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late to the Last Supper
So I finally read The Da Vinci Code. I picked up a second-hand copy locally for a fiver, as I felt it wasn't fair of me to diss a book I hadn't read but at the same time I didn't want to lend credence-through-cash to it.
Now I can diss it. Basically, the plot isn't terrible; it's no worse than any other "Templar Fiction" which I understand is the genre this belongs to or perhaps has even had created for itself. I stalled briefly at the opening page which claimed the Priory of Sion and the Secret Dossiers as fact, since a brief investigation of said fact shows that the Priory and its Dossiers were hoaxes, admitted as such by one of the co-perpetrators over a decade ago. I suppose it's like the crop-circle guys, or the alien autopsy guys: people will still claim that the admission of a hoax is itself a coverup.
The writing, however, is awful. It reminds me of the one epsiode of CSI I've managed to sit through, where I was pained by people who are supposedly established work colleagues explaining basic facets of their jobs to each other as a means of exposing this to the viewer. There's a subtle way to do exposition like this, and a sufficient quantity of what needs such exposition, and neither the CSI scriptwriter nor Brown appear to be even AWARE of this. It's like instead of saying "I left my house and went to the pub", I told you that "I left my basement apartment below a Georgian House built in 1821 by the famed Architect Waiderno, passed through the unnumbered black rusting squeaky multi-railinged metal gate, and walked the 1,127.5 metres to The Kings Inn, previously known as Hogans and still referred to as such by the more established locals despite its having changed hands to one Tony Weir in 2000 for the sum of ... " and so forth. Actually, I can't make this quite bad enough as my internal editing process keeps cleaning it up. But you get the idea. I skipped several pages of unnecessary verbiage without missing a single detail and frankly it's probably one of the worst pieces of writing I've ever encountered. It's certainly on a par with the one posthumous Ludlum novel I own, which suffers from much the same problem.
In summary, the story wasn't so bad but the writing was awful. Thankfully I've got some better literature here to cleanse my brain.
Now I can diss it. Basically, the plot isn't terrible; it's no worse than any other "Templar Fiction" which I understand is the genre this belongs to or perhaps has even had created for itself. I stalled briefly at the opening page which claimed the Priory of Sion and the Secret Dossiers as fact, since a brief investigation of said fact shows that the Priory and its Dossiers were hoaxes, admitted as such by one of the co-perpetrators over a decade ago. I suppose it's like the crop-circle guys, or the alien autopsy guys: people will still claim that the admission of a hoax is itself a coverup.
The writing, however, is awful. It reminds me of the one epsiode of CSI I've managed to sit through, where I was pained by people who are supposedly established work colleagues explaining basic facets of their jobs to each other as a means of exposing this to the viewer. There's a subtle way to do exposition like this, and a sufficient quantity of what needs such exposition, and neither the CSI scriptwriter nor Brown appear to be even AWARE of this. It's like instead of saying "I left my house and went to the pub", I told you that "I left my basement apartment below a Georgian House built in 1821 by the famed Architect Waiderno, passed through the unnumbered black rusting squeaky multi-railinged metal gate, and walked the 1,127.5 metres to The Kings Inn, previously known as Hogans and still referred to as such by the more established locals despite its having changed hands to one Tony Weir in 2000 for the sum of ... " and so forth. Actually, I can't make this quite bad enough as my internal editing process keeps cleaning it up. But you get the idea. I skipped several pages of unnecessary verbiage without missing a single detail and frankly it's probably one of the worst pieces of writing I've ever encountered. It's certainly on a par with the one posthumous Ludlum novel I own, which suffers from much the same problem.
In summary, the story wasn't so bad but the writing was awful. Thankfully I've got some better literature here to cleanse my brain.
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I wish the author and publisher to be roundly slapped by fish for it. Dead, stinking fish. And everybody who took the book seriously, too.
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Life's too short.
(I'm considering the movie for one reason and one reason only: it sounds as though Ian McKellen is amusing as hell in it, and I'd put up with a lot to watch that.)
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I end up reading books like this for the same reason. I was actually a bit hopeful I'd enjoy it because so many folks I know seemed to love it, but it was complete crap.
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Incidentally, I hadn't known till now that the whole Priory of Sion thing was made up out of whole cloth. So the Holy Blood, Holy Grail guys were suing Dan Brown over "ownership" of ideas based on the inventions of a French crackpot. Brilliant.
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" There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence..."
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