The Dan Brown Code

I finished reading the Da Vinci Code today. As several people had warned me, I was disappointed by the ending. But before I say anything else about the ending, let me pick at the rest of the book.

I've found that the most important thing a writer can do is to make the characters real enough that the reader can identify with them. It doesn't matter if your character is a Hobbit in Middle Earth, a Klingon on a Vor'Cha Attack Cruiser, or a Harvard University professor visiting Paris as long as the character acts in a believable way. I expect Hobbits to be country bumpkins. I expect Klingon warriors to be aggressive. And I expect university professors to have the mental prowess of a human being. The character Robert Langdon possesses a library's wealth of information all stored inside his tiny mammalian brain. Breaking codes, identifying obscure links between unrelated things, art history, he knows it all inside and out. And if he doesn't know the answer then he can consult two other people who do. Sophie Neveau and Sir Teabing are also entirely super-intelligent. I'm not saying that I have a problem with smart characters, but when three people can unravel all the mysteries of the world's most secret organization in one day with only the knowledge they have when you meet them, then something is wrong. The only time they pause to actually research something they begin sweating because their library computer search takes more than five minutes. I can't suspend disbelief with these three, especially when you find out who the real "bad guy" is.

My other problem with the characters is that they're flat. Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveau don't have a personality. They are computers that store information and are able to retrieve it on demand. The only one with any personality is Teabing. he is unique and eccentric and I enjoyed it when he was involved in a scene. But I didn't feel anything for the other two. I couldn't get behind them. I couldn't relate to them. They were a function to tell the story, but they didn't bring me into it.

I had a hard time with the plot line. The story itself of these two people trying to evade the police as they went about their wild goose chase didn't interest me. The part of it that kept me reading was the back story. The book is littered with conspiracy theories, history, and accusations against the Church. I thought Dan Brown had some balls to put a lot of these things in his book and I was behind him 100%. Whether the story of the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, and the Queen in Exile is true or not doesn't matter. It was interesting, it was speculative, and it kept me reading. It was great.

The entire story as you're reading seems to be showing you a secret war between the Church, with the group Opus Dei as its arm, and a secret organization known as the Priory of Sion, which is dedicated to preserving Truths that the Church is trying to cover up or destroy. I loved this. This is what I meant when I said I thought Dan Brown had balls. But here's the disappointment. At the end you find out that the Church had almost nothing to do with any of the events happening in the book in the present. Sure, there was a desperate bishop and a crazy monk, but the Church as an organization was NOT involved. It was all the scheming of ONE GUY. An independent who was affiliated with no one but himself. He wasn't with the Priory of Sion. He wasn't with the Church. He was a guy who wanted to find the Grail. Just a guy.

Who cut your balls off at the 90% complete mark, Dan Brown?

This book had the potential to be epic. A battle of ideologies in the present time in which the most powerful religion in the world could have been turned upside down. But, no. Instead we got a watered down resolution in which nothing changed. And that includes the characters. They are the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning. Sure, they have a little more knowledge and one of them was reunited with her family, but they didn't grow as people. I cannot see any difference between the Robert Langdon I met on page one and the one I know at the end. It's like a Tom Clancy book. Sure, it's cool that there's a lot of interesting information in there, but the character is only an excuse to give you that information. The character himself is unoriginal, uninspired, and boring. So you just uncovered one of the great mysteries of the past two thousand years? That's great! Where will your NEXT adventure take you, Dr. Langdon?

Maybe it's me and I just don't understand the Mystery and/or Suspense genre. As I said, I really enjoyed the back story of this book and the character of Leigh Teabing as you first meet him, but I have a hard time thinking of anything else that stood out to me.