The Da Vinci Shuffle



My webmail informs me that my new Shuffle is waiting for me at home. I know I should know better at this point, but I'm a romantic at heart. I believe my new Shuffle is sitting in yet another DHL soft pack, waiting for me to rescue it from between the front door and the screen door. Like Santa Claus and Nintendo's new console, I can't prove its existence. It's just this benevolent matter of faith that they are out there somewhere.

Fingers crossed, this will be the end of the whole damn saga. Eager to plug in the new widget, charge it, fill it with music, and take it to the gym and work Monday so I can drown out the world. Been surrounded by CNN at the gym and the hostile crackle of my co-workers, and I wonder why I have headaches. True, I prolly lose my hearing on the nth repeat of Morcheeba's "Undress Me Now," but it's worth it. Tis better to be deaf after listening to Skye Edwards than to have hearing and listen to office gossip.

Speaking of distractions and matters of faith, I finally got around to reading Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." At this point, with the book hovering in the best seller's list for going on two years (and a major motion picture based on the novel coming this year), it's almost pointless to write a criticism of the title, lest you end up sounding like A.S. Byatt's knickers-in-a-twist attack on Harry Potter or (more apt) Salman Rushdie, who was quoted as saying the novel was "a book so bad it makes bad books look good."

So, I fall back to the critique style of my recent writing classes: say something positive before saying something negative. Here goes.

If you are a conspiracy theorist, history buff, or crossword puzzle addict, this book's for you.

However, akin to "The Devil in the White City," it feels like a glorified book report, but "Da Vinci" feels it has to juice up the eye-catching islands of historical intrigue by throwing in murders, family secrets, religious masochism, and boring tracts of talking-down exposition between characters that we're lead to believe are smart. There's also a "police procedural" feel with the book, where you know (by the Law of Minimal Characters) at the end of the hour, one of the people you were shown has to be the murderer, or in this case the head of the UberConspiracy. It's all very flat when Brown rotates the action to the major fictional characters, and you expect there to be a "Scooby Doo" moment where the villain exclaims "And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling professors/cryptography experts."

The worst thing about "Da Vinci" is that it could have been a better book. The fiction aspect slows down the action, and Brown's obvious raisonneur of hero Robert Langdon is alternatively condensing and helpless. When he's not being rescued by the beautiful French cryptologist Sophie Neveu, he's talking down to her about the religious symbology found in art, specifically Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Brown's so wrapped up in speaking through Langdon that he strips the wonder of discovery of the UberConspiracy from us and makes the exposition feel like a second-rate Discovery Channel episode*. Brown, in my humble and worthless opinion, should have dropped Langdon and focused on Neveu, who gets two earth-shattering revelations about her family history clumsily dropped on her in the climax and denouement. And this for a woman investigating the murder of her beloved grandfather at the start of the story. Neveu had the most invested in the adventure, while Langdon gets dragged along, somehow shoved to the forefront. Imagine "Hamlet" with Horatio in the lead.

Again, it's impossible to talk negatively about a publishing force of nature like "Da Vinci." Hate it and there's a thousand people to take your place who are inspired by the meta-theme that there's more to spiritually (and even iconography) than means the eye, that organized religion isn't all about truth, and the guilty pleasure of when gossip crashes into pious history. As something to inspire further questions and deeper explorations into Gnosticism, or as piece of "Indiana Jones meets Art History 101," it's serviceable. Its popularity, I reckon, comes from a need to belief in a greater spiritual wonder, that the story of Jesus isn't finished, and that the greatest secrets come on a platter of a puzzle handed down to us, ready to answer when we are ready to hear it. There's a seduction to it all, that we are the ones on the cusp to begin a new, more enlightened way of faith (a concept alluded to in the book). It's a shame "Da Vinci" was content to be mired in flat characters and grinding exposition instead of letting us experience that wonder, too.

*It's important to note that "Da Vinci" (for being an historical thriller) has gotten spanked for taking liberties with the subject matter. Whether this is sour grapes from critics, a deliberate campaign to undermine the book, or true...that's up to you.