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Previous experiences with Dan Brown

I have read three of Dan Brown’s other books, and had decided a while ago to skip on his most famous book to date. Occasionally there are interesting tidbits of information in them, but then on subjects on which I have some knowledge they are inaccurate: how can I trust the information given? For example, in the book Digital Fortress the puzzle left by someone obsessed with the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in World War II gives to stop a computer releasing the secrets of the NSA is “Enter the prime difference between the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima” into a computer. The “answer” is 3 — the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a Plutonium bomb while Hiroshima was a Uranium bomb. According to Dan Brown the “prime” difference is Pu-238 and U-235, and 238 - 235 = 3 — a prime! The problem with this “analysis” is that the radioactive isotope of Plutonium you build bombs out of is Pu-239, not Pu-238. Now the “difference” in the isotope number is not a prime anymore. For a mathematician who memorised exact yields, weights, etc. of these weapons getting the wrong isotopes is ludicrous. The fact that the female NSA agent has made the same mistake is unbelievable. The fact that an editor allows even this high-school level knowledge of nuclear physics slide (or at least, information that can be checked with a cursory glance at an encyclopaedia) is a travesty.

Note that here I am simply criticising on the basis of established scientific facts. There are other avenues that you can use to critique his work, such as believing in Deception Point that having the heroes escape by an underwater volcano blowing up underneath the villian’s boat as being just a tad too convenient. I feel myself to be inclined with that view, but in these cases it is really is each to their own.

Problems with the Da Vinci Code

So why did I read the Da Vinci Code? It was given to me for free, and airports are boring dull places if you have nothing to do. This is also his most famous book, and even as someone who has not read it I know roughly what the claim is. The holy grail is in fact the bloodline of Jesus Christ, Jesus was supposedly married and a real man, being transformed into the son of God by the church after the fact. Whether you believe in it or not, it makes a rather interesting point of fiction to pursue and I figured that it must be a fairly entertaining book to have sold so well.

Wrong. My problems with the book were (primarily) two-fold:

• The book seemed incredibly dismissive of faith in general
• The writing itself was poor

Faith

On pg 370 Dan Brown makes the following comment to defend not uncovering the “truth” about Jesus Christ:
[Text allowed by fair use, as comment is being made, as defined under Copyright Act 1976 Title 17 Section 107]

“Am I? The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”
Sophie looked sceptical. “My friends who are devout Christians definitely believe that Christ literally walked on water, literally turned water into wine, and was born of a literal virgin birth.”
“My point exactly,” Langdon said. “Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.”
“But it appears that their reality is false.”
Langdon chuckled. “No more false than that of a mathematical cryptographer who believes in the imaginary number `i‘ because it helps her crack her codes.”
Sophie frowned. “That’s not fair.”
A moment passed.
“What was your question again?” Langdon asked.
“I can’t remember.”
He smiled. “Works every time.”

The comment that Brown is trying to make [through the character Langdon] seems to be that religion serves a useful purpose in helping people, and gives many people a moral code to work by. If religion works for those people, then who are we to denigrate it? Even though I do not believe in the supernatural, I have no problem with people having their own religion and using it to guide their lives [with the small caveat that they respect my freedom not to believe in their God]. So while I have a great deal of sympathy with the overall viewpoint, the text above comes across to me as smug and condescending. I can only imagine how it must seem to someone that actually does believe in God. In particular I object to

• “…Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”
  I do not believe that the miracles actually happened. However, I would not be as arrogant as to dismiss someone who did believe in the miracles as someone who did not understand their faith. I think that people who are true believers in a religion are using as a way to uncover the truth; now I may disagree that they will uncover it that way, or I may give precedence to the known laws of nature over eye-witness accounts (which, let’s face it, can be notoriously unreliable) but this is a substantial disagreement that I could at least discuss with a rational religious person. What we take as given may be so radically different that nothing useful may come out of the discussion, but to simply dismiss a person who believes the miracles actually happened as not understanding their faith is arrogant in the extreme.
  (I would argue quite vehemently that I believe that they are incorrect because I put a higher value in the known laws of nature, but there is a difference between disagreeing on the truth and thinking that the other side is simply not interested in the truth.)
• “No more false than that of a mathematical cryptographer who believes in the imaginary number `i‘ because it helps her crack her codes.”
  This is the sort of cheap disingenuous trick that works only because the author is arguing both sides, and makes the side he disagrees with weaker. The problem here is that the i is an object that requires the same amount of “belief” as the number 1. Both belong to consistent logical frameworks, and we can model problems in the real world that require the complex numbers. Neither number is a physical entity: you can have one apple or one banana, but you cannot simply physically posses 1 any more (or less) than you can posses i. It is true that you cannot have i apples, but the phase of an electromagnetic wave or the impedance of a capacitor are both represented by complex numbers. The names “real” and “imaginary” are prejudicial names from a few hundred years ago when mathematicians had quite a different view on mathematics. We have moved on since then, but Dan Brown hasn’t.

  It may be easier to see the deception playing out here if we use a more familiar example (or if you are someone who subscribes to the view that “1″ is an invented concept, just like “i”, which is a philosophically defensible view). In any language we invent words like “car” for the purpose of making communication easier, or in the case of a more abstract noun making communication about an idea possible in the first place. Instead of arguing about God, let us say that our protagonists are debating whether or not I can fly like a bird — a statement that is clearly false. The argument is very different, but we can copy the “logical” steps that Dan Brown takes:

  “My point exactly,” Langdon said. “[Believing Damien can fly] has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.”
  “But it appears that their reality is false.”
  Langdon chuckled. “No more false than that of a Englishman who believes in word car because it helps him communicate more effectively.”
  Sophie frowned. “That’s not fair.”

  You are right Sophie. That really isn’t fair.

Writing

When I go off like this people often pull me aside and tell me to relax. It is a work of fiction, not an article in a journal. I would argue that the main point of fiction is to allow us to study idealised situations that would give us a better insight into how we think people should act, and to give us an insight into how someone (like the author) thinks different people’s internal thought process works. This is a personal view, so let us look at The Da Vinci Code under the most lenient possible metric: is it an entertaining read?

I would argue that it is not. Let us take this excerpt from chapter 22 [in particular, note how many times the word "rose" appears]:

…The Rose Line.
Slowly, Silas let his eyess trace the path of the brass strip as it made its way across the floor from his right to left, slanting in front of him at an awkward angle, entirely at odds with the symmetry of the church. Slicing across the main alter itself, the line looked to Silas like a slash wound across a beautiful face. The strip cleaved the communion rail in two and then crossed the entire width of the church, finally reaching the corner of the north transept, where it arrived at the base of a most unexpected structure.
A colossal Egyptian obelisk.
Here, the glistening Rose Line took a ninety-degree vertical turn and continued directly up the face of the oblisk itself, ascending thirty-three feet to the very tip of the pyramidical apex, where it finally ceased.
The Rose Line, Silas thought. The brotherhood hid the keystone at the Rose Line.
Earlier tonight, when Silas told the Teacher that the Priory keystone was hidden inside Saint-Sulpice, the Teacher had sounded doubtful. But when Silas added that the brothers had all given him a precise location, with relation to a brass line running through Saint-Sulpice, the Teacher had gasped with revelation. “You speak of the Rose Line!”
The teacher quickly told Silas of Saint-Sulpice’s famed architectural oddity — a strip of brass that segmented the sanctuary on a perfect north-south axis. It was an ancient sundial of sorts, a vestige of the pagan temple that had once stood on this very spot. The sun’s rays, shining through the oculus on the south wall, moved further down the line every day, indicating the passage of time, from solstice to solstice.
The north-south stripe had been known as the Rose Line.
For centuries, the symbol of the Rose had been associated with made and guiding souls in the proper direction. The Compass Rose — drawn on almost every map — indicated North, East, South and West. Originally known as the Wind Rose, it denoted the directions of the thirty-two winds, blowing from the directions of eight major winds, eight half-winds, and sixteen quarter-winds. When diagrammed inside a circle, these thirty-two points of the compass perfectly resembled a traditional thirty-two-petal rose bloom. To this day, the fundamental navigational took was known as a Compass Rose, its northernmost direction still marked by an arrowhead. . . or, more commonly, the symbol of the fluer-de-lis.
On a globe, a Rose line — also called a meridian or longitude— was any imaginary line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole. There were, of course, an infinite number of Rose Lines because every point on the globe could have a longitude drawn through it connecting north and south poles. The question for early navigators was which of these would be called the Rose Line — the zero longitude — the line from which all other longitudes on Earth would be measured.
Today that line was in Greenwich, England.
But it had not always been.
Long before the establishment of Greenwich as the prime meridian, the zero longitude of the entire world had passed directly through Paris, and through the Church if Saint-Sulpice. The brass marker in Saint-Sulpice was a memorial to the world’s first prime meridian, and although Greenwich had stripped Paris of the honour in 1888, the original Rose line was still visible today.
“And so the legend is true,” the Teacher had told Silas. “The Priory keystone has been said to lie `beneath the sign of the Rose.’”

If you lost count, Brown uses the word Rose 16 times over the course of two pages. This might be forgivable if it was the only time it occurred. Alas, on pages 219 — 220 the word Rose occurs 15 times. There are other less egregious examples scattered throughout the book, and repetition of almost any word like this becomes very distracting very quickly!