Peter: A Plot Against Readers

A few years ago, before Covid messed everything up, I was attending a seminar on technology in teaching with a friend. I don’t recall how we got onto the topic, but we were talking about our NetFlix habits; when I mentioned that I enjoyed the physics-heavy romantic comedy series The Big Bang Theory, which had by then been extremely popular in the US for several  seasons, and was clearly very popular on NetFlix, his face expressed his surprise even before he had had time to say anything. Clearly, what myself and many others greatly enjoyed could be greatly disliked by others. Similarly, despite the strong idea for his story, Dan Brown's internationally famous novel The Da Vinci Code developed that story so implausibly with a cast of unbelievable characters speaking in the same exaggerated, simplistic high school English in which the entire book is written that I found it painful to continue to the end. 

Don't read it

         Memory had told me when I was brainstorming ideas on it that Dan Brown’s novel had hit the bookshelves about ten years ago, but I was wrong. I should have known it was earlier because I remembered reading it in the paper version, rather than the digital Kindle version that has been normal for me for more than ten years now. The only bit of research I did for this essay informed me that The Da Vinci Code had in fact been first published in 2003 — significantly earlier than I thought. Long before Covid, my colleagues and I at work would sit around chatting in the teachers’ room at AUA’s old premises on Rajadamri, and that was where I realised how popular the novel had become. The reviews I’d read in The New York Times (NYT) and elsewhere were not kind, but since it was what my friends wanted to talk about, I thought I should read it; it would be unfair to dismiss it as rubbish without having first read it myself. Who knew: I might disagree with the NYT’s reviewers and thank my friends for introducing it to me. 

Do watch it

         I think the book was about 300 pages in length, but I managed to read it in one afternoon — not a good sign. I can read quickly, but if something is worth reading, that usually means it challenges me to think in some way, and getting through 300 pages in a few hours means not much thinking was required during the reading. Admittedly, that rule is not always the case: I enjoyed all of the Harry Potter books, and they were also fairly quick reads; in fact, I wished they had lasted longer, even the massive book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Having read Brown’s book, I had to agree with the NYT’s evaluation: rubbish, to put it bluntly. The story itself is very promising: a powerful secret group of bishops and priests within the already secretive Catholic Church committing murder and other crimes for centuries to prevent a secret about Jesus Christ coming to light that would mess up their luxury lifestyles taken from faithful followers around the world. That the story itself is strong is proved by the fact that when the film version came out starring Tom Hanks as the Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon, I thoroughly enjoyed it, more than once, in fact. 

But in Dan Brown’s hands, the story moves along not smoothly and plausibly, but in constant erratic jumps marked by amazing coincidences and lucky accidents. For example, they are on a plane and the woman accompanying Professor Langdon, Sophie, the estranged granddaughter of the murdered leader of secret group protecting the two-thousand-year-old secret from their enemies in the Catholic Church, accidentally discovers an encrypted message concealed in a container that they have recovered from a bank vault after several earlier amazing adventures. Naturally, Langdon knows how to decrypt it, and gives another long lecture on it. Dan Brown likes to show off his knowledge of obscure details. I’m sure he did a lot of research for the novel, but since it’s not an undergraduate class, in interesting but not very important snippets of 2,000 years of European history, it interferes with telling his story, treating his readers like high school students being lectured to. The film version sensibly deletes most of this. 

Definitely worth reading

        And that brings me to the most serious pair of related problems with Brown’s very popular novel. The language is that of high school students, not very well-read high school students. That a Harvard University professor could sound so silly does not make his character credible. Even in casual conversation, we would expect something better. But the language faults carry over into the writing in general: it’s all one short, simple sentence after another, again, very high school. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, in contrast, use a wide range of sentence types, appropriately varying from short and simple, to complex and very long: if I recall correctly, Rowling has a couple of sentences that approach the 200-word mark. I would have to do research to confirm, but my suspicion is that no sentence in Dan Brown’s novel exceeds about 30 words, and my memory is that most are much less. Of course, short, sharp sentences are good, especially for creating a sense of action, but a bit of sophistication that treats readers as intelligent, educated adults is also a good thing for developing more complex themes in the story. The Harry Potter books, actually written for a high school audience, use a far greater sophistication in language than Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. 

Because I wanted to have the evidence to support my opinion when I met my friends the next day, I did persevere and read the entire book, but it really was one of the few occasions where I came close to not finishing a book I’d started reading. To be fair, I decided to read Brown’s other books as well; the next one, Angels and Demons, was much like the first, but his latest, Origin, tells another strong story far more effectively. He has clearly worked at his craft, and is now much stronger at telling an incredible story so that the reader believes it step by step as his well- developed characters have consistent personalities seen as they move the action forward in language that does not interfere with enjoying the tale being told. If I could walk into AUA’s teachers’ room tomorrow, I could honestly give a much more glowing report of his latest than of Dan Brown’s more famously popular but awfully written The Da Vinci Code.