My Weekly Book

The da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

It is not going to come as a surprise to many people who have followed this community that I read this a good while back and absolutely loved it. I went on in short order to read everything else written by Mr Brown all of which I enjoyed very much. I would recommend Angels and Demons as possibly even better than the book under discussion and Deception Point as an absolutely cracking, if rather more conventional, adventure thriller. I arrived at the conclusion that, while the author is not the best writter in the contemporary thriller market he is certainly very, very good indeed and in, say, the top five. Just my opinion, of course.

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My first read of The da Vinci Code was a whizz-through for plot. I responded to all those little Dan Brown tricks - plunging straight into the narrative with little introduction, short chapters ending in cliffhangers - and therefore could not wait to find out what was going to happen. I think I read it in less than 72 hours, possibly less than 48. This left me a little hazy on the plot and also slightly unsure on what I thought about it all. Which is why I promised myself a second read-through more or less the moment I finished.

And there’s been a lot of criticism of this book since then. It’s wrong about the Priory of Sion. It’s wrong about Opus Dei. It’s not entirely right about the internal layout of The Louvre, St Sulpice or Westminster Abbey. The writing’s actually not all that good, actually. Nor the characterisation, now we come to think of it. In fact, anything that popular must be a little bit dodgy, if not very dodgy. Definitely something we should be sneering at…

I’d allowed the siren song of all these criticisms to get to me a little and had ruefully decided that it probably wasn’t the book I remembered. Well, I’m very pleased to report that I still think it’s a very, very good and accomplished piece of writing. The premise and its execution are superb. Dan Brown has this knack of being able to imagine things on a really big scale and make them… well, how shall I put this? Credible enough. The suspension of disbelief he requires from his readers is at a level that I, personally, am happy to provide (except for one particular incident in Angels and Demons - but we’ll let that pass for now).

And the really interesting thing is that criticism of the central premise of the book, that the sacred feminine has been stripped from religion and that our society is impoverished as a result, is not something I hear being aimed at Mr Brown. Maybe his version of the Priory of Sion isn’t altogether historically accurate - but this is a novel. Opus Dei is not actually presented as, per se, the bad guys. What actually happens is that one individual member (well-supplied with emotive backstory) has run amok - and the head of the organisation repents by the end and is redeemed.

The contention that history is written by the winners rings very true to me on the subject of the Catholic church. And the idea that Roman Catholicism (as opposed to, say, the Celtic kind) was not the only force at work in the early church certainly isn’t a surprise to me. I think that, as a manifesto for a new appreciation of the place of the sacred feminine in our spirituality, this makes a pretty good case. And it’s a bloody good read as well.

I’m glad I re-read it. My good opinion of it has been reinforced.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 5:23 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.