Book Review: The Da Vinci Code

This review contains spoilers

The Da Vinci code was a disappointing read. It has poorly written characters, its plot is pointless, and the pacing is all over the place.

Robert Langdon, a symbologist, is called in to investigate the death of Jacques Sauniere, a curator at the Louvre museum in Paris. His investigation turns into a quest in search of the “Holy Grail”, which, in the book, is supposedly a set of ancient documents that reveal the marriage and bloodline of Jesus Christ.

The pacing of the story is strange right from the get go. The first 170 pages take place in a single location, which makes this part of the book feel like an extremely long introduction. By the time you realise that the story has started, the plot had already been advancing for quite some time.

The initial pages are also packed with so much exposition and so many flashbacks that, what is supposed to feel fast-paced and action-packed, ends up feeling very slow and boring. Our main characters just managed to distract the police trying to arrest them, thus buying them around 10 minutes to escape. This is a race against time and the stakes are high. Why are there multiple flashbacks from Sophie’s childhood in the span of these 10 minutes? Why is she narrating her backstory now? Dumping exposition in the middle of a chase is poor writing.

The characters in this book are cardboard cutouts with no depth. I can’t write more than two sentences about each character even if I try. Romance was not at all explored throughout the story, but at the end, our main characters are suddenly in love. From the beginning to the end, our characters learn nothing of value and undergo no transformation. They exist solely as narrative mouthpieces for the author.

The plot in this book is weak and full of contrivances. The plot twist at the end comes out of nowhere, with no prior hints. Leigh Teabing’s “master plan” doesn’t make any sense if you think about it. And the dumbest part is: the police just stop investigating once they arrest Leigh. Why would they not look into all the conspiratorial stuff?

The only reason I continued reading this book despite all its flaws was that I was waiting for the big reveal at the end. I wanted to know what the grail documents contained. Imagine my disappointment when that reveal never came.

The book starts off with our characters being the only ones in the world who can find the holy grail. The stakes were high and they had to decode Sauniere’s messages or the story of Mary Magdalene would be lost forever. But in the end an old lady reveals that “everything is fine” and that “the brotherhood would survive”. If that’s the case, then what was the point of this whole quest that our characters undertook? Their only achievement is returning an empty box to a random old lady. The main characters had a absolutely no impact on the world and things would’ve been exactly the same had they done nothing. I don’t understand the point of this book.

Despite all my ramblings, this book has some merits. It’s an easy read because of how simply everything is laid out for us. The puzzles that the characters had to solve were creative and interesting. I might have enjoyed it more had I read it at a younger age.