Da Vinci Code

While travelling a country the length of Viet Nam (1000km) there is more than adequate amounts of time to polish off a book or two, especially given the ease of picking up or exchanging popular english titles along the backpacker’s path.

And so I came into possesion of a photocopied version of Dan Brown’s popular “The Da Vinci Code” in Sai Gon for a $1. It being popular - on the NY Times best sellers list - made me both curious and wary in the same ways I regard television. But popular doesn’t imply bad. And so I decided to give it a shot.

The verdict, in short, its quality and style bear more resemblence to a movie of the week on TV than a feature length film. In otherwords, I wouldn’t recommend it and have not much good to say.

Even from the first five or six pages, it’s easy to see that it’s a horribly written book. I simply couldn’t believe this book was as popular as it was…but then I often think the same about popular music or television(excepting Battlestar Galactica and Lost).

I’m not going to summarize the “Foucault’s Pendulum Lite”, conspiracy theory, Encyclopedia Brown, plot, but I will say parts of it are in fact interesting. But constantly the book condesceneds to its NY Times best-selling common demonimator so forcefully it just becomes obsurd and uninteresting.

Check out Foucault’s Pendulum for the ultimate conspiracy mystery, or Club Dumas (which Polanski’s Ninth Gate was based on). I’m not going to fault the author for his book becoming popular (even though that clearly seems the aim), but clearly there are other books more deserved of being popular and you should not read this book. The book is mearly badly written while the ideas are at least fun, though still quite simplistic to anyone that went to University.

In summary: the characters are flimpy, the prose horribly written, but the ideas are fun and interesting and carry a lot of the momentum forward to a decidedly unsure outcome.

So, not recommended.