The Da Vinci Code: Leonardo Strikes Back
I'm a servant of the thing that's been haunting you. As you walk up the road, it leers down upon you from great billboards. Upon entering a library or bookshop its name will bombard you from all sides. If you switch on the TV it will be there, be it trying to assert itself over smug historians or simply exuding its own smugness and wealth for all to see. And now here I am, with the inevitable and unavoidable: it's a review of The Da Vinci Code.
I held out against reading the book for so long, really I did. As my friends extolled its virtues and competed over how many useless facts they could recall (what idiot with far too much spare time actually counted the 666 panes of glass in the Louvre pyramid?), I basked in the radicalism and anti-establishmentarianism that was Not Knowing Who The Hell Married Jesus. But when the first film poster reared its ugly head on my walk to school, the time was up. As a writer, if there is one thing I won't do it's watch a film based on a book I haven't read - I see it as the ultimate insult to enjoy something that may for all I know be making a mockery of the literature that inspired it. So, very reluctantly, I borrowed a copy from my best friend and tried not to cringe too hard at her gleeful smile over yet another victory for the Dan Brown Squad.
OK, so I have to admit it: my mind wasn't exactly open. I was going into that book with a cynical attitude better befitted to an 80-year-old than a teenager - and yet, even with that admission, I still have to say Dan Brown let me down. Some part of me hadn't quite expected my friends to be raving about absolutely nothing, but it seemed they were. Every part of me cried out that this book was simply one huge clich� - from the phrases used, to the techniques, to the plot itself. I cringed at the way the main characters' pasts were ever so subtly hidden in layers, making them the people they were. I sneered back at the characters' earnestness. The book came close to being hurled across the room several times.
Yes, I could see what had sucked in my friends, and with them most of the Western world - the plot was exciting, the twists admirable, and the buzz from guessing the truth before the characters annoyingly addictive - but I was still left with an emptiness somewhere inside me. It boiled down to this: could a book that had delighted so many, across languages and generations, really be this badly written? Without claiming I could do better, it honestly felt as though Dan Brown was working to a very precise mystery-story formula and substituting pieces of a highly controversial topic into the appropriate gaps. The Da Vinci Code had obviously delivered beyond expectations for so many others - but the only impression I got was one of a Big Fat Anti-Climax.
However, when one of your friends has to be physically dragged past its billboard each morning, it?s going to be rather hard to avoid a film. To tell the truth, I was rather interested to see how they were going to condense the exhaustingly fat paperback into a film that wasn't going to induce multiple comas; so I went along with only a token whimper of frustration. And I'll tell you what is its overwhelming characteristic: my god, that film is long. It went on, and it went on, and just when you thought it couldn't go on any longer, it did. By the end I was scribbling cynical messages to the characters on my leg - I kid you not. An irritatingly accurate memory meant that the only surprise was just how old Tom Hanks had got; I closed my eyes in the self-flagellation scenes, since I can't bear gore; and at many points I got terribly annoyed with myself for going all righteous on Dan Brown's behalf when the film didn't stick to the plot. Nevertheless, it did teach me that I was most terribly unsubtle: despite having finished the book, I had been left with no idea that Mary Magdalene's sarcophagus was underneath the Louvre. Good thing the director panned down to it, for all us philistines in the audience.
I have never been a Christian: this is not a licence to burn that evil, blasphemous book, because that would release unnecessarily huge amounts of greenhouse gases and all those poor trees would have died for nothing. I am in no way connected to the man who sued Dan Brown and lost: this is not a bitterness-fuelled attack. I am simply a citizen who, like all of us in our heart of hearts, wants to be the one who doesn't sell out and won't lower her standards. I'm lost now, branded as one of them forever, but for some it isn't too late. Those of you who haven't yet read or seen The Da Vinci Code - stay strong through the relentless fire of publicity. Hold subversive basement meetings with a secret handshake that can't be infiltrated by the converted. Huddle around a fire made from the copies people have bought you, hold each other's hands and whisper the mantra that will get you through it all: it really isn't that great.
Author: Kirsty Upham
Bolton iJourno group
