Mona Lisa Smile

In middle school, I was a little obsessed with stories of history, myth and symbol. (My double major in college was no coincidence.) One of my favorite authors as a kid was Elizabeth Peters, mainly because she wrote Indiana Jones-esque adventure mysteries with nerdy female protagonists.

My cousin, who will graduate from middle school later this month, had a copy of The Da Vinci Code, so I read it my last day in California. (Actually, I read half of it, and then he came home from school, and then I had to fly home, so I bought it at the airport and then finished it.)

Back to middle school. The Da Vinci Code reminded me a lot of Peters' The Dead Sea Cipher because it's basically the same idea. Actually, DVC also reminded me a lot of The Forever King, a book I really enjoyed as a teenager. They both deal with modern incarnations of ancient predictions, and what daydreaming adolescent doesn't like that?

DVC isn't particularly well-written, plausible, or shocking. The characters are all well-tested types: the American in Europe who unwittingly is caught up in a sinister plot; the academic as keeper of ancient wisdom; the strong-willed female who carries the burden of a traumatic memory; and yes, even secret societies (the same ones that always recur: the Knights Templar, with a shoutout for the Masons). I even got half the "codes" on my own, including the mysterious scene Sophie witnesses.

But Brown at least does a good job of withholding information from the reader and then suddenly revealing it at the end of a scene. His chapters are short, and he switches from the good guys to the bad guys to keep the reader wondering what could happen next. An old literary device, but a reliable one.

Overall, I liked it. The basic "secret" put forth in DVC is by no means a new historical or theological theory. It's been suggested before, many times. (There's even a Dar Williams song, orginally written by Richard Shindell, which I think I overplayed in my younger years.) It's just never been disseminated like this before.

Actually, there isn't just one "secret" in DVC. Aside from the suggestions about Christ's life, the ideas about the sacred feminine, goddesses, and symbology are nothing new either. They were kind of pounded into the reader's brain, sometimes condescendingly through Langdon's flashbacks to teaching courses, where the reader becomes one of his students and "learns." Then again, I've read a dozen too many books on cultural theory and analysis, (which, incidentally, is also why I think Chuck Klosterman is too superficial). I've read far more works that go into greater depth.

So if this is what the masses are reading, this is awesome! Anything to get more people talking about how thought patterns are normalized.

Don't think I'll see the movie, but the book was good fun.