Tour guides at Le Louvre are getting continually pissed off by people who have read The Da Vinci Code and have taken its fictional account to heart.
I cannot judge the authenticity of The Da Vinci Code, as I haven’t read it, although I have wryly observed that it there is a mania around it like Harry Potter - the Edinburgh branch of Blackwell’s has a Da Vinci Code board game in their window at the moment. But, if it is anything like another Dan Brown book, Digital Fortress, which I have read, then I feel sorry for the tour guides.
Digital Fortress, without doubt, is the worst book I read this year (if not this decade). I picked it up on a whim - the book was about crypto and the author had been feted a lot in the press, and I could do with some light thriller reading. Big mistake.
I am going to reveal some plot details now… this is technically a ’spoiler’, but it also saves you having to read the book, so I’m saving you a great deal of trouble.
For starters, the research is dodgy. While I am all for artistic licence, completely throwing the entire science of information theory out of the window, and coming up with some magic machine at the NSA that can crack all the world’s codes instantly, is taking it a bit too much. Brown has to come up with some fictional cipher that changes over time that is baffling it, cosntructed by a bitter ex-employee with the co-operation of the boss of the NSA. Our hero has to run round Seville trying to find the solution to the code, while our heroine in the NSA has to get to the bottom of some shadowy conspiracy. And surprise surprise, they succeed at the very last minute, and it ends happily ever after.
The hocus-pocus wouldn’t be so bad, if the book was well-written and had some semblance of a decent plot. Instead, the characters are one-dimensional cliches. All the plot ‘twists’ can be seen coming a mile off. The ‘action’ sequences are tedious recountings in slow motion. The boss turns out to be secretly in love with the heroine of the book (suprise). The holes in the plot are numerous and gaping. The so-called geniuses in the book are all mind-bogglingly stupid. The finale, as the NSA gets broken into, while the horrified cast watch a screen ’seeing’ the defences gradually being worn down by ‘hackers’, in real-time, and then at the very last minute solving the problem and saving the day, is ridiculous.
Oh, and the writing is terrible. It’s as if Jeffrey Archer was his ghostwriter - there’s no cliche unturned, no simile too bland, no characterisation too weak - Brown uses them all. Empathy with any of the characters is all but impossible. Overall, it reads like the book version of a bad Hollywood film, rather than any work of literature in its own right.
It might be that The Da Vinci Code, which he wrote a couple of years later, is actually quite good. But I severely doubt that this is the case - given the author has already demonstrated a total lack of ability to come up with a plot, research the story or even write - for most mortals, it would take a special effort to come up with a book this bad.
