Bad writing

Compared to the other books on the bestseller rack, I'd say DVC is rather good writing, at least on the mechanical level. Descriptions, dialogue, pacing - all above par.

People complain that the characters are cardboard, the facts weren't researched very well, the plot is not nearly as plausible as it could've been. On those levels it's maybe not the greatest writing, but then again, it is a thriller, and it is fiction.

When a book sells as well as The DaVinci Code has, it's probably more educational to figure out what the author has done right, rather than what he's done wrong.
(my $0.02)

Unimportant said:

When a book sells as well as The DaVinci Code has, it's probably more educational to figure out what the author has done right, rather than what he's done wrong.

Click to expand...

An excellent point!

I can tell you right now what Dan Brown did right in The DaVinci Code: He made readers want to turn the page to find out what happens next.

It does get slated mercilessly for its bad writing, and deservedly so. In terms of its storytelling, it clearly does grip people and as Yog says makes you want to turn the page; myself, I get so annoyed with the clunky prose and Mary Sue-isms that I can't get past the third chapter.

I think also--it has been on the bestseller list since I was in diapers. I always look at it and say, Yeah, it was good. But it wasn't THAT good!

You will often hear of the debate between Plot and Character in a novel (you can do a search in this forum and find exactly such a thread). The DaVinci Code is an example of a story that has opted to focus on plot over character. It is also great evidence that, while both are clearly better, you can do very well with just one - if it's the right one.

James D. Macdonald said:

I can tell you right now what Dan Brown did right in The DaVinci Code: He made readers want to turn the page to find out what happens next.

Click to expand...

True. But he also fails in a sense that I don't want to read it again.

It doesn't hurt, either, that he taps into a body of mythology that lots of people are already interested in.

But the point is is doesn't really matter what we as writers think of it, the general public loved it and it was an entertaining read. Isn't that the whole idea?

I haven't read it, either, and probably won't. However, the public doesn't always judge a book by how good the writing is, or J. K. Rowling would still be poor. The fact that it has sold extremely well tells me that people are finding in it the answer to some compelling question they have. Could someone who has read it hazard a guess as to what this might be?

Zane Curtis said:

It doesn't hurt, either, that he taps into a body of mythology that lots of people are already interested in.

Click to expand...

That's one way to put it. Here's the basic list of objections:

1. Bad history.
2. Bad art history, bad religious history, bad theology, bad textual scholarship, bad bad bad all over.
3. Stupid use of cryptology.
4. Extremely offensive religious bigotry.
5. Claiming a wholly unjustified degree of factuality.
6. Thanking respectable sources in the frontmatter while listing highly dubious sources in his website bibliography.
7. Knowing better and doing it anyway.
8. Making Sandra Miesel semi-famous.

Dan Brown didn't so much research as plunder Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Dell, 1982), a theoretically nonfictional book which combined clever but hardly ground-breaking research with some judicious speculation to put forward a theory which I doubt the book's own authors entirely believed.

What Holy Blood, Holy Grail actually demonstrated is that over the last century or so (it's hard to date this, because recent believers forged documentation and planted it in research libraries), some people in France have believed that the Merovingian dynasty was descended from Mary Magdalene and Jesus -- which is, you will note, a very far cry indeed from demonstrating that the Merovings were descended from JC and MM.

To put that claim in perspective, the earliest chroniclers of the Merovingians, who at the time they were writing were a millennium-plus closer to their subject, said that the supernatural ancestor claimed by the Merovingians was a sea-monster. Apparently it was a well-known anecdote at the time. There was this ruler named Chlodio or Cloio, the son of Faramond or Faramund. One day when Chlodio and his wife went swimming, she was molested by a "Quinotaur," a variety of sea-monster. She subsequently gave birth to a son named Merovech or Merovee or Meroveus, who founded the Merovingian dynasty. The story is obviously your basic heathen kingship cult claiming a god-like origin for their founder, like Romulus and Remus being fostered by a wolf, or the emperors of Japan being descended from the goddess Amaterasu.

I have nothing against ancient heathen kingship cults per se, but when you're talking about a dynasty that was supposedly Christian in every possible sense of the word, claiming descent from a sea-monster would be a very odd thing for them to do. It's also hard to believe that no one so much as hinted at the JC/MM aspect of the Merovingians' divine descent at the time that their dynasty was being deposed on grounds of obvious incapacity, and the Carolingians installed in their place.

Short version? The Priory of Sion/Holy Blood, Holy Grail claim is a load of codswallop. Furthermore, it's known to be a load of codswallop -- as in, the parties responsible have admitted to forging the documents and sneaking them into libraries. Anyone who does real research on the subject has to know that. Dan Brown absolutely has to know that.

I very much blame Dan Brown for making his story-boosting research and sources sound vastly more significant than they were, and for not mentioning the admissions of forgery. It was a piece of vanity on his part, unnecessary for the telling of the story, and it caused a great many people to conceive false impressions of the matter. In fact, his research leaned heavily on a bunch of newage woo-woos. You can find the whole thing discussed here.

But that's only part of it. Dan Brown plundered two other related bodies of mythology. One is gnostic, pseudo-gnostic, semi-gnostic, neo-gnostic, and wishful-thinking-gnostic speculations. That's an ancient can of worms which has been repeatedly added to by worm enthusiasts. You can claim anything about gnosticism, because there's very little that some gnostic somewhere hasn't said or implied. In the meantime, it'll give your work that intoxicating whiff of ancient secret knowledge.

The third source, which many of you will have encountered without identifying it as a body of mythology, is anti-Catholicism. It exists. Not everything that gets called anti-Catholicism is part of that mythology, but there are definitely mythologies of anti-Catholicism. If you don't believe me, try typing isis nimrod babylon into Google and looking at what turns up. That's only one branch of it. Here's another. There are lots more.

Traditional anti-Catholicism is where Dan Brown got all that crap about the church conducting a centuries-long campaign of systematically suppressing and altering scriptural texts. It's an old libel. If you're Jewish, it may help you understand some of the reactions to The Da Vinci Code if you imagine a bestselling thriller which assumes there's a factual basis to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. If you're Mormon, imagine a bestseller in which murders committed by a secret corps of Danites are casually sanctioned on an everyday basis by the LDS church hierarchy. If you're of Oriental descent, imagine Sax Rohmer got published.

Dan Brown doesn't care. If something sounded cool, he threw it in. I'd find it all much easier to forgive if he hadn't gone out of his way to give the impression that the novel had a factual basis.

Why do people like it? I thought the best summary of that was a line I ran across a while back in an Amazon review of the book: "Will make stupid people think they're clever." And why not? It worked for The Bridges of Madison County.

His cryptology is specially stupid. Fibonacci numbers? And it took an "expert" so long to figure it out? PLEASE. And the (spoiler...) flipped-around texts? It took me 3 seconds to figure it out...

His target audience must be 3rd graders. Apparently, there are a lot of them in the world...

p.s. yeah, I totally agree: it makes stupid people feel smart. that's why it's a best seller.

holy cow hapisofi...you sure nailed dan brown...you go! maybe hes a devil worshipper and wants to spread rumors about jesus? lol j/k!

maestrowork said:

His cryptology is specially stupid. Fibonacci numbers? And it took an "expert" so long to figure it out? PLEASE. And the (spoiler...) flipped-around texts? It took me 3 seconds to figure it out...

His target audience must be 3rd graders. Apparently, there are a lot of them in the world...

p.s. yeah, I totally agree: it makes stupid people feel smart. that's why it's a best seller.

Click to expand...

When I'm riding the subway and just want to zone out, I work cryptograms. Of late, I've gotten a lot more people ask me about them. Of course, since they've learned their crypto from TDVC, they also ask me what key I'm using to break the code ...

13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5 is bloody obvious. I would spot it instantly. Even if you don't recognize it in that form straightaway, once you've got the two-digit numbers defined by spaces, all you have to do is put the digits in order to know what you've got. It's not well scrambled, either. You've got that telltale 1, 1; and though 3, 2 and 8, 5 are in reverse of their usual order, they're still grouped with their accustomed partners.

The sequence would be easily crackable even if you didn't put in spaces at all. If you handed me 1332211185 to play with, I'd probably start by putting it in order: 1111223358. If I were having a reasonably clever day, I'd notice 1, 1 and 2, 3 and 5, 8. Heck, just noticing 5, 8 might be enough. From there it's only a step to checking whether those are the requisite digits for the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. Not a tough problem.

Encryption via mirror reversal is just dumb. Spotting one flipped-over letter cracks the whole. Like Pepys' crude cipher, or Making Light's disemvowelling, Leonardo's mirror-writing hides nothing. It just makes it harder to read.

"His target audience must be 3rd graders."

From what I understand (and I may well be wrong) the biggest selling books are those that target the lowest common demoninator. In this case, not literally third graders, but the average adult reader who has the reading/comprehension abilities of a 12 year old*.

*based on what I was told by my local newspaper when I was writing a scientific column for the lay reader.

This will make me sound really evil, but here goes...

If nothing else, Dan Brown's writing reassures me. I have read DVC and I tell myself, "Well if THAT can get itself published..!"

Unimportant said:

"His target audience must be 3rd graders."

From what I understand (and I may well be wrong) the biggest selling books are those that target the lowest common demoninator. In this case, not literally third graders, but the average adult reader who has the reading/comprehension abilities of a 12 year old*.

*based on what I was told by my local newspaper when I was writing a scientific column for the lay reader.

Click to expand...

That's a standard newspaper thing. Their audience is geographically based, so they have to shoot for a general audience.

Novels don't work that way. A lot of perennial bestsellers are highest common denominator: books that are so good on all counts that everyone likes them.

Sooo...(the minority raises a tentative hand) I liked the book....

Don't Shoot!!!

j/k. Seriously though it was a page turner. I don't really understand why people take offense to certain entertainment pieces (I am thinking Da Vinci and the Passion of the Christ) because it is just that, entertainment.

People talk about the anti-Semitic message in Passion...well not if you are intelligent enough to understand that it is a MOVIE. Or in this case, just book. It was d*mn good marketing that made Da Vinci what it is, a controversy...and that sells.

And yes, I have heard all the arguments on "What if someone is not smart enough to realize it is just fiction?" Well, quite frankly, there has never been a successful revolution by a band of idiots. So I am not so worried.

I understand not enjoying the book on a mechanical POV, or even a research POV, but it is still fiction, the story is untrue, and just that, a story.

HapiSofi said:

If you're Jewish, it may help you understand some of the reactions to The Da Vinci Code if you imagine a bestselling thriller which assumes there's a factual basis to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Click to expand...

Interestingly enough, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, one of Brown's major sources, cites The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a legitimate and truthful historical source.

inexperiencedinker said:

Seriously though it was a page turner. I don't really understand why people take offense to certain entertainment pieces (I am thinking Da Vinci and the Passion of the Christ) because it is just that, entertainment.

People talk about the anti-Semitic message in Passion...well not if you are intelligent enough to understand that it is a MOVIE. Or in this case, just book. ... it is still fiction, the story is untrue, and just that, a story.

Click to expand...

Just a book? Just a story? Technically untrue, and therefore inconsequential?

What are you doing in a venue devoted to discussing fiction writing, if you think fiction doesn't matter? Do you truly believe that if something is entertaining, it has no further effect in the world?

HapiSofi I adore you.


A novel needs to be a monumental lie that has the absolute ring of truth.

inexperiencedinker said:

People talk about the anti-Semitic message in Passion...well not if you are intelligent enough to understand that it is a MOVIE. Or in this case, just book.

Click to expand...

Oh, so if something is a movie or a book, it can't embody any bigotry or spread any. Thanks so much for enlightening us on that point.

Rowling

cattywampus said:

I haven't read it, either, and probably won't. However, the public doesn't always judge a book by how good the writing is, or J. K. Rowling would still be poor. ?

Click to expand...

I wouldn't go that far. I think Rowling is a very good writer in every sense of the word. Dan brown is a good storyteller who has tapped into something extremely conrtoversial, and I know far more peole who have read DaVinci Code because of the controversy than because of the story or the writing.

But J. K. Rowling is both a good writer and a good storyteller.