The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

 

The Book

Spoilers Ahead

    Robert Langdon, Harvard professor is dragged from his Paris hotel room in the middle of the night by Detective Fache to look at the dead body of Jacques Saunier, a curator in the Louvre Museum.  There, he (Langdon) sees how this remarkable man, the world's leading expert in the sacred feminine, spent his last seconds on Earth. To everyone's shock, Saunier has left a complex code to be deciphered. But before Langdon can get his jet lagged, sleep deprived brain wrapped around the situation, Suanier's granddaughter, Sophie Nevuex, professional law enforcement code breaker, whisks Langdon away from the scene, convinced Fache intends to frame Langdon for the crime. Unbeknownst to Langdon, a mystery man known only as the Teacher, has orchestrated to have four prominent members of French Society murdered. 

Together, the two of them on the run from the French police, they meet up with Langdon's friend and sometimes mentor, Sir Leigh Teabing, a wealthy man who dabbles in history and the legend of the Holy Grail. Along the way, Sophie reveals her grandfather was the leader of a shadowy society known as the Priory of Scion, an organization descended from the Knights Templar and rumored keepers of the sceret of the Holy Grail. 

With Teabing's help, they crack part of the code only to discover they need to be in London. Teabing smuggles them out France and into London. All the while, the Teacher is hot on their heels and has members of Opus Dei or The Way, chasing them. One of the monks is responsible for the killing, and will kill again on the Teacher's orders. When Opus Dei catches up with them in London, the group splinters, Teabing is kidnapped and Sophie and Langdon receive and appeal from Fache to come in, he promises to keep them safe. 

Not knowing where to turn, Sophie and Langdon solve clue after clue and then try to turn around and rescue Teabing from the Teacher's evil clutches. Following the clues Saunier has left, the finally figure out what they are supposed to do, only to find out that the Teacher was Teabing all along. After a shootout, Fache arrests Teabing, apologizes to Sophie and Langdon, but it's too late for Opus Dei who realizes they were duped by the Teacher and all they had hoped for is lost. The leader of Opus Dei, in an act of atonement, offers his wealth to the murder victims' families. Fache helps him, but is not impressed with how easily this so called man of the cloth is led astray. 

Meanwhile, Langdon and Sophie solve the final clue and go to a chapel in Scotland, where Sophie is reunited with her grandmother and brother, both of whom she believed were dead. Together the family agrees to resurrect the Priory of Scion and keep the secret of the Holy Grai. Sophie agrees to meet Langdon in Italy in a few months when he continues his lecture tour provided they do not go to any museums. The End. 

My Thoughts

Yeah, I feel no guilt about completely summarizing this book, it's not only a best seller from 20 years ago, it was a blockbuster movie with Tom Hanks as the lead. Here's my real opinion. 

I read this book 20 years ago when it first came out. My brother purchased it, read it and then gave it to me, not impressed with it enough to keep it. I was not surprised, as things go, this book simply hit every single check mark for how to be a best seller and we were off to the races. Here are the rules. 

Book 5 by an author, on average. 

Have an ordinary protagonist. 

Take sides in something controversial. 

Have enough "death stakes" for the protagonist

Have a love interest B story

Have the protagonist betrayed by someone close to him. 

Have the protagonist use his special gift to win the day and the girl. 

Set the world right by the end of the book. 

Let's take these in order.

 Angles and Demons was the 4th book of Dan Brown's career, making this book The Da Vinci Code his fifth. Angels and Demons sold well, which meant that most bookstores were willing to carry it, giving Brown a very large platform to sell his book and a wide audience. Check. 

Ordinary protagonist: Robert Langdon might be called an elitist because he's a professor at Harvard, but in this context, he's not getting riches, he is only well known inside his tiny academic circle, and he isn't rich. It hasn't made him any friends he can call along this path when he is wrongly accused and he has no real wealth he can use to get out of a difficult jam. In this context, Langdon is ordinary, bringing to his troubles no more resources, other than his knowledge in his specialty than you or I. He is an ordinary man, without privilege in a foreign land. Harvard professor is what validates him in the eyes of the reader and is short hand for extremely smart. I't also a convenient way to dump as much exposition as Brown can artfully chock into this tome with an excuse. As a writer I am totally jealous. 

Take sides in something controversial: Brown revives a conspiracy theory involving Mary Magdalene. In fact he stole it from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. He not only embraced controversy, he stole and it got a lot of opposition because he was weaving a narrative contrary to what most Christians believe about Jesus. That takes a lot or courage and more than a dabble of hubris to believe you can get away with it. 

Have a love interest B plot. Yeah, if you didn't guess that Sophie Neveux or Sophie the New was going to go through this book listening to Robert Langdon explain the plot of the book to you, then I guess you were in for a surprise. Her nickname in the book is Princess Sophie, and isn't the princess always supposed to fall for the gallant knight? Even if, or maybe especially because he's an ordinary guy? Of course she was. 

Have the protagonist betrayed by someone close to him. I don't even think you have to be a writer to have figured out that Leigh Teabing, crotchety old gentleman that he was, was the villain. 

Have the protagonist use his special gift to win the day and the girl. Langdon knows symbols and he's an academic, which means his knowledge of symbols allows him to read some of the clues set forth by Saunier. Of course Sophie could have figured it out, she's smart and she knew the guy. But the compressed timeline of the book, with the action taking a little over 36 hours to complete, means that she's too emotional to put her skills to the best use. Langdon, despite the danger he's in is the one who is supposed to keep his head. 

Set the world right by the end of the book. They do. 

So it hits the checklist perfectly. But actually, it's a pretty mundane plot if you've been studying how to write genre fiction. What keeps the casual thriller reader engaged in the book is probably because they are new to the controversial subject matter of the book, the fact that Mary Magdalene might have been Jesus's wife. What keeps Brown's loyal readers in the book is that for all of his boringness, at his core, Robert Langdon is a good guy. He's easy to root for. And it seems unthinkable that Langdon would have actually killed anyone. We are rooting for him because, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, we want the brains to win. We want to believe that doing the right thing matters and being the smartest, solving the mystery is what matters. When the good guys do it, then world is OK. 

I'm not certain the conditions are right for this book to hit it big today. For one thing, the Catholic Church is much less in the news than it was in the early 2000s when this book was written. I think fewer people are going to be rooting for the Catholic Church to fail today. Secondly, I am not certain we are living in an environment that rewards the kind of nerdy Robert Langdon is. 20 years ago America believed that if a smart guy could get the right answer, then that was all that mattered. Today, I think Langdon would be seen as an elitist snob. We wouldn't worry for him, even though we know he's innocent, I believe there are a fair number of us who would rejoice in his troubles as he would be an avatar for everything a significant chunk of America believes is wrong. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

As I said above, my brother gave me this book. It's a first edition and I am almost completely certain that this pass through it was only the third, but possibly the fourth time it was read. For sure I read it once after my brother gave it to me, he read it. What I don't remember is if my father read it or not. Dad's a little weird when it comes to books. He'll read a book, regardless of controversy, if he believes the bestseller is something worth reading. He really enjoyed A Time to Kill, and kept a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his bedstead bookshelf next to a number of biblical reference books. So like I said, Dad's weird. But I know he thought Dan Brown's use of the Catholic Church was a cheap ploy and Dad's a Methodist. Anyway, the book is in great condition and still on my shelves, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. Since I didn't have to check it out of the library, we will pick up this feature with the first book that I do read from there. 

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