The book starts out with the gruesome murder of the curator of the Louvre. Harvardian Robert Langdon, a professor of something fictional, is summoned to help with the murder, in part because he had arranged an appointment to meet with the curator, and in part because the curator has written his name on the floor in his own blood. Langdon is baffled--but with the help of the beautiful Sophie Neveu (cue all-too-obvious-love-interest music), he discovers a series of clues leading to a vast conspiracy by the Catholic Church and a shadowy cabal of symbologists to keep hidden the darkest secret of Christianity.
I have said that this novel takes itself a bit too seriously. And that's true--at no point does Dan Brown indicate that the conspiracy theory he weaves is anything but fictional. (Indeed, an all too earnest prefatory note makes it clear that Brown at least sincerely believes in the veracity of his theory.) Fortunately, although Brown takes his ideas seriously, his writing does not reflect that: instead of dwelling sententiously on the importance of the Christian conspiracy, Brown is happy to zip the plot along, with nary a thought given to characterization, subtlety, or good writing.
In other words, The Da Vinci Code is a typical pulp thriller, complete with paper-thin characters, clunky flashbacks, and extremely awkward and ill-timed exposition (see, e.g., the lengthy explanation given for the puzzle involving "so dark the cons of man," while, I believe, the protagonists are escaping from the police).
What makes the book fun nevertheless is that its central mystery is carefully built up and doled out. The structure of the mystery's revelation is fairly standard: Every chapter begins with the previous chapter's puzzle being solved, and ends with a new puzzle being announced--typically by some character thinking something akin to, "And then he realized what the message meant, and his blood turned cold." (Did I already mention that the book lacks subtlety?) In between, the explanations for the various puzzles are supplemented by some discussion of evidence, but also by an inordinate amount of self-reinforcing mantras like the constantly intoned, "There's substantial evidence for this, Sophie." But even all of this repetition and silliness doesn't erase the fact that the conspiracy is revealed in a highly entertaining manner, with lots of secret messages and obscure clues being thrown at the reader and then quickly explained away. Brown also does a good job of making the mystery seem a lot more important than it actually turns out to be: what starts out as nothing more than a puzzle about the curator's murder becomes a question about the very future of civilization. Sweet!
Of course, the actual resolution of the conspiracy is a little bland--I, for one, was disappointed. (I was sort of imagining something similar to the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) But even so, and despite all of its many, many flaws, The Da Vinci Code is a lot more fun than it really has the right to be.
Copyright © 2004 Steven Wu 