No Louvre Lost: THE DAVINCI CODE, by Dan Brown (A Hasty Conclusion)

Picking on the poor little ol' DaVinci Code hasn't been nearly as illuminating as I had anticipated, and, yes, all snark aside, I did expect the exercise to illuminate. I honestly believed that a book that achieved such unprecedented popularity--if not exactly critical acclaim--could teach me a lot about storytelling. I realize that it's the A Billion Chinese Can't Be Wrong argument from The Lost Boys, but, in general, I trust the masses. I do not equate "popular" with "least common denominator," and I appreciate when I see the same cover over and over and over again on my morning commute that it represents the zeitgeist, and that's not nothing. Rather than resist, I would much rather understand.

In the case of The DaVinci Code, the best that I can gather is that there are a whole bunch of people out there who are drawn to controversy and/or the Catholic church. The crux of the novel is that Jesus hooked up with Mary Magdalene and that their coupling created a child. Oh, sure, Brown enjoys dropping the phrase "sacred feminine," and he calls out the church for scrubbing the records of powerful women throughout history, but make no mistake, there are really only three questions at play here: One, did Jesus do it? Two, if so, did he create offspring? And, three, does a vestige of that line still exist today?

I suppose I understand how this could excite a certain audience and rankle another, but I just don't care. Blame it on my feelings toward Jesus, but Langdon and Sophie were running around and hollering about how their discoveries--if discovered--were going to rock the very foundation of the Western world, and my reaction was, Yeah. So?

One of these figures is supposed to be a woman. You can rule out the people with beards. Or can you...?

So, in the case of The DaVinci Code, allow me to borrow a phrase from Ian MacKaye and simply say that I was out of step, with the w-o-o-r-r-l-d. There was a disconnect between me and the material, and no matter how deftly Brown pulled it off, he was only going to achieve a certain amount of success with me as his audience. It's kind of like the best U2 album. It's still a U2 album, to betray another of my biases.

Yet, even as it became clear that I was not an audience member that was naturally drawn to the material, I left open the possibility that there was something to learn from the way the story was put together. Turns out, there wasn't. Previous entries have cataloged a number of ways in which I find Brown's narrative lacking. There's no point rehashing them here. The short version is that The DaVinci Code feels more like a 450-page screenplay than a novel, which is to say that it feels like the thing before the thing that it really wants to be. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my novels to feel like novels.

Even so, the book does not deserve to be mocked. The initial idea was that a serious examination of a flawed text is a worthy endeavor. Problem was that I opted to be obnoxious rather than serious, which is less about the relative merits of the book and more about Look at me! Dan Brown made some choices. He made a whole bunch of choices. I don't agree with many of them, but a lot of people apparently did, and who am I to ridicule that which so many people enjoyed?

I'm reminded of the Beastie lyric, "It takes a second to wreck it / It takes time to build." I'd rather build.

So I'm stopping this strand of the blog now. Honestly, the worst part, it's not even fun to write. Just too negative. Depending on how this entry went, I was also thinking of applying a similar technique to other popular fare such as Twilight and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I have no plans to do so now.

I still intend to read them--the Billion Chinese argument again--but I'll be keeping all of the mean-spirited quips to myself.

Currently #10,992 on Amazon's list of top-selling books, though it has sold over 80 million copies worldwide.