Lot'sa spoilers aho, kids ...
... so don't read on unless you've already read the book, yada, yada ...
kasuta said:
Brown has said he researched this book meticulously, but just in the brief time I had to skim one of these debunking books, it looks like he either a) didn't research very well or b) completely distorted things for the sake of plot.
Yes on both accounts (though the distortion bit may possibly be due to some other agenda).
Plenty of very religious people have pointed to the factual theological and religious-historical errors perpetrated by Brown, so I'll skip that. I'm not that religious, anyway, but I can certainly see how the neognostic-meets-US-wicca basis that Brown uses to wholly reinterpret Christian history can be offensive.
Also, I'll skip the errors Brown makes regarding Leonardo and his art. Suffice to say that if Brown actually had any concept of Italian Renaissance art, the book would have been called "The Leonardo Code". Not as catchy, admittedly, but correct.
Anyway, now that we're all in secular and non-art mode, let's examine why this rather shoddily researched piece of modern pulp writing doesn't rise above the average modern US thriller, and in fact falls somewhat below:
(1)
Americocentrism: This book is clearly written by an American for American audiences. Preferably Americans who have never been to Europe, checked into European hotels, or come into contact with the French or British judiciary.
How about the bit about the US Embassy as some sort of safe haven for US citizens who've broken French laws? With some sort of personalized flight service for the happy offenders back to the New World? Every day? And this (fictional) preposterous arrangement then protested by a mere French police chief at ambassadorial level?
And what about Fache, a police officer from Paris, getting Kent Police to do his every bidding, brandishing
guns and
holding third-degree interrogations on British soil? Without any mention of, say, the local Chief Constable or indeed even the Home Secretary being involved? Fache completely running the show, as if British forces came under his jurisdiction ... oh, la la ...
And why is Fache referred to as captain, by the way? The proper French term would be
Commissaire.
The answer to all this: US habits, customs and traditions, by a US writer, for a US audience. Fache operates versus British police as a fictional FBI Special Agent would operate against a local Sheriff's/Police department in normal US pulp thrillers. We've all read them. And the US police senior officers are captains and lieutenants, and guns are part of the culture ...
This very specific americocentrism becomes even more damaging to the book's general credibility as regards its more
(2)
General anglocentrism, particularly in the linguistic/cryptographic area: All clues and leads are in the English language. Even when other languages - e.g. latin - are involved, English is always needed to make sense in the brownian universe. This even extends to essential "facts" such as the Mona Lisa = Amon L'Isa argument.
(Which becomes preposterous once examined, because:
(a) Leonardo never gave the title to his work
(b) the original title was in Italian, La Giaconda, and indeed the French title is La Joconde. There would be no reason for this alleged grandmaster of Priory of Sion (a phony claim, BTW, based on the Plantard hoax) to make a pun of his painting in English, a very small language at the time.)
The general gist of having an effectively anglophone couple solving mysteries in France with the help/opposition of people who all speak the English language fluently is partly solved by the author making the Neveu/Saunière/St Clair family Anglo-French to all extents and purposes, and by making French cops and Swiss bankers alike surprisingly bilingual. (Well, it
is surprising to anyone who's ever lived in France, or gone through their school system.)
Of course, the bilingual part as far as the French go would make Agatha Christie or the people behind 'Allo 'Allo blush, basically tacking on kindergarten French to the required sentences. Fortunately this would not appear to be
le suicide professionel for a thriller writer. Ah, the lucky
Monsieur Brown ...
One could go on. But I'm tempted to focus more specifically on less linguistic points and moan about
(3)
The bad research done as regards France. The Hotel de Crillon, for example, is not one mile from the US embassy, but literally
next door. Even if you want to drive all around the Place de la Concorde rather than walk a few steps, and venture onto the Avenue Gabriel or Rue St Florentin (do Langdon and Neveu want to go to the Embassy or the Consular Section? Does Brown actually know the difference?), it's no more than a third of a mile at most by car ...
(Oh, and BTW, when the French police actually want to find and arrest someone in a car, they shut down all the chokepoints in the capital rather than form a blockade at a specific point. Trust me!)
Would a "French police judiciaire cryptographer" (who probably would be working for DST or DCRG and not the Police Judiciaire if she was in the civilian field) really have done cryptographic studies in a foreign country (Royal Holloway, London), rather than, say, at Ecole Polytechnique? Cryptographers tend to be
very highly vetted and studies abroad are
not a merit. Not that Neveu is particularly accomplished, mind, but anyway ...
Well, that's a minor point. But some really
big plot points hinge around some complete absurdities. For example the notion that the fictional Swiss bank in Paris actually would fall under
Swiss banking secrecy laws, and not
French national laws ... ouch!!!
(Would Brown have made the same bizarre mistake if the Depository Bank of Zurich had been located in New York or Los Angeles?)
In a similar vein,
(4)
There's bad research regarding Britain. Brown doesn't seem to understand the intricacies of the British honours system, and Teabing gets an awful lot of leeway considering he's a mere knight in a country where Peers of the Realm quite routinely get sent to prison. Teabing (an anagram of Baigent as has already been mentioned on this forum) even flashes a
knighthood ID of some sort (!) to get into a building. Hehe, ID cards in Britain, and regarding Honours as well ...
He's a Royal Historian (which unlike Poet Laureate, Astronomer Royal etc isn't a real title). Silas gets away from armed British police (which in itself is unheard-of) with Aringarosa, and takes him to hospital with a gunshot wound and the hospital A&E people
don't even call the police which they're required to do by law! Considering Silas has opened fire on British police officers, the Met would certainly not allow him or Arangosa to quietly slip away ...
(Incidentally, no British police officer would pull a gun on Teabing merely for trying to brush past Kent Police. He'd be handcuffed and taken to the station. Firearms would only be used if Teabing had threatened the officers with a gun himself, and in that case, he'd have been unceremoniously shot.)
Of course, theses particular plot points aren't much worse than the Laurel-and-Hardy part where Fache and his men in the Louvre drop everything they're doing to follow Neveu/Langdon (as they think) rather than, say, call for their numerous colleagues on the street to find and detain the fugitives first before leaving the Louvre ...
I could go on, but won't. The errors are too numerous to mention, and this from a pure thriller-writing point of view.
I think everybody's agreed that Brown isn't a new Eco, but heck, he's even making Ludlum and Deaver look positively brilliant.
I don't expect most thriller writers to get most, or indeed any facts right as far as regards the size and shape of Renaissance paintings, or regarding early Christian history, for example.
(Although Brown should have dropped his "Fact" intro in the book and on his webpages for this to apply in this specific case. By alleging that everything he writes is based on fact, when in fact, almost none of it is, he's opening himself up to totally different scrutiny than that normally accorded writers of fiction. His bad.)
I
do expect writers to get simple facts such as European banking secrecy laws or British police jurisdiction correct, as well as the geography of the landmarks of the main location, Paris. Heaven forbid that a French - or British - writer wrote a thriller set in the USA, where all the details where similarly wrong ...
All these simple points are what distinguishes really bad thrillers from reasonable ones, all other things being equal. The Devil's in the details.
That said, grudging respect to Dan Brown for finding the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg.
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