The Da Vinci Code revisited

[fleetfootmike]

As some of you may remember, I don't LIKE the Da Vinci Code. I think it's badly written, and the theology and history in it is fanciful bunk.

Channel 4 in the UK broadcast a 2 hour documentary on the 'history' behind it, presented by the always-watchable Tony Robinson, who apart from being Baldrick in Blackadder, is the presenter and voice-of-the-common-man in their excellent archaeology series "Time Team" (US readers - find a channel showing this and WATCH IT, it rocks).

I commented, jokingly, to Anne as it started: "you realise that if he buys into the rubbish, Mick and Carenza [the professional archaeologists on Time Team] will never let him back?'

I needn't have doubted: he did (within the constraints of a dumbed down 2 hour TV documentary) a stellar job of intelligently and reasonably rigourously debunking the Grail, the Cathars, the Templars, Rosslyn Chapel, the Priory of Sion (man, what a hoax THAT was) and the whole 'san greal' vs 'sang real' thing.

And to cap it all, the moment that made me laugh out loud and applaud the TV: as he summed the whole thing up, having just come back from Paris on the Eurostar, he said: "...and in fact it's not even particularly well-written."

:)

Comments

[jhayman.livejournal.com]

Ah, Mike...

The history is fairly garbage-y but I thought it a page turner, if you didn't stop and think too much. Kind of a Harlequin action-adventure... :)

[tiassa]

Personally, I kept turning the pages because I wanted to see if it could get any worse.

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree with Judith. I thought it great fun and sufficient to make me curious about all that stuff which frankly I mostly hadn't cared much about before as a devout non-Christian two generations back.

Anyway - maybe it wasn't "well written" and yes, I think I do have eclectic but typically pretty good "lit major" type taste in literature but I certainly thought the pacing was wonderful! I literally found it annoying hard to put down at times.

However, I'm a great fan of Blackadder and the show sounds wonderful and I'd love to see it. I wouldn't be in the slightest bit upset to see the book debunked. I enjoyed it. I didn't say I thought it was great literature and I certainly didn't find it a basis for a new path of religion (which apparently some people did! Some people took this whole thing far too seriously I guess).

I admit that I got half way through Holy Blood Holy Grail and stopped though. It might be interesting to find some GOOD books on related subjects though and Angels and Visitations made me really curious about the Vatican, which basically wasn't on my radar screen before reading that. I guess "to each their own" eh? ;-)

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

I should perhaps clarify - I could have lived with the speculative history, as a work of fiction. I could even have lived with it being presented (as Dan Brown seems to make a point of) as fact.

But the thing that made me throw it across the room was the writing style.

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

Ok I'll bite. What, specifically, was it about the writing that you so disliked? I really am pretty well read in a variety of literary genres and while I certainly don't remember thinking there was anything *special* about the writing of Da Vinci Code, I don't remember being put off by it either. And, as I said, I thought the pacing (certainly a PART of the writing style) was delightfully tense so that each chapter literally ended with a page turner. I wouldn't want all or even most books to be like that (for one thing it kept me up far too late some nights wanting to know what happened next) but I thought it was great fun. Made me really feel like I was reading a "beach book", not a luxury I indulge in often.

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

See http://www.livejournal.com/users/fleetfootmike/88468.html - my problem was precisely the device he used to get the pacing: it's (IMHO) being dishonest with the reader. Certainly, for me, it jarred.

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

Didn't bother me in the slightest except for keeping me awake. If it had I'd have stopped reading it. I can see how that would be a "love it or hate it" thing though. I found it fun. (as I said - it would annoy me if it were done all the time)

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

I've never bothered to read the thing. OTOH, it sounds not unlike John Grisham.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I read one of the guy's other books.

At least Tom Clancy reads the manufacturer's brochure before he uses a high tech weapons system in his plots.

[braider.livejournal.com]

You guys were greatly missed at Dixseption, by the way. Has Rika delivered the Item from the Glassers?

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

Uhoh.

No.

Bet I can guess what it is, too :) :) :) :)

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

I have a cunning plan, M'Lord, ...

Et in arcadia ego

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I flipped through it. I thought it was hilarious. Then again, I thought it was hilarious back in the 1980s when I first read it.

What I find horribly amusing as well is that the writers of that piece of historical sillyness titled "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are supposed to be considering taking action against Brown for plagiarism. Brown cites HBHG as research, and you really can't copyright research in that manner... unless it's made up. So the minds behind HBHG, to stand any success, might have to admit they made the whole thing up.

Triva: Henry Lincoln, one of the said authors, also wrote for Doctor Who - "The Abominable Snowmen" and "The Web of Fear", to be precise. Well, I suppose that the Priory of Sion as a society protecting the bloodline of Christ is no less ludicrous a concept than Yeti in the Underground...

Really, though. As a piece of fiction, the original is a much better read. :)

Steve Dix

[(Anonymous)]

I got "DaVinci Code" and the other one about code-breaking, "Digital Fortress" (which turns out to be Dan Brown's first novel) in a two-for-one sale. If you read DVC and then DF, then it becomes fairly clear that Dan Brown writes to a formula. He starts off with someone dying. He then introduces the protagonists. 3/4 of the way through the book we get The Plot Twist, where Someone We Have Assumed To Be A Baddie Isn't, and Someone We Assumed Was A Good Guy Was Nasty All Along.

It's also fairly clear if you read "Digital Fortress" (and you should, Mike, if just for the laughs over his complete misunderstanding of the subject in general and the net in particular) that Mr. Brown does not let the facts get in the way of a story.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

People find fantasy much more interesting than reality. That's because it is. We are made to feel guilty about this, because life is real and life is earnest, and there's (allegedly) much more excitement in the veins on a fallen leaf or the Daily Telegraph or whatever than there is in all that airy-fairy nonsense like Tolkien, and so on and so interminably forth. So there is a market for writers who can package fantasy as something that "hey, you know, it might be true." And since all the good ones are actually writing honest fantasy...

[qb-fox.livejournal.com]

I liked the book, broadly speaking.

The style is not so irritating that I couldn't put up with it. I also spotted the obvious betrayal so far back that I spent most of the book checking, as I went along, that it worked. Actual I'm not convinced it does, or at least not well.

That said, its nice for someone to tie up the Templar conspiracy theories in one book, very cute. Its just a shame that he [Dan Brown] thinks its real. What a moron? Even a passing ammount of research would have debunked some of it.

Of course, all the divine proportion stuff is real, and features in art a lot. Interestingly Jean Cocteau uses it loads, as well as DeVinci, and both were listed as Masters of the Priory of Sion in the hoax. I wonder if that was why the hoaxsters picked them.