has got ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’. Add to this a tea obsession and some very melodramatic bad-guy ‘monologuing’ (as they put it in ‘The Incredibles’) and we have a very British bad guy. Seems very old-fashioned in such an à la mode piece, full of exophoric references to Smart Cars and suchlike. Perfect for the zeitgeist; I doubt it will endure.

What kind of name is ‘Teabing’, anyway? That’s NOT a good anagram for ‘Baigent’!

The countless inaccuracies in the background to the story are barely worth mentioning. It’s a work of fiction, after all. But when Brown begins the novel with a big heading, ‘FACTS’, and then brings up the Priory of Sion, his taking ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ as apparently his only source makes him look like a fool. It’s not hard to find out who Pierre Plantard really was, or what an easily-dismissed piece of esoteric fluff his Priory really is. Worse than that, though, is his treatment of Da Vinci and the story of Christ.

I was surprised, in a book called ‘The Da Vinci Code’, to see so few mentions of Da Vinci himself, and so little reflection on his paintings. And to say that Paul in The Last Supper must be Magdelene because he’s got no beard is nonsense. After all, Paul was often painted as quite feminine and beardless by contemporary artists – as in The Last Supper of Ghirlandaio.

Brown also seems to neglect to mention that Gnosticism, while supporting his ideas on Christ as an ordinary human in many texts, also contain far more evidence for Christ being seen as a super-powered deity than the canonical Gospels do – as in The Acts of Thomas, which I remember reading in part in year 10 at school. His claims that the Counsel of Nicene heavy-handedly censored everything that they disliked in writings about Jesus, on values that were totally new, are also easily dismissed when we see how similar the Muratorian Fragment’s list of gospels is to the one established at Nicene, which it predates by a century or more, if I remember correctly.

Still, the book is a fun one, a good momentary distraction. I would just hate to think that some gullible people might believe what they read there. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s fanciful The Portrait of Mr. W.H., where fabricated evidence is playfully used to identify Shakespeare’s male lover, only not so charming and having rather more ideas above its station. Brown’s work is entertaining, but a frustration.