The Da Vinci Code

I’ve been meaning put this review into the blog for a while, and after a bit of a blogging drought, what better way to warm up?
Dan Brown’s book is a good read, but it is about an idea rather than people, so don’t expect much in the way of characterization.
No doubt the leading characters will have more depth when they are played by Russell Crowe and Kate Beckinsale in the planned movie version next year. But that’s the way fiction is written these days – the writer has to create characters who can be played by movie stars, not characters who fire the imagination of the readers.
In fact, very early in this book, Brown drops a big hint that he sees Harrison Ford in the role of his protagonist, Robert Langdon, rather than Crowe – but Ford is getting on these days, and we all know that Crowe will do a good job of giving Langdon the depth he lacks here.
What carries this book forward is the plot, and that is interesting. Langdon is a professor of religious symbology on an enforced quest for the Holy Grail, in the company of a comely French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu.
But as anyone who has read anything remotely connected to the Holy Grail in the last 20 years, they are not going to find the Cup of Christ. Rather the grail is a metaphor for something else that I won’t mention here in case there is a prospective reader somewhere who doesn’t know. The adventure starts with the murder of the curator of the Louvre, and quickly gathers speed when Langdon meets Sophie and goes on the run. He is the prime suspect for the murder, and she has reason to believe that he has knowledge that can tell her more about her family.
The dead curator has left a trail of riddles and anagrams for the two to crack, and part of the fun of The Da Vinci Code is trying to figure them out before Langdon and Sophie do. The trail leads to fascinating places that are richly described, and leads the reader to the Internet to look up The Temple Church in London and the two pyramids at the Louvre. Brown even makes this part easy, because all you have to do is go to his website.
The shoes of the Bad Guy are filled by an Albino devotee of the Opus Dei cult called Silas, which no doubt will be interesting to cast. But it pays off for the reader. Silas is actually the most fleshed out and sympathetic character in the book, even if he is also the most murderous.
The one other character that fascinates is Leonardo Da Vinci himself – although he does not actually appear in the book, his presence hangs over it, and the discussions of the secret codes and puzzles in his paintings are riveting.

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