Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Catholic secret societies, lessons in obscure art history and a gruesome murder in the Louvre! Dan Brown's conspiracy-theory thriller is the pulp must-read of the season.
Mar 27, 2003 | Trust me.
Sometime in the next few weeks, someone you know is going to tell you they've read this fantastic new thriller called "The Da Vinci Code," and before you can stop them they will have launched into a breathless description of the plot. Carried away by the pleasure of reliving each twist and turn, every narrow escape, they'll spill all the book's secrets and stare at you expectantly, as if to say they'll forgive you for leaving them in the lurch and dashing right out to the bookstore to buy it.
When that happens, you should cut them off quickly -- and then dash right out to the bookstore and buy it. Dan Brown's novel is an ingenious mixture of paranoid thriller, art history lesson, chase story, religious symbology lecture and anti-clerical screed, and it's the most fun you can have between the sort of covers that aren't 300-count Egyptian cotton.
If the idea of a mystery that draws on the history of religion and art sounds like the kind of "must read" you've picked up before only to find yourself bored silly (i.e., Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"), let me hasten to reassure you that Brown, for all the facts he throws around, operates squarely in the territory of the pop bestseller. "The Da Vinci Code" doesn't offer the kind of solid descriptive writing you find in the work of the best practitioners of crime fiction. Brown appears to be the kind of writer who hits on a snazzy gimmick and then mines it for all it's worth. And it's one hell of a gimmick.
Brown's hero is Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbolism who, after a lecture in Paris, is awakened in his hotel room in the middle of the night by a member of the Police Judiciare. After being spirited away to the Louvre, he finds that the museum's curator, whom he was scheduled to meet with earlier in the evening, is dead of a bullet to the stomach. In the time before his death, the curator has managed to leave a trail of clues, the most visible of which is that he has arranged his body in emulation of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Vitruvian Man." He has also drawn a pentacle on his chest in his own blood, and scrawled another cryptic message -- "O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!" -- beside his body in black-light pen.
No sooner has Langdon begun to unravel the possible meanings of the dead man's clues than he discovers that the grandstanding police captain (whom Brown has given the great name of Bezu Fache) suspects him of the murder. Langdon's temporary salvation comes in the form of Sophie Neveu, a police cryptologist summoned to the scene who knows Langdon is being set up as the fall guy. Their only chance of following the trail left for them is to go on the lam.
If all that sounds insanely complicated, consider that I haven't even mentioned the assassin, an albino giant who is also a devout member of the Catholic secret society Opus Dei. Or that the bishop who heads Opus Dei is summoned to a secret meeting with Vatican officials. Or that, like Leonardo himself (and Botticelli and Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau), the dead curator was a member of another secret society, the Priory of Sion. Or the fact that Sophie Neveu is the dead man's granddaughter.
The fun of "The Da Vinci Code" is that things get even more complicated than that. As in his previous novel, "Angels & Demons" (which also featured Robert Langdon), Brown has written the story in real time. The book is one continuous chase -- by car and plane, from Paris to London and back to Paris -- with Langdon and Sophie in one "Beat the Clock" situation after another, putting their prodigious noggins to work on the coded clues they've been left while staying out of the clutches of Bezu Fache.
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