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The Da Vinci Code
Well, I spent most of last night and today reading The Da Vinci Code.
Interesting book. Plotwise, it's relatively average. I spent a fair amount of my youth reading Robert Ludlum novels so "man solving convoluted secret one step ahead of the bad guys" isn't exactly a resoundingly new plot. Then again, it's always a serviceable one. I liked that the hero was rather nerdy. Anyone this deeply steeped in research would have to be somewhat nerdy (and reading the book, I think that Tom Hanks, who has been cast in the role, can be a believable fit for the character as written). Still, the plot in itself isn't really innovative. The twist of who is the true villain isn't that shocking. And the ultimate resolution of the plot is... well, to be honest, it's a bit anti-climactic (I mean, Sheesh. I'm an architect and it's fairly absurd to speculate that with the way modern architecture firms and construction companies work, that there's anything beneath recent construction that a whole bunch of people don't know about. If trying to keep something a secret, that would NOT be the way.) In the end, I'm not sure how much has been solved (then again whenever a story is about finding the Holy Grail you sort of know it will prove somewhat elusive in the end). What makes the book interesting isn't the plot or even the characters (characters who seem to function primarily to provide a dizzying amount of exposition) but the research.
Boy, Dan Brown must have done a hellacious amount of research. I had the "Special Illustrated Edition" of the book (40% off at BooksAMillion) which I think is the way to go. What's fascinating about the book is actually the artwork, locations, religious, and scientific history it discusses, so having pictures of these things is rather nice.
The theories introduced in the story aren't new to me. I've had my own interests in these areas and to that end have read non-fiction books such as Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which theorized that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife (and who also looked suspiciously on the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls have often been kept away from scholars. However, I always found that writer's theories regarding the "resurrection" to be far less than convincing and enough to leave her research as interesting but unconvincing) and The History of God which traces the assimilation of pagan religions into Christianity and the history of the early Church. Therefore, I did have some grasp of the history and theories that Brown's characters were discussing, and it does provide fertile ground for a mystery novel.
I also had to smile at Dan Brown's discussion of Phi and The Golden Mean (not that he called it that in the book, but it was the way it was taught to me in Architecture school). I clearly remember during my Study Abroad tour while in college going to cathedral after cathedral and being told to sketch and examine their floor plans and their detailing (I still have sketchbooks full of it). And yes, they invariably broke down into following the order of The Golden Mean. (So color me less than shocked when the character in the novel points it out.) My classmates and I reached the point of rolling our eyes at our professors and saying "What's the point? It ALWAYS breaks down into that ratio." I do have to say though that Brown was far more interesting in discussing the Mean's importance than Professor Scott Finn was (Saw Finn a couple of months ago. He's still an asshole. He's just a gray-headed asshole now. Oh, and he finally came out of the closet. . .not that we hadn't known that he was gay when he was IN the closet, so what was the point?). Anyway, I have to say I found it amusing that Brown and his characters were so fascinated by something which had become a point of repetitive boredom to a class of architecture students travelling through England, France, and Italy. (I did begin to wonder whether Phi might in some way factor into the proportions in string theory. I may actually pull out my copy of The Elegant Universe because I seem to vaguely remember it having to do with the relationship of quarks...er... or something in strings and subatomic particles. I'm very much a dilettante in these subjects. Beats me what 99.5% of it means, but I find it fascinating. And looking at Amazon, Greene's new book The Fabric of the Cosmos looks like it might be a worthwhile read). Speaking of science and physics, I also found the inclusion of Sir Isaac Newton in this "return of the goddess" theory to be quite suspect because if I remember correctly, for all that Newton was a scientist, he was quite religious... or am I misremembering? Was it Galileo who was religious? [Hmmm... just googled. Turns out I was right that Newton was religious but it seems it was a somewhat unorthodox belief so I suppose he isn't an odd choice to figure prominently in Brown's story.]
Anyway, touching on all these subjects-- history, religion, art, architecture, math/science-- is what I found interesting about the book. Then again, I also think a lot of the fun of the novel for me was this tour of paintings and architecture as it reminded me of the study abroad tour. We went to museum after museum and cathedral after cathedral analyzing composition and symbollism so I had some affection for the characters' quest. Even if the quest for the Grail wasn't as satisfying as it could be, I found the book as a whole to be interesting in its areas of speculation and research. Honestly, the questions are more interesting than any answers anyone could come up with anway.
Interesting book. Plotwise, it's relatively average. I spent a fair amount of my youth reading Robert Ludlum novels so "man solving convoluted secret one step ahead of the bad guys" isn't exactly a resoundingly new plot. Then again, it's always a serviceable one. I liked that the hero was rather nerdy. Anyone this deeply steeped in research would have to be somewhat nerdy (and reading the book, I think that Tom Hanks, who has been cast in the role, can be a believable fit for the character as written). Still, the plot in itself isn't really innovative. The twist of who is the true villain isn't that shocking. And the ultimate resolution of the plot is... well, to be honest, it's a bit anti-climactic (I mean, Sheesh. I'm an architect and it's fairly absurd to speculate that with the way modern architecture firms and construction companies work, that there's anything beneath recent construction that a whole bunch of people don't know about. If trying to keep something a secret, that would NOT be the way.) In the end, I'm not sure how much has been solved (then again whenever a story is about finding the Holy Grail you sort of know it will prove somewhat elusive in the end). What makes the book interesting isn't the plot or even the characters (characters who seem to function primarily to provide a dizzying amount of exposition) but the research.
Boy, Dan Brown must have done a hellacious amount of research. I had the "Special Illustrated Edition" of the book (40% off at BooksAMillion) which I think is the way to go. What's fascinating about the book is actually the artwork, locations, religious, and scientific history it discusses, so having pictures of these things is rather nice.
The theories introduced in the story aren't new to me. I've had my own interests in these areas and to that end have read non-fiction books such as Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which theorized that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife (and who also looked suspiciously on the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls have often been kept away from scholars. However, I always found that writer's theories regarding the "resurrection" to be far less than convincing and enough to leave her research as interesting but unconvincing) and The History of God which traces the assimilation of pagan religions into Christianity and the history of the early Church. Therefore, I did have some grasp of the history and theories that Brown's characters were discussing, and it does provide fertile ground for a mystery novel.
I also had to smile at Dan Brown's discussion of Phi and The Golden Mean (not that he called it that in the book, but it was the way it was taught to me in Architecture school). I clearly remember during my Study Abroad tour while in college going to cathedral after cathedral and being told to sketch and examine their floor plans and their detailing (I still have sketchbooks full of it). And yes, they invariably broke down into following the order of The Golden Mean. (So color me less than shocked when the character in the novel points it out.) My classmates and I reached the point of rolling our eyes at our professors and saying "What's the point? It ALWAYS breaks down into that ratio." I do have to say though that Brown was far more interesting in discussing the Mean's importance than Professor Scott Finn was (Saw Finn a couple of months ago. He's still an asshole. He's just a gray-headed asshole now. Oh, and he finally came out of the closet. . .not that we hadn't known that he was gay when he was IN the closet, so what was the point?). Anyway, I have to say I found it amusing that Brown and his characters were so fascinated by something which had become a point of repetitive boredom to a class of architecture students travelling through England, France, and Italy. (I did begin to wonder whether Phi might in some way factor into the proportions in string theory. I may actually pull out my copy of The Elegant Universe because I seem to vaguely remember it having to do with the relationship of quarks...er... or something in strings and subatomic particles. I'm very much a dilettante in these subjects. Beats me what 99.5% of it means, but I find it fascinating. And looking at Amazon, Greene's new book The Fabric of the Cosmos looks like it might be a worthwhile read). Speaking of science and physics, I also found the inclusion of Sir Isaac Newton in this "return of the goddess" theory to be quite suspect because if I remember correctly, for all that Newton was a scientist, he was quite religious... or am I misremembering? Was it Galileo who was religious? [Hmmm... just googled. Turns out I was right that Newton was religious but it seems it was a somewhat unorthodox belief so I suppose he isn't an odd choice to figure prominently in Brown's story.]
Anyway, touching on all these subjects-- history, religion, art, architecture, math/science-- is what I found interesting about the book. Then again, I also think a lot of the fun of the novel for me was this tour of paintings and architecture as it reminded me of the study abroad tour. We went to museum after museum and cathedral after cathedral analyzing composition and symbollism so I had some affection for the characters' quest. Even if the quest for the Grail wasn't as satisfying as it could be, I found the book as a whole to be interesting in its areas of speculation and research. Honestly, the questions are more interesting than any answers anyone could come up with anway.
no subject
Salon is a subscription site, but you can read anything there by watching a short advertisement.
I read The DaVinci Code last spring. And as a novel, I don't think it was much to go nuts about. And as a plot, I kept asking "Why would people go to all this trouble to protect and keep secret information that is only valuable if everybody knows it?"
In the end, the big secret is of no value at all. Christianity is what it has become over 2000 years of development. What modern Christians believe has as much to do with St. Augustine who lived 350 years after Jesus, and Martin Luther, John Wesley and John Knox (not to mention Henry VIII and King James).
So if we find out that Jesus liked his pet dog, Spot, and had a favorite pair of sandals, most churches are going to say "Gee that's an interesting historical note," and go on doing things exactly as they've been doing.
no subject
The plot, I thought was generally standard thriller which are fun enough but nothing especially skilled. And the tying together of disparate elements is quite fun. However, the truth is, yeah, architecture and art are frequently tied to the Golden Mean... but that's not because of any really huge hidden secret. It's because it's pretty standard background in most art and architecture courses and always has been. I don't think you can ascribe too much meaning to it beyond the artist or architect's own intentions which can be many. We all have our tendencies. I have a co-worker who always teases me because nearly everything I design has a transected arch in it somewhere.
no subject
It's a fun mishmash of partial information. But, hey, that's what fiction is. You're not supposed to think that it's actual history. If it was actual history it wouldn't be a fiction novel.
Brown is using lots of bits of separate histories, historical speculation, artistic shorthand, and other bits and pieces of info and tying them together as if they truly fit together. In reality, not so much, for a novel? Yeah, sure, why not? That's what fiction is and I'm not going to complain if fiction doesn't stand up under the scrutiny of reality. (Then again, I'm a sci-fi lover so that's pretty par for the course for me).
I tend to look at it as a fairly standard thriller that pulls in fun bits of disparate history. (I always find it extremely difficult to buy that Mary Magdalene made it to France even if she did happen to marry Jesus. There is substantial evidence that she had a great deal of influence on early Christianity. Still, the craziest theory I've run across was Barbara Theiring's concept of the "resurrection." She had a lot of interesting info on the Dead Sea Scrolls but her theory on the resurrection was so bizarre that it made it impossible for me to take her seriously.)
no subject
Yes, they talk about that in the article. It's fiction, but Brown prefaces by saying the Priory of Sion is real. Yes, it was real -- created by an antisemetic French embezzler in the 1950s. (What the article has to say about Pierre Plantard, the actual founder of the Priory of Sion, is pretty interesting, and would make a more interesting novel than The DaVinci Code, IMHO.)
BTW, I always wonder when people talk about the information in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The majority of the scrolls are pre-Christian (approx. 80 years, B.C.E), and there are actualy no references to Jesus in the texts. (This information comes from the Orion Center web page. http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/ These are the people who have custody of the scrolls.) It's not actually clear that "The Teacher of Righteousness" is a reference to Jesus. They were written by a Messianic Jewish sect (thought by some to be the Essenes) in the pre-Christian era.
The bulk of the information in the scrolls refers to the Second Temple period of Judiasm, and is interesting from a historical perspective, but not particularly relevant to any study of Christianity.
no subject
Yeah, there are "facts" in the DaVinci Code. And there are theories, many of which are not exactly supported. Like I said, it's sort of like Sci-Fi. Star Trek doesn't use physics exactly right either, although it has some of the interesting point in it extrapolated to make it fun. Same dif just differing information. I don't think that Colleen McCoullough's First Man in Rome series is real history either. But it's an interesting novelization of that time period.
And, no, the Dead Sea Scrolls are not in fact Christian. They are contemporaneous, giving insight into a form of Judaism and lines of thought in the region within approximately the same era of time when Christianity first began developing.(To be honest, the "Essenes" always seemed a somewhat odd--even somewhat cult-like sect). However, their apocalyptic outlook does give some insight into what Judaism considered "Messiah" (which is, of course, quite different from what Christians mean by "Messiah") and as such the scrolls make a good tool of research into the region.
I'm not particularly (okay,I'm really not at all) religious. My interest is primarily in history. Jesus as a hitorical figure interests me. There will never be any hard fast evidence of one thing or another (as we are talking religion and thus that's based on faith) but we can learn a lot about the context and the era.
And the history of the Church has also interested me (then again you're talking to someone who took Greek/Roman history in college in something like 10 different versions from World History, to Tech/Civ history, Architectural History, Art History, Interior Design History, and several Study Abroad seminars on the rise and fall of Ancient Rome and the rise of Rome (as in Catholocism). So it's purely a historical/archeological interest on my part.
Browns inclusion of those things is fun, but not something that should be taken a face value any more than someone should look to Star Trek for an explanation of String Theory.