I shouldn't be writing this.
I'm neck deep in The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova...the first novel I have read in some time that has cast a spell over me. I really should get back to the narrative: it's calling me.
And NCIS, literally the only series I've bothered to watch since they cancelled my beloved Joan of Arcadia, is on in less than an hour.
And a Blue Jays game just started.
And there's yardwork to do.
Ah, screw it.
The Historian will still be there tomorrow: in fact, this novel is so good I almost don't want to read too much at a time. I'd rather savour it. I can watch NCIS while blogging; the television's exactly one keyboard-length (that's a musical keyboard, not a computer keyboard) away from me. Josh Towers is pitching for the Blue Jays tonight, which should mean a guaranteed loss: he stinks this year. And yardwork's gonna happen tomorrow, when the blisteringly powerful sunshine will be replaced by blessed cloud cover. I'm finding myself getting nauseous within scant minutes of venturing out into the sun these days: if this keeps up, one of these days I'm going to step out and burst into flame.
Okay, having disposed of those distractions....
The Da Vinci Code.
I can't get away from this novel. The movie's coming out in less than two weeks and nothing less than all-out war is being waged in every corner of the media. Dan Brown is variously hailed as a prophet and reviled as a fraud, and his work is held up to an increasingly harsh light and either praised or trashed. The Code has spawned its own genre of conspiracy thrillers, and every suspense novel I've read since is said to be "in the tradition of" The Da Vinci Code. Including The Historian, which really isn't at all.
Apparently The Da Vinci Code has now outsold the Bible it dares to contradict. I bought the book approximately one year into its century-long domination of the bestseller list, read it, and enjoyed it enough to go out and buy everything else Dan Brown has published. It was pretty good. It wasn't the best thriller I've ever read (in my opinion, Brown is but an apprentice to the masters that are Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child). Nor is it even Brown's best work--I found Angels and Demons considerably more satisfying. But Da Vinci was pretty good. I will be seeing the movie.
It's not Brown's writing that captivates, that's for sure. (Okay, hotshot--you go write something better!) No, really, his writing is pedestrian at best. But then, so is Stephen King's, and he too has sold about a gazillion copies. So it must be something else. In King's case, it's the effortless ability to create characters the reader cares about, characters that seem real. In Brown's, it is a relentless sense of pace combined with bits of smart-seeming esoterica strewn around the text.
And the subject matter--as the movie captions it, "the greatest cover-up in human history"--doesn't hurt at all.
(By the bye, the notion that Jesus may have married and fathered kids might not be 'the greatest cover-up in human history'. Various authors have tried to one-up Brown in this department, most notably among them one who sued Brown for plagiarism--and lost. Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers makes a startling...and persuasive...case that Jesus of Nazareth may not have died on the cross at all. Now THAT would be a cover-up.)
Perhaps it's because I don't consider myself a Christian, but I just don't get the outrage over the suggestion that Christ might have been a husband and father. I used to be a Christian, and I've read my bible and done a fair bit of exegesis. I was taught that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute; much later, amused at the idea of prostitution in Holy Scripture, I looked that up for myself, and couldn't find it. Only recently has the Catholic Church bothered to apologize for this slander of Mary's reputation--she was, in fact, a queen in her own right--but that shouldn't be surprising. It did, after all, take them centuries to confirm Galileo's observation that the Earth orbits the Sun. (They killed him for saying so.)
Given the Church's rather shady history of forced conversions, witch-burnings, and abuse of altar boys, it really doesn't strain credulity to suggest they may have left a few things out of their sacred text. Of course, that's not to say The Da Vinci Code is factual in every particular. The Catholic Church's paranoia about this novel, however, suggests it could be.
2 comments:
I enjoyed The DaVinci Code far more than Angels and Demons, largely because I didn't like the romance part between Langdon and Vittoria. Also, I read it AFTER the DVC, so it was almost too formulaic for me.
To wit:
Langdon is woken in the middle of the night. An authority sends/gives him a photograph of someone who has been killed and mutilated. He meets the surrogate daughter of the deceased, who raised her by himself(in A&D, she was adopted, in DVC, she's his granddaughter). He is sent on a quest with seemingly few clues. The murderer is hired by a duplicitous and corrupt person who appears to be anything but on the surface. He never yawns or seems to need sleep. He flies in some truly unusual and advanced aircraft. Langdon nearly dies before he figures the mystery out. Normalcy is restored.
I chose NOT to buy Deception Point because I'm sure I would have been able to pinpoint the killers/perpetrator within six chapters.
But you're right, his pacing is excellent, and he has a very visual storytelling style. However, I would not say his work is particularly well-written or evocative. I almost think DVC was rushed even a little too much. That said, I'm stuck into it right now, myself.
Oh, yeah, formulaic for sure. (Deception Point isn't quite so much, but it *is* a good deal more political.)
One thing I didn't like about both novels was a corollary of the Rambo effect--you know, the law that says ten million bullets can be fired at the hero and the most that can happen is he'll get his shoulder grazed. This corollary is that heroes need no sleep. They can perform great feats of derring-do and leap to brilliant intuitions on no sleep at all.
Post a Comment