Several people had recommended The DaVinci Code to me.
So when Ecogrrl lent it to Nath, I took advantage of the opportunity
to read it. On the surface, it sounds great -- a suspenseful adventure
built around Leonardo, cryptography, the Grail, and some of the more
obscure and enigmatic elements of Christianity. Sort of
Focault's-Pendulum-meets-Cryptonomicon. Unfortunately, the
book was awful. I thought I'd take this opportunity to be a curmudgeon
and explain my objections to this book in an utterly plot-spoiling way.
If you're planning to read The DaVinci Code, look away.
First of all, the plot was a trite collection of suspense clichés.
You know -- one step ahead of the bad guys, you're in grave danger, do
exactly as I say if you want to live, that sort of thing. When interesting
things happened they were horribly contrived. Example: the author tries
as casually
as possible to mention one character's peanut allergy so that a chunk of
pages later he can kill him off via suprise nut poisoning. But the early
mention comes out of nowhere and raises all sorts of plot device warning
flags. The resulting poisoning elicited more of a groan than a gasp.
But my bigger beef is with the book's use of codes. This book is supposed
to be about some of the world's most closely guarded secrets, kept safe for
over a thousand years. It's amazing they were kept safe for more than
a week given the skill with which the secret keepers encoded their messages.
I don't remember how long it takes our heros, one of whom is a professional
cryptologist, to figure out that "O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!"
is an anagram. First of all, you'd think that a professional would try
that straight away, just to make sure. But come on -- as soon as you see that
"O" and "Oh" appear in a single inscription you should suspect an anagram.
Consider next the account number for the safe deposit box: 1123581321.
The Fibonacci
numbers jump right out at me (though I acknowledge that not everyone will
be as familiar with them as I am). But no. To quote: "When the Fibonacci
sequence was melded into a single ten-digit number, it became virtually
unrecognizable. Easy to remember, and yet seemingly random."
Ack. Worst of all, the phrase "seemingly random" evokes the spectre
of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, and we know that any reference
to that work immediately calls into the question the credibility of a
publication (consider, for example, my PhD thesis).
But the most absurd
"code" is the message written in backwards handwriting. Most people
who read the book immediately think, "oh look, a message written backwards."
But the Leonardo experts scratch their heads and exclaim, "This language
looks like nothing I've ever seen!"
The lesson is simple. The author is naïve about codes, and therefore
should have avoided talking in specifics. It's quite possible to
talk about codes without describing the codes themselves --
Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver does an excellent job of that
in several places. There's nothing wrong with writing around science
or technology without ever saying how things work; Star Trek thrives
on it. The movie Sneakers does it too, though you have to
forgive a bit of implausible computational magic. The magic in that
case is a concession to the film medium, an allegorical
shorthand for a tedious explanation of the sort of hacking that
would really have taken place. The author
should have read more science fiction before attempting the cryptographic
portions of the book.
And it's all a great big shame, too, because I like the premise of
the book. I enjoy material about Christian sects (I recommend the
third and fourth books in Simmons's Hyperion novels). However,
if you're interested in Opus Dei, the Knights Templar, the Priory of
Sion, and so on, I think that you'd be better off reading the author's
source material than the book he produced from it.
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