Eco, for example, is a “professor of semiotics” while Brown’s hero Robert Langdon is a “professor of symbology.” And the subject matter of the books overlap: Knights Templar, Masons, Mary Magdalene as Mrs. Jesus Christ, Rosicrucians, etc.. Of course, Eco’s treatment of these hermeneutic obsessions is brilliantly ironic while Brown’s is credulous.
On the other hand, it’s clear from trudging my way through The Da Vinci Code that Dan Brown doesn’t so much understand the common mind as have the common mind. I’ve never read a less confidence-inspiring author, one who radiates so obviously that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. It’s not just the clunky prose style — that’s forgivable in well-informed authors like James Michener and Tom Clancy — it’s the small mistakes of fact and judgment that pop up every couple of pages in the narration. It’s impossible to take the giant conspiracy theories seriously when he gets so many little things wrong.
After reading The Da Vinci Code, the campaign by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to rename the anti-religious as “brights” (on the model of how homosexuals got themselves renamed “gays”) seems particularly hilarious.
Umberto Eco, on the other hand, turns out to be a fine fellow, much more admirable than you’d expect a European postmodernist academic to be.
Actually, a better source of Brown’s books is Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent, and Henry Lincoln’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, John Cape, London, 1982. The authors actually sued Brown but lost in court because they represented their work as actual history, and history is a legitimate source for fiction writers like Brown.
I read The Da Vinci Code some years back and thought it was a B- Grade book but maybe an A Grade screenplay.
That was before the movie. I certainly fumbled that judgment.
Even given my usual skepticism, I have rarely been as disappointed in a book as I was with the Da Vinci Code, given the adulation heaped upon it by reviewers, readers and the media. I agree totally with Djolds1: B-grade all-around.
Agree with this guy about Eco. He’s a clever, good-natured post-structuralist, who deconstructs his subjects with Italianate brio. He writes best-selling novels which certainly don’t to the reader (although they’re not my cup of tea).
I read one-quarter of The Da Vinci Code, repelled in boredom, and scanned the rest to search for some improvement. My conclusion was that to rate the book positively required experiencing a thrill that you had discovered the idea that Jesus had sex and left royal offspring for the ages, which even covers the needs of two opposing ideologies.