The Da Vinci Craze

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I wonder what it's like to write a pulp novel and have it become an irrationally huge bestseller? I am amazed at how popular this book is. It is everywhere. I got onto the train once and saw seven people in the same car reading it. And keep in mind that this is a hardcover edition they're all reading. I cannot fathom how big it will be when the paperback is released. I figured I should read it, just to see what the big deal is.

I am pleased to say that I enjoyed it. It's not great literature; it's pretty good pulp. It's like a Bruce Willis movie: completely preposterous and relentlessly entertaining. It's designed for commuters. It features 115 short chapters, so you can finish the current one quickly before your stop comes up. It demands that you keep reading, because each chapter ends in a cliffhanger. This became somewhat annoying, because some of the cliffhangers were pretty contrived. Oh well. It did its job pretty darned well.

What it is not is history. At the beginning of the novel, Brown says "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Hmm. That's a pretty big statement. What Brown excels at is taking disparate factoids and mashing them together. Factoid A is true, and factoid B is true, but the way Brown conflates them is entirely fictional. It's a nice technique, because it gives the illusion of truth, or at least plausibility, that good historical fiction needs (or good conspiracy fiction, in this case). This has not stopped readers from assuming it's all true. My girlfriend the art historian tells me of a colleague teaching a class on Da Vinci who is being inundated with student questions about things from this book. I suppose Brown did his work too well.

Do I recommend it? Sure. It's a fun read, and I've read worse. I'd wait for paperback, though.