MikePadgett.com

Da Vinci Bored

— Hands up who thought The Da Vinci Code was utter guff?…”

Well, I’ll drop my hand now as I need to continue typing this. It’s not that I don’t find the arguments interesting, if I could actually get to them. But they’re buried in the contrived prose of a singularly flimsy little dime novel.

The Mona Lisa: laughing at us

I read Dan Brown’s masterpiece last year, long before I’d heard about the film, and this veritable parvum opus put me off reading his other novels, which they say are substantially better.

I enjoy getting stuck into the kinds of arguments that The Da Vinci Code only hints at. Told artfully, theological or otherwise, these tales are enlightening and frequently frightening.

You might call it embedded fiction. Outstanding examples that spring to mind from the feverish quills of such luminaries as Umberto Eco and the Marquis de Sade.

I was disappointed to find, perhaps predictably, that Brown failed to hit those high notes. What’s more, it came at a time when I was devouring as much primary source Renaissance art history as Blackwells could muster, ahead of a planned (and eventually executed) trip to Florence.

What’s more, you can now suffer new and improved and in technicolor guides to The Da Vinci Code. You can take in the sights of Paris with a Da Vinci Code walking tour. You can buy a supplementary copy of your dog-eared, moth-eaten Brown book that’s peppered with illustrations of Leonardo’s works.

The juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous.

The reduction of centuries of high culture to 300 dots per inch.

The Raphael Mysteries. The Michelangelo Cipher. The Hidden Titian.

The Opus Dei terrorist threat.

OK, so no-one suggests that Brown writes literature, but I would gladly go out and buy a copy of something that elegantly spins a strong yarn of threaded with theological intrigues.

Now that would be something: a serious spin-off.