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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
That sense of constant forward motion is how Brown manages to disgorge huge chunks of information about history, aesthetics and religious and pagan symbolism without making the book feel like it has stalled in its tracks. (Finding a way to manage that is going to be the biggest challenge for whoever makes the inevitable movie version.) Without giving the game away, I'll just say that Brown has devised a series of situations that allow the two characters to show off their specialized areas of knowledge, coded clues that allude to the history of art and the tension between paganism and the Catholic Church.
At its best, "The Da Vinci Code" is the type of thriller that might have amused that great atheist Luis Buñuel. Langdon is forever discoursing on symbols -- the pentacle, with its connotations of satanic worship, is the best example -- whose real meanings have, he insists, been perverted by the church in an attempt to solidify its power by crushing dissent. Central to Rome's consolidation of power is a suppression of all forms of goddess worship, and a wholesale recasting of pagan iconography in Christian terms.
Part of the fun of conspiracy theories is that they indulge our worst fantasies of the powerful, allowing us to imagine them as the unscrupulous bastards we always suspected they were. And if conspiracy theories have their safe side, offering us a world where everything falls neatly into place, they also promise a weird sort of freedom. Suddenly there are symbols everywhere just waiting to be deciphered, offering revelation to all who can read them. All that we believed fixed is shattered and everything is up for grabs. What could be scarier or more thrilling than that?
"The Da Vinci Code" plays with the gleefully heretical notion that the entirety of Judeo-Christian culture is founded on a misogynist lie, evincing disgust for sex in general and the female body in particular. Brown has a provocateur's talent for using facts as the seasoning in his sinister stew. He writes of Opus Dei's $47 million world headquarters in New York as if he were a Jedi describing the Death Star. There's a bad-boy charge to Brown's relation of the story of the Emperor Constantine's unification of Rome under Christianity.
Jesus' divinity is not, Brown tells us, a sign of God but rather something decided upon by a vote ("a relatively close vote at that," says one character at Constantine's ecumenical gathering, the Council of Nicaea). As for the revealed word of God, well, Brown says, what we know as the Bible was created from Constantine's suppression of all the gospels that related Jesus' human traits. If you know someone who was upset by Martin Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation of Christ," "The Da Vinci Code" should make them fall down frothing at the mouth.
Brown doesn't stop there. He is at his most wicked in a long section explicating Leonardo's "The Last Supper," one of the revered pieces of Christian iconography, which here stands revealed as a two-fingered salute to church doctrine, a pagan critique of the very foundations of Christianity. Boy, is it fun.
But the problem with conspiracy theories is that, in order to keep existing, they need to hover just beyond the reach of exposure. Finally, "The Da Vinci Code" does not have the courage of its anti-clerical provocations. The church has a lot to answer for here, but it's not the book's ultimate villain, and as the story draws to a close you sense Brown backpedaling.
There are other, smaller letdowns. As a character, Langdon doesn't exist as a great deal more than a fount of information. (Brown's invention of a People magazine description of his hero as "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed" feels like a bid to get Ford cast in the movie version -- please, God, no.) And he falls into the danger that always awaits a thriller writer so adept at twists, by supplying so many last-minute surprises he nearly twists the plot into total implausibility.
Finally, though, neither Brown's failure of nerve nor the slight defects of craft are enough to ruin the pleasure of this hugely entertaining book. As a thriller writer, Brown is like a showboat academic, using facts to spin one grand theory after another. It may be an inch deep, but it has the thrill of a terrific performance. I hope Langdon returns in another adventure, one in which his creator goes whole-hog with his craziest heretical impulses. For all the readers who are going to be happily immersed in "The Da Vinci Code," that would be a most fitting act of contrition.
