Da Vinci Code

So I may be the last person on this earth to have read Dan Browns “The Da Vinci Code” (in it’s german translation, thanks to Eris who lent me the book)

I finished it over the long weekend. As much as I like a good conspiracy theory, this book is so bad, I don’t know where to begin. Although it has some nice ideas (nothing earth-shattering in terms of conspiracies in my opinion) it reads horribly. The cast feels like out of the stories my son (age 8) tells me. And it seems to me (proud parent) that my sons characters have more depth, than the cast of this boy-scout like “Schnitzeljagd”.

I guessed a couple of the riddles. I guessed who “the teacher” was after reading the first paragraph of his first appearance. I hated all the “Deus ex machina” moments (24/7 swiss bank vault, private jet in a hangar). The few that weren’t deus ex (allergies) were so badly disguised, that I just knew how person X would die - and die he did, the way Dan Brown set him up a couple of pages earlier.

Dialogue sucked, motivation of the people highly doubtful, characterisation bad, enough loose ends left in the story to make any 3 months old cat happy.

If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and skip it. If you want to read a good (but sometimes really longish) conspiracy theory, read Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”.

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