The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
November 16th 2006 06:47
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
I won't presume to dissect what lies behind the runaway success of The Da Vinci Code but it launched a certain kind of thriller and made it a cottage industry and that's our concern. This thriller takes up a work of art or a religious icon and weaves its intrigue around it. According to some, it is an indication to take Western culture seriously. According to others, it is symbolic of decreasing imagination.
I myself wrote that "the extraordinary success of these novels might be indicative of the fact that we are out of Cold War and farther and farther from it. No longer under threat of nuclear destruction, we want our heroes not to stop bombs in the hands of rogue nations but find a missing Caravaggio painting or the Holy Grail and increase our aesthetic education or make us immortal."
I will hold to my view that this is a post-Cold War thriller but there's at least more to it than that, at least to The Da Vinci Code. Curiously, that came across in The Last Templar, another Brown clone. In a revealing moment, that novel says that the fall of Communism was affected not by Ronald Reagan but by Pope John Paul II !
The end of Cold War did away with the Kremlin but the bugbear of all liberals, the Catholic Church, was still there. The communist dictaorship had fallen but the old religion it promised to wipe away was still there and flourishing. Imagine what it must do to the mind of a liberal ! If there were only a secret that could bring down this huge monstrosity, a spiritual government that commands the loyalty of a billion people, why, our hero must find that secret.
The Da Vinci Code is born out of such a conceit. Richard Langdon is again woken up in the middle of his sleep and yanked off this time to Paris, where another bizarre murder has taken place in Louvre. The murdered has pointed to Leonardo da Vinci'd paintings as clues and it is for our symbologist to crack them.
Dan Brown peels away the flab and self-indulgence that marred his Angels and Demons and achieves a highly readable thriller. Only problem is he does not have a convincing villain and if you are a good suspense fiend, you probably can smell the culprit two pages after he is introduced. It also does not help that Brown builds his plot on a very old and a very stale conspiracy theory. But, probably, that's why the novel became such a hit.
You can find my other post on these thrillers here.
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