With Ron Howard’s movie version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code coming out in a month, I want to offer some thoughts on the book.
First, everyone should read Mark Bertrand on The Da Vinci Code. I agree with most of what Mark, as well as most of what the Salon article he references, say about Dan Brown’s novel. Basically, Mark dismisses Brown as a terrible writer, while the Salon article assumes that he’s a terrible writer and then dismisses him based on the bogus history purported as truth within The Da Vinci Code. All of this stuff is great. Me, I enjoyed the first half of the book and then simply finished it because I felt like I had to. I admit that I felt some tinges of guilt as I was reading it. Even though I reacted with anger that such typical and trite stuff could be so popular, I still kind of liked it. But don’t tell anyone.
The problem is that people tend to dismiss Brown very quickly, in a huff of deserved intellectual highbrowness. Yes, he’s a hack author who basically passed off some very suspect “history” as fictionalized truth. But The Da Vinci Code is also one of the bestselling books of all time. I have gotten emails from Christian groups describing how people have "lost their faiths" over this book, and that we, as Christians, need to know how to combat it or how to minister to people who have had their faiths shaken. My own mother-in-law, who was visiting while I was reading it, wondered why I would read such a blasphemous book. I guess she thought I should have better things to do with my time. While it's easy to dismiss these kinds of responses very quickly, as well, I'm not sure that we should dismiss either of them.
Yes, it's true that Brown is not a great writer. The book is engaging in the way that a silly action movie is engaging (and full of the same number of holes, too). One page chapters are a sure sign that an author is trying to create a false sense of suspense, after all. All of that contributes to its popularity, surely. But what do we do with a book that is so popular because of its false religious/historical suppositions? How do we engage a novel and a culture that is enthralled with the novel? We can’t just dismiss it, because this means that we dismiss the public as a bunch of gullible idiots who are “going to hell” by virtue of their own gullibility. The argument would be something like, “if someone is going to lose their faith over The Da Vinci Code, that person didn’t have real faith in the first place.” There’s something to that argument, sure, but we can’t let it rest there, either. All of these religious refutations aren’t quite the right track either, because why bother reading “history” from either side, when the people involved clearly have such agendas?
Will I go see the movie? You bet. I can’t wait, in fact. I think it will be good, and that’s enough for me to go see a movie no matter how blasphemous it is. Am I a “good Christian” for doing so? Maybe not. But at least I’m “seeking the truth,” as the tag line to the film claims I should do. Hah! That gets me every time I see it. Seek the truth by, well, not believing this movie is truth.
I haven’t rated a book here before, but why not, just so I can compare the book with the movie?
Grade for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: 4 (silly but engaging)
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