Left Behind vs. The Da Vinci Code: Let the Battle Royale Begin - Part 2

Special guest blog by Jon

Two things strike me by reading by Kim’s reviews. The first is that I’m married to one heck of a writer. The second is that there is no way my comments here are going to be as long and involved as hers. Two strong temptations exist when reviewing books like The DaVinci Code or Left Behind. The first is to be savagely critical, holding up each line, character and idea for mockery. A “hatchet job,” so to speak. The other is to take an intellectually critical position. Here one would approach the source material as a serious attempt at literature and try to speak to it in a similar fashion. Honestly, I can’t muster enough enthusiasm for these books to write out a sustained blog entry in either of those ways. I’ll just offer some comments as they come into my mind.

I suppose my biases should be mentioned first. I’m a Christian, a political centrist and registered Democrat, a fairly intellectual guy and a regular reader of the kind of genre fiction that focuses heavily on plot and consistency (science fiction and mysteries). I think that between these four attributes I was bound to be offended on some count by both of these books. That being said:

Left Behind:

A good rule for writing fiction: do NOT name your main characters “Buck Williams” and “Rayford Steele.” Honestly, you’ve lost me already if you use names like these. Twice we’re told that he’s named Buck because he “bucks the trends.” Give me a break – this sounds like the kind of nickname someone gives themselves, not a real-life name. That’s not the worst part, though – the Antichrist’s name is… Nicolae Carpathia. Put that name into your mind and let it swirl around like you’re tasting a bit of red wine. Then spit it back into the glass. Nicolae Carpathia? The first image that comes to mind when I hear that name is (no joke) Count Chocula. Perhaps I’m focusing a bit too much on the characters’ names, but I think they are representative of two things: the low-level of writing and the stuck in the Cold War tone of the whole work (note the very American “Buck” facing off against the Slavic “Nicolae”).

Left Behind starts out with a great premise: people all over the world have just disappeared and no one is quite sure why. In particular, the action begins aboard a jet plane in the middle of its flight. Excellent! We’ll get to see the pilot vanish, right? And the remaining passengers and crew will have to deal with landing the plane themselves, right? Unfortunately… no. The pilot stays on board. A few people in the cabin disappear. The biggest bit of tension is that the remaining passengers are confused and have to be calmed down. Again, this may seem like a small point in the particular, but it illustrates another fundamental weakness: for a so-called “thriller,” almost all of the action occurs off-screen. We are told that planes are dropping out of the sky, cars are overturning, the city’s water supply is running out (which makes no sense to me, but whatever), and on and on and on. But we never see any of this stuff happening! I could understand if a movie version cut out these things for budgetary reasons, but there’s no reason not to show this stuff in a book. Oh, well.

How does Left Behind work as a Christian novel? Well, it does and it doesn’t. The idea of the Rapture as a backdrop for a novel is a good one. I think a great book could be written with the same plot and setting as Left Behind. I can’t say I found Left Behind very spiritually uplifting or instructive, however. For one, three of the four salvation experiences that appear in the novel seem rather self-centered to me. Rayford becomes a Christian because he doesn’t want to be left behind again, Chloe Steele more or less gives in to salvation for the same reason and Buck Williams accepts Christ so that the Antichrist won’t be able to hypnotize him.

No, I am not making that last one up – Buck looks into a conference room, sees Carpathia, asks where the bathroom is located, goes in, becomes a Christian, goes back to the meeting room, and is successfully warded when Carpathia attempts to hypnotize him by looking him in the eyes. What in the world is salvation? Nothing more than “I don’t want to go to hell” and “Now the Antichrist can’t use the bogeyman eyes on me”? The only salvation experience that has any ring of truth occurs offstage (of course). This is when Bruce Barnes, the token “Christian who was left behind,” realizes he had been holding back from fully committing to God and rededicates himself. I would have happily traded in the three salvation scenes to have seen this one portrayed.

The last comment I have about Left Behind is that despite planes crashing, murders occurring and the Antichrist relocating the UN headquarters to “New Babylon,” this was the single most boring book I’ve ever read all the way through. How can you possibly make a boring book with this premise? I can easily see writing a bad book, but not a boring one. That’s an achievement (of sorts).

The Da Vinci Code:

I have very little to say in favor of this book. If Left Behind was much too boring, The Da Vinci Code is much too exciting. I can accept that the two main characters have to run everywhere. They’re wanted by the police, after all. What I can’t accept is that they are solving these secret codes while on the run much of the time. In an early scene Robert Langdon (a better name than Buck Williams, for sure) is trying to escape the police by fleeing the Louvre. Halfway down the stairs, however, he realizes that “Oh, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!” must be an anagram for “Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!” He then turns around and runs back into the museum to find the Mona Lisa. Seeing as this was one of the “codes” I wasn’t able to figure out before the characters did, I was certainly impressed with Langdon’s prowess. But I just have a hard time believing in this sort of calculation, particularly when it is compounded by the fact that the same anagram was thought up and written by a man in his last minutes of life.

I found the theology of this novel too confusing to be offended by it. I had difficulty not laughing at one section that reminded me of two schoolgirls gossiping: “I heard Jesus is in love with Mary Magdalene I heard he wants to have HER BABY! !” Yes, Jesus and Mary had babies together and their descendants are living in France. The Priory of Sinon needs to protect the family’s privacy, though, and they’ve been doing so for a thousand years now.

I wonder what they’re scared of. I’d rather read about Jesus’ kids in the paper than Martha Stewart or Kobe Bryant. Or is the horrible secret that Jesus’ kids are… FRENCH!!!

“The horror… the horror…”

Seriously, though, I’m realizing now that it’s not that I don’t have a lot of positive stuff to say about The Da Vinci Code, it’s that I don’t have a lot of anything to say about this book. It’s a mediocre thriller that attempts to shock by spouting out all sorts of quasi-historical and fully hysterical jabs at the Catholic Church. I can honestly say my favorite bit of this book is the cover, which is a striking montage of the Mona Lisa and some incredibly complex code (ok, it’s written backwards – the characters take several pages to decrypt this highly devious ruse).

I’ve been writing about these books for an hour and a half now, I can’t waste any more time of my life on these books, I’m going to stop writing. Looking back it appears I’ve been rather harsh to these novels, which was not my original intention. I guess I just read better stuff usually (and much of my tastes veer towards “non-literary” books, so that’s saying something). I guess the final I thing I have to mention is the Left Behind Board Game, which looks faintly intriguing, in a train wreck sort of way. If they ever make The Da Vinci Code into a board game, it should definitely involve both running and solving anagrams. That would probably be a more entertaining experience than reading either of these books.

(Thanks to anyone who read down this far and to Kim-Loi for the invitation to appear on her blog.)