darstec

Many years ago, I read an article (magazine pre Internet) or book that stated the Leonardo used the same person as model for either Jesus or John (I forget which but believe it was Jesus) and Judas. The models were used many years apart. That is how much that persons life had sunk. I don't know how true that might be but it does make for an interesting anecdote.

mephie00

I find it a little odd how much attention The DaVinci Code is getting. It is a work of fiction, and yes the author does claim it's based on facts. The people who critique the book are either Christians that object to it for conflicting with religious doctrine or historians and biblical scholars who object to factual errors (like Da Vinci having anything to do with it or where he came up with the figure of "80" non-cannonical gospels).

The attention Dan Brown is getting would be like Michael Critchon getting all kinds of publicity because numerous creationist orginizations were objecting to his claims of dinosaurs ever existing while paleontologists from across the nation demand to know where the hell he got the idea that diplodocus had a neck frill and spit poison.

johno

Of course you are exactly right, not all of them are supported by Californian pimps, but not one of them is supported by an English gentleman. I have the advantage of you here, being an English gentleman and therefore writing from personal knowledge. English gentlemen eschew vulgar ostentation, and it is difficult to be more vulgarly ostentatious than to own a stretch limousine.

There are lots of common people in England, and some of them become rich: they wear very expensive clothes, and ride about in stretch-limousines, but being rich does not make them gentlemen.
The idea of an English gentleman owning a stretch limousine is as incredible as the idea of President Bush discussing the finer points of the literary style of Henry James with his staff.

I took issue with the description of vaulted archways in the Louvre. The archway is supposed to be between two adjacent rooms. The fact that there is plenty of sloppy writing on the internet is not an excuse for Brown's sloppy writing.

Some of us realise that English evolves, and usage that is appropriate for plays written in blank verse in the 16th century is not necessarily appropriate for modern novels written in prose. Perhaps I did not make my criticism clear enough. The word 'renowned', in my opinion, is over-used throughout the book. It is superfluous with respect to Sauniere. Who, it will be revealed later in the book, is some kind of a curator at the Louvre and will, ipso facto, have been renowned before having been appointed to the post.
I did not rewrite the review which was posted in 2004, it gave my view of the book which I thought was not excessively condemnatory. I did give it three stars.

The first sentences of The da Vinci Code are:
Here are two suggested rewritings:

Rewrite 1:

An old man staggered, alone, into the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. He lunged at the nearest painting he could see: it was huge. He grabbed hold of the frame and heaved at it; it came free, crashing down on top of him.

Rewrite 2:

It was late at night. The last visitors had left hours before. The silence was broken by the sound of irregular hurrying footsteps echoing in the vast emptiness of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. An old man was tottering towards the nearest picture he could reach. The fronts of his shirt and coat were covered with blood. He almost fell as he lunged towards the picture. He grabbed at the frame, noticing, even in his agony, the fingernails-on-chalk feeling as his nails scraped the gilded gesso of the frame. He heaved at the picture, but it would not move. He felt the frame slipping through his bloody fingers. He rubbed his hands on the sleeves of his coat and tried again. He was very tired, very weak, but one last effort, just one... He gripped the frame as hard as he could, driving his protesting fingernails into the gesso for every last atom of purchase, and heaved again. As he heaved he felt a surge of hot blood from the stab wounds in his chest and belly. Did the picture move? He heaved again, throwing his weight backwards, then, slowly, an oak-tree falling after the final stroke of the axe, the frame creaked, parted from the wall, and slowly, slowly accelerated, toppling on to him, crushing him, in slow motion, it seemed, to the floor. He lay beneath the wreck, trapped under the canvas, choking in the dust of smashed plaster. He heard the clamour of alarms. His body cried out to lie still, but there was still something to do.

Is this better? Different anyway.

Good writing probably lies somewhere between the two contrasting examples.

The piece you quoted

was my satirical rephrasing of the Apostle's creed spoken weekly, or more often, by members of the catholic church, a rephrasing that encapsulates the theological implications of Brown's thesis. I should have thought that anybody with a passing knowledge of christianity would have recognized it. Remove the repeated nots, and it is revealed.

johno

The Bishop

First of all - the stretch limos. They are not used by English landed Gentry, and they are not used by nouveau riche arrivistes. They are used by office Christmas parties. I've never ever seen or heard of a "stretch Jaguar", and any such object would have to be custom built. It's safe to say that if Teabing is the kind of Englishman he is depicted as being he may well own a plane, and he may well be able to fly in and out of private airports, but he very probably does not own a "stretch Jaguar".

Anyway.

I actually don't have any quibble with this attitude towards the DaVinci Code myself. Except to point out that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks made one of the greatest movies ever made that celebrated humanity's technical and scientific abilities to make the greatest achievement of mankind. And now they've made a film celebrating, well, bad education and the wildest speculation possible in opposition to all known scholarship and evidence.

I don't have to click the link to know that a scenario that involves "Mel Cardinal Gibson" is not necessarily a deeply researched piece of factual information. Neither need it be! For all I know, this guy got the word preferiti from reading Dan Brown's book! I've never seen the word in any real catholic reference work, including Eamon Duffy's history of the entire Papacy.

I didn't say that people under consideration to be pope would not be described as "candidates" in the normal course of people writing about the process. Of course they are. What I said was, "there is no slate of candidates" (and if I didn't, then I meant to). Brown states as FACT that there are four cardinals chosen to be candidates, in the sense that only those four names are on a putative ballot paper, or only those four names would be acceptable as votes, and it describes those four candidates as "preferiti". This is absolutely false. There are no set "candidates" and there is no "slate". Each cardinal simply writes down the name of the person he would like to be pope, on a piece of paper and then puts it in the counting box. Here's something you might find interesting: that name doesn't actually have to be a cardinal!.

Not to point out the obvious, but there is actually a clear writing quality distinction between using "renowned" in dialogue (as Shakespeare, of course always and only uses) and using it in a descriptive passage in a fictional book. Johno would hardly be prohibiting the use of the word "renowned" from a speech made by any character, as he would not prohibit the use of any word in speech! He is saying that using "renowned" in description of a fictional character is bad writing, and I agree with him.

As long as I'm allowed to discount the word "rumoured". Obviously these things became rumours as soon as Dan Brown wrote about them. Anyway, no religious treasure was ever rumoured to contain "Q", which is a scholastic construct that nobody would even have heard of from 100CE till about 1900. Q is not "legendary", it is a hypothetical document, a scholastic construct. It's nothing more than a hypothesis to explain some of the material common to Matthew and Luke that isn't in Mark. Nobody expects ever to find an actual manuscript. It would have been a "sayings Gospel". Describing that as "Allegedly it is a book of Jesus's teaching" is misleading. It's perfectly possible that Q was never even written down. The Vatican does not "believe it exists" in the sense that it is an extant bit of parchment, it may (or may not) believe there originally was a document from which Matthew and Luke got their "quotes" from. No, nobody ever claimed Jesus himself ever wrote it. And no spiritual leader has ever kept a chronicle of his own ministry in his own hand, that has always been the job of acolytes, whether it was Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul or Mohammed.

The upshot is that Dan Brown seems to think that there are old references to a document called Q that may or may not contain Jesus's teachings, and which may still exist as a piece of paper, possibly with Jesus's own handwriting on it. There are no references, in fact, to any such document, in any other historical writings whatsoever. Q is entirely a deduction based on what is common to two gospels, possibly three including G.Thomas. And it is called Q in reference to the fact that it would be a source document, if it ever existed (Q standing for quelle - "source").

Fiction is fiction, but if it purports to include some facts, it should get those facts right.

I think there has been plenty posted here about the quality of the writing, even before Johno gave us an example of his own deathless prose style. But to answer Haran's original question, I will cite the only book in the same genre that I have actually read, and that is The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth. I haven't read the book of The Day of the Jackal, but there is sufficient in the film to indicate the same level of research. What Forsyth does is demonstrate a knowledgable person's knowledge. Dan Brown makes his supposedly knowledgable protagonist (he's supposed to be a Harvard professor) as ill-informed as he is. Forsyth is convincing in his explanations. Brown is unconvincing in his. And Forsyth knows how to avoid cliché.

Also, it's simply the plain and simple fact that there can scarcely be a page of any of Dan Brown's books in which he doesn't demonstrate that, whatever piece of information or knowledge he is trying to convey, he skim-read whatever the source of his information was, and immediately got hold of the wrong end of the stick. For all I know, Forsyth is talking out of his hat when he describes the advisability of using small cut diamonds as negotiable tender for a ransom demand, but he's damn convincing! Brown writes howlers, like the Aztec thing, that anybody can see is wrong.

Amaleq13

It is my understanding that, while certainly hypothetical, Q is generally assumed to have been an actual text utilized by both authors. Again, IIRC, this assumption is based upon the similarities in wording between the two which tend to suggest a shared text rather than a shared oral tradition that would be expected to result in more variation.

That is not entirely accurate, either. Given that Papias' description of "Matthew" does not appear to refer to the canonical Gospel, the possibility that the collection of "sayings of the Lord" he mentions might refer to Q has been suggested by some scholars.

johno

I have been posting here for months now, and still fail to remember the need to mark anything other than simple declarative statements of fact with smilies. The first example was pared down, the second as clotted as I could make it. I should hate you to think that either represented my normal style. However I think both avoid the clunky diction and the vulgarity of Brown's writing.

Of course the whole beginning is nonsense anyway. When I accidentally set off the alarms in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I merely leant across a silken rope, and just touched the wall beside the Vermeer that I wanted to look closely at. Alarms in internationally important museums of art respond to potential attempted theft long before anybody has pulled anything off a wall.

johno

The Bishop

Amaleq, I was not actually trying to cast doubt on the original existence of Q, only the way DB represents it.

The last thing that I didn't mention because my post was getting too long. I now own three Dan Brown books, only two of which I have read in full. Each one has the exact same prologue - someone is being described being in the throes of their own death, and they are desperately trying to stay alive long enough to put some sort of clue out so that the secret they are guarding isn't lost forever.

THAT. IS. BAD. WRITING. It's like, it's so "formulaic", it's Dan Brown's own specific formula! How bad is that?? That you actually generate all your books from your own formula?

darstec

Sorry, but my experience was only at the National Galleries in Washington DC. Unfortunately that must not be considered an International gallery as (though it was frightening to realize) one could actually touch the paintings in some rooms without setting off alarms. Being somewhat clumsy I stood a respectful distance away from them lest I accidentally trip or something, except for one painting where I was trying to compare the brush strokes against a copy I possessed.

They were according to a guard, wired to detect painting movement. He also pointed out the cameras. I take it you are not an expert in alarm systems as you seem to only be familiar with one type. We can see from your attempt at rewriting Dan Brown's passage you are definitely not an instructor nor a writer of literature, as you failed to include even half of what was conveyed by Dan Brown in the passage you attempted.

What vulgarity? You seem to use a definition of the term differently than other writers might.

darstec

Ah, I understand now, no True Scotsman.

Are we to further understand that you yourself are landed gentry with a pedigree? Perhaps Dan Brown got his ideas from Lives of the Rich and Famous. It seems from watching that show some of your pedigree in the UK are not aware of your rules.

I would assume that when architectural sites describe something, even if it is on the Internet, they would know what they are talking about. While I cannot claim to be an architect myself (I can't even draw a straight line with a ruler) I could lend you books from my personal library that describe such features as vaulted archways. But then I suppose you know more about the subject than those authors. Or is just sloppy literature on behalf of the architects?

OK, so use of the word 'renowned' in your opinion is poor literature? Could you point to some authoritative work that agrees with you? If not then as J. Paul Getty said, "One's opinion is only as good as one's knowledge."

Read the book again. It was not ipso facto. But then what can one expect if you skim a book rather than read it?

Both illlustrations are very, very poor in comparison to all the information conveyed in DB's paragraph. Don't take up writing as an occupation.

Good writing lies far beyond anything you have illustrated. It is difficult to write that without seeming to resort to ad hominem, but clearly your writing does not illustrate what is taught in writing classes.

It could also be tongue-in-cheek, what a Fundie would say when mocking those who do not believe as they do. There was nothing in your ditty to illustrate otherwise. In fact you underscored it when referencing conspiracy buffs. But then I can forgive you as writing is not (as you have amply demonstrated) your forte.

cad0830

I think the onlu thing that I find interesting is the fact that the writers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are willing to sue over the "historical" contents of the book. Forgive me if I am wrong, but if that is the case, then they have to admit they made HBHG up--you can't copyright historical fact. IMO, those writers are actually admiting that they made their stuff up. Their archaeology and research was shotty, to say the least.

You'll have to forgive, I cannot remember names, but here are my major concerns/some Christians' concerns about the book:

1. In an interview, Dan Brown stated that the historical contents of the book were completely true. I am not sure of the date, but do know it was an interview with Matt Lauer.

2. Dan Brown's willingness to state that ancient cultures all venerated women, especially in Roman civilization. Romans, I quite remember from ancient history, regarded women as property, much the same as slaves. Some way to venerate women.

3. His assertations, so to speak, that Da Vinci drew anyone other than who Da Vinci himself recorded in his notes in the Last Supper are wrong. It is no secret that Da Vinci chose models, but saying Da Vinci had a code or such is not actually accurate. Most people who have studied his writing who also have knowledge of special education say he actually may have had a learning disability, hence the writing.

4. The dating of the gnostic gospels. Other than the Gospel of Thomas, the dating of the gnostic gospels are no where near the dating of the current canon of scripture. Most scholars agree to a date of all of the canon being before the turn of the first century, with Revelation being written around 95 AD. Recent speculations have suggested a date of around 70 AD, but I think the dating of this is just high hopes to bring Revelation closer to the life of Jesus. Certainly, the writer of Mark was probably a contemporary of Jesus. Other gnostic gospels, such as the Gospels of Judas and Mary Magdelene have a date in the 3rd-4th centuries at best, giving a better reason why they were not included.

5. The current Bible was already in circulation in most areas with Christians before the Council of Niceae, making the assertation that Constantine made the Bible ridiculous.

6. The Priory of Sion was a fictictious group. The person who gave the list including the Issac Newton and Da Vinci put himself on the list and was convicted of fraud in the 1950s. Nice person to believe there.

Christians have a real problem with a man saying his historical facts are facts even in a fiction book because they aren't fact. He, like the writers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail did not study his history fully.