November 9, 2014
A coworker of mine recently expressed frustration that some other coworkers seem determined to make some things at work as complicated as possible. That's essentially how I felt about this book, about the plot overall and about the "villain" Zobrist's plan.
So I read The Da Vinci Code when it was wildly popular, my junior or senior year of high school. At that time the twists and turns in the plot thrilled me, plus I felt like I was reading a "smart" mystery. Now a (I'd like to think) more sophisticated reader, I have a hard time deciding if the Robert Langdon series is trash lit for smart people, or a shot of culture for the masses. Either way, I found it unsatisfying.
First off, the entire plot doesn't make sense. See, Zobrist was a genetic engineer or something, a brilliant scientist, who correctly pointed out that the world's population is getting out of control. He hires a corporation to "hide" him while he develops an airborne virus that, like, alters people's DNA or something so that like a third of people, forever and ever, will be unable to have babies. Now, this isn't the only instance of over-the-top "science" in this book, and that along with the details on Dante and The Divine Comedy, and Italian art and history is just exhausting. But I think Brown would have had something here if he'd cut out the Italian and Dante stuff, cut out the pointless treasure hunt, and cut out that shmuck Robert Langdon.
I fucking hate Robert Langdon. He is beyond douchey. This was especially frustrating due to the fact that his presence in the situation was pointless. What the hell was the point of the treasure hunt again, and Zobrist's elaborate clues based on his supposed obsession with Dante? I don't buy into his Dante fantasism, which is kind of a big problem because that's the foundation on which the plot is built. Like, why is this scientist obsessed with Dante, anyway? If it were explained, then maybe I would buy into the plot. Zobrist was a fascinating character, a huge creep, which made his supposedly earnest supplications to Sinsky seem unbelievable because he came off really intensely. Think Paris Gellar crossed with Batman. No wonder she called him a terrorist and stormed out.
But since Zobrist supposedly was obsessed with Dante, that brings Robert Langdon onto the scene, who so happens to be an expert on Dante and Dante-inspired art and Florence. But at the beginning of the book, he has amnesia. This turns out to have been induced by some strange drug. He's being played by the organization that's hired to hide Zobrist and blindly help him execute his plans. Supposedly this organization (run by a slimy, amoral worm called 'the provost') is based on one that really exists, and supposedly they help nations to perpetrate mass lies to the public. Way to feed into conspiracy theories. I don't even care.
Zobrist's lover Sienna is recruited by the organization to use Langdon to protect Zobrist's virus (of course they don't know that's what it is, but she does), and she poses as a doctor who "helps" Langdon to "escape" from the "hospital." But she really wants to use Langdon herself to stop the virus, though she doesn't tell him the truth for some reason. Oh, and get this: the virus had already been released by Zobrist before he killed himself. Oops. So why did he need to leave the stupid clues? Why couldn't he send Sinsky a message that said "waych the birth rates" or "nah nah nah nah, I'm cutting down the world's population by 1/3 and you can't stop me, nah nah." That'd pretty much get the point across, right? And if he wanted Sienna to "protect" the virus, as he said in his video, and he wrote to her shortly before his death, why didn't he just tell her it was in Istanbul?
I'm done ranting about this book. It's the second and last Robert Langdon I'll ever read. One last thing that nagged me, though: whenever the character expressed surprise or anguish, their questions would end in the double-punctuation "?!" or "!?" (Brown mixed it up a little throughout). I think that this is acceptable while texting, or even used very very sparingly in other forms of writing. But we're talking like every single page here, since the characters tended to be shocked more than the reader. Now, I could go on to discuss how the female characters were sexist, how Brown gives and withholds details obnoxiously in order to confuse readers, or I could continue to explain why I despise Robert Langdon (who the fuck says "thank heavens" to his agent when he wakes him on the phone in the middle of the night?). He's meant to be like a thinking man's Indiana Jones, but fuck it. I'm done here.
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