Dan Brown, The da Vinci Code: Puzzles as Special Effects
Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, Harvard professor and cryptographer, are on the run in Neveu's native Paris. Langdon's suspected of the murder of the chief curator of the Louvre, who spent his dying minutes constructing an elaborate puzzle that seems to point to Langdon as his murderer. Neveu, though, is not convinced of Langdon's guilt. Since she believes that the dead man - who is in fact her grandfather - intended to leave a message specifically for her, she spirits Langdon away from the clutches of her colleagues in the Paris police department. This little act of defiance sets in motion a manhunt that blankets the city.
The two fugitives combine complementary talents - Sophie's cryptography and Langdon's academic specialty of religious symbolism - to attack the multi-layered puzzle left behind by the dead man. As they labor over a succession of arcane clues, they must evade the clutches of the law and, unbeknownst to them, also elude the strange albino monk who is the actual killer.
Their quest ultimately leads - as must all quests that begin in the City of Light - to the Holy Grail. Langdon and Neveu dash from hiding place to hiding place following a bizarre, tortuous treasure hunt whose clues were constructed by the dead man. Their path leads to a Swiss bank vault, an estate on the outskirts of Paris, and then across the English Channel to London. Surviving on wits and luck, the two not only outwit the elite of Paris' gendarmes, but outfight their heavily armed, homicidal pursuer.
At every turn, Langdon, Neveu, and the British historian whose help they enlist must decode double- and triple-entendre laden snippets of doggerel, shatter cryptograms, decipher odd-looking messages, and use their powers of intellect and knowledge to edge one step closer to their goal. It's a goal that has been sought by millions for two millennia. Good luck, guys - you'll need it...
Greetings from The FX Channel
We've all heard film critics lament that many of today's blockbuster releases are just a series of special effects strung together in a 105-minute chase scene. Everything else that makes up a script - characters, setting, allegory, symbolism, social commentary - ends up buried by the mass of computer-enhanced villains, exploding aircraft and tanker trucks, and inhuman acrobatics. If it ain't got aliens, explosions, electronic phantasms, or slow-motion thirty-foot vertical leaps, your movie's apparently destined to end up at the art houses. And everyone knows you don't make much money off art films.
The written word has its own version of Hollywood blockbusters - those high-tension action thrillers in which plot and characters are swept away by a sort of literary "special effects." Sometimes the effects are violence; sometimes they're raw sexuality, but once in a great while, a new breed of literary special effects surfaces. Just as The Matrix forged the leading edge of a new class of visual effects, so, too, does the occasional novel break new ground on the strength of a different method for carrying its story forward. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is one such novel - a work that employs a different breed of special effect to its great advantage. Does Brown, however, maintain balance in the rest of his work? Or do his special effects overshadow plot and characters? I think the latter...
Robert Who?
The death of Robert Ludlum left popular literature without a grand master of the thriller - even if his last few novels (including the Prometheus Deception) were so twisted and jammed with randomly italicized words that I, for one, wondered if senility had set in. The raging success of The Da Vinci Code has cast Brown as Ludlum's heir apparent. But - at least in the early years - Ludlum's thrillers were plot-driven. To the contrary, however, in The Da Vinci Code Brown devised an extraordinarily simple plot: a man falsely suspected of murder fleeing from the law and the real murderer, helped by a comely lass. To dress up this plot, Brown tossed in the requisite plot twist or two - a sinister someone directing the killer, the profoundly secret life of the victim, the comely lass's relationship to the dead man. So far, so good...
To complete the embellishments of his plot, Brown adds in a short time span (hey, it works in "Twenty-Four") and - tada! - liberally sprinkles the pages with his new, improved special effects. The willing suspension of disbelief so vital for movie watchers when Neo and Trinity dodge bullets and walk up walls must also arise from the pages as a pair of sheltered academics outwit a succession of seasoned police officers and dodge a devoted assassin. All this, while - on but a few hours of sleep - the two find the mental energy to decipher the dead man's strange and arcane clues. Of course, the "average man performing extraordinary deeds" plot is common in escapist literature; this is nothing new.
Like rapt moviegoers staring open-mouthed at a morphing Terminator or cheering as 007 outpaces an avalanche, Brown's readers are intellectually overpowered by the puzzle-solving prowess of Langdon and Neveu. This, even though several of his puzzles - such as "O! Draconian Devil" as an anagram for Leonardo Da Vinci - are actually hoary with age. Too, many readers are fascinated by a retelling of the Mary Magdalene story (which Langdon's character notes was a best-seller as recently as the 1980s), a tale that was covered just last year by Christopher Moore's Lamb.
Once, however, you strip away the ornamentation of puzzles and Magdalene story, you're left with a rather pedestrian plot and fairly weak characters. Like a prestidigitator chatting up his crowd, Brown's puzzles act to distract the reader from such weaknesses. One such point that critical readers might ponder are why Neveu seems so sanguine over the horrific death of her sole living relative (her "estrangement" notwithstanding)? Likewise, Brown's method for the insertion of Remy's peanut allergy is incredibly awkward; as is the subplot surrounding the revelation of "The Teacher's" identity. Quite puzzling to me is Langdon's failure to recognize backwards handwriting - after having been steeped in Da Vinci for hours, from the Vitruvian Man pose of the corpse to theMona Lisa, Madonna of the Rocks, and The Last Supper, one would assume that he'd be properly prepared. Heck, I knew what it was immediately.
A Hit! A Most Palpable Hit!
So why is The Da Vinci Code a runaway best-seller? It's simple, really: for once, we find ourselves exposed to special effects that are mental instead of physical. That's enough to make most people feel that they are themselves capable of performing these heady feats, even if they doubt they're capable of cracking skulls like a Rambo. I know I spent a few minutes myself trying to puzzle through each of the clues; so, I imagine, does almost every other reader. It also doesn't hurt that the action moves at breakneck speed, even if it does rely heavily on a string of Deus ex machina moments. The book is, after all, meant to be fun instead of a scholarly tome. I just wish that Brown had sufficient plot that he didn't need to camouflage its lack with all the special effects. Five stars for the FX work, three for a decidedly average plot.
Parting Shots
Brown has been hailed for his remarkable research (it says so on the book jacket), but...
1) When's the last time you saw a bar of soap in a public restroom? 2) Odd - according to Disney, The Lion King DVD is being released for the first time... today.