Chris Chelser's Blog, page 27

The Bare Bones of… “Gethsemane Hall” (book)

I warned you this book would make it here. Hopefully the ghost of its unsatisfying ending will stop haunting me now.

What: “Gethsemane Hall” by David Annandale.

Why:  I hate seeing great story potential crash and burn, and this one is still nagging at me.

Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!

Because the sting is in the tail with this one.

Summary:

“Gethsemane Hall” is a classic haunted-house story where nothing is what it seems, and it’s all real. The cast consists of the owner of the house, now a grieving widower who is falling from faith, his best friend, a paranormal researcher who believes in ghosts (and her assistant), a paranormal researcher who is a sceptic (and his assistant), and a disgraced FBI agent who only wants to clear up the mess and save her career. So what is the mess here?

The house is. It is a massive estate near a small English village. The grounds are said to be where Saint Rose lived and died, so the place literally has a saintly reputation. The owner, Gray, hasn’t been there for years, but after the tragic death of his wife and daughter, he felt drawn to the place.

Unfortunately a man recently killed himself in the house, supposedly scared to death because of the haunting he was investigating. Seeing as this man was a former FBI agent, said agency doesn’t want any publicity linking them to paranormal research and sends a discredited agent to debunk the rumours. To that end, two more paranormal researchers are brought in: one is convinced ghosts are real and that the house is sacred, and the other has put his money on magnetic fluctuations being responsible for it all.

They are both wrong.

A series of hauntings leads to the discovery of a long flight of stairs leading to a cave system below the house. In one of those caves, the group discovers a sarcophagus, which turns out to contain… a flight of stairs. That leads into a cave. With another sarcophagus. And evidence of a bloody cult that thrived on pain and suffering, courtesy of an enormous reptile.

The cult is gone, but the reptile is the house – or at least that is what I understand from the descriptions. It is also a new god, and it draws humans to it to feed on both their pain and suffering, and supposedly their flesh, because no corpse lasts long enough to be discovered, never mind receive a proper burial. Of the cast and the entire village, only the FBI agent survives to become the reptile god’s evangelist. Like Saint Rose was before her…

Story Skeleton:

A typical horror story, I’m afraid. Maybe I’ve been unlucky in my search, but in my experience, horror stories have a slow build-up that needs about one third of the story to introduce the cast and how they connect, one third to introduce the site where the horror will take place, and the last third of the story, where everything escalates and all the featured characters die, except one.

In that respect, Annandale doesn’t break the mould, but he invests serious story time and energy into setting the cast and introducing the house itself. When the hauntings begin in earnest, the story picks up pace and raises interest. It is creepy, it is enticing and I really wanted to know how he would put his story elements to use.

Until the first person dies and credibility is under heavy fire: paramedics are called in, but even though the only access route to the site of the body is almost too narrow for one person to pass through, the paramedics and their equipment effortlessly move down that route. Then it turns out the body has vanished. It had been horrendously mauled and scattered over a wide area, but it has vanished. Without a trace. The paramedics – standing in a cavern with no light and a lot of panicked people – call it a hoax and leave, against effortlessly.

That kind of inconsistency stings. Why not make the scene so that calling the paramedics is evidently futile and doesn’t happen? The story doesn’t stand to lose from cutting the paramedics out.

Immediately after this scene of stairs   cave   sarcophagus chain of events from before is repeated exactly. If this was meant to be a deliberate pattern, its justification for the story’s sake doesn’t show.

As the story works up to the climax, the characters run up and down the whole route several times. After the first mention of how difficult the path is, it causes no further hindrance and only serves to make the location seem scary and complicated. The result, alas, is neither.

The escalation had an interesting premise, too. The idea that something worse than Hell is the only life after death, is scary in itself, but the reptile god being responsible for waking and slaughtering the whole village without leaving any trace whatsoever is more than my suspension of disbelief can manage.

Lesson learnt:

I love the premise of a house that is actually haunted. I loved the horrific revelation of what lay at the root of the hauntings, but a good premise depends on execution to become a great story. Outrageous escalation such as “Gethsemane Hall” deploys is a genre convention. This I know. Given the many 3 and 4 star reviews, “Gethsemane Hall” meets the expectations of the horror loving population.

However, rules of convention do not mitigate the absence of consistency and storytelling tactics. Still I feel it has far more potential than its ending gives us.

Mini-review

Gethsemane Hall by David Annandale

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Began promising. Took too long to take off, and finally crashed in a fire of the ridiculous inconsistencies and implausibilities that too many horror stories suffer from. The premise was good, but deserved better treatment.

This poor, derailled story might make an interesting one for ‘Bare Bones’, just to see how it went wrong.

The Bare Bones of… “Jurassic Park” (novel)

What: “Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton.

Why: Because the book is so much deeper than movie!

Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!

Since I don’t think there is anyone on the net who doesn’t know the overall story.

Summary:

At first glance, that overall story is very basic. A rich guy finds a way to resurrect dinosaurs, makes a dino-zoo on an island, but the insurance insists a couple of experts vouch the island is safe. It isn’t, and one employee’s sabotage doesn’t help. The carnivores do what they do best, resulting in all-round mayhem. Not everyone is dead in the end (the dino’s certainly aren’t), but the body count is considerable.

So far the familiar part of the story.

In the book, however, the dinosaur island is only a demonstration of Crichton’s more profound story. The evident danger the dinosaurs pose serves the main storyline, while the concept of dino’s living in modern times serves to spice up what is otherwise an apparently uninteresting plot: the core of the story is the island’s security system.

Because it fails. Not just the epic computer meltdown that features so prominently in the movie, but far subtler failures, like faulty presumptions. The dino’s are all female and cannot reproduce, but nature will take its course and soon the investigators find eggs. Hatched eggs. Of carnivores. Another misfit is that the state-of-the-art computer system counts the dino’s, but only to the number there should be. Any number above is ignored and not displayed, so that this reproduction taking place goes unnoticed for too long. Back-up systems that work well on paper, but don’t stand up to real life. And only then the sabotage – and humanity’s inherent stupidity – is thrown into the mix, with disastrous consequences. The insufferably arrogant mastermind of the dinosaur breeding program has just enough time to realise that this was perhaps not such a good idea before he is eaten by a contingent of his own creations.

Oh, and some dino’s have already made it to other islands nearby. Islands in habited by humans…

Story Skeleton:

Crichton tells his story based on fractals. Quick explanation: fractals are patterns that can be repeated endlessly in such a way that a cluster of patterns combined constitutes the same pattern as the original elements. Therefore by enlarging this into infinity, the same pattern repeats itself into infinity.

“Jurassic Park” has a staged structure. In the first stage, the basic pattern is introduced. In the second, the pattern is enlarged to the next stage, so several of the basic patterns together form the new pattern.

The basic pattern, Crichton shows us, is solid and dependable, and the second looks just as well-thought out. He demonstrates this by means of the an island park featuring live dinosaurs, and all the security measures that have been taken to make sure the project and the animals remain under human control.

But as the fractal pattern extends to the next stage, the inherent mistakes in the basic pattern become visible: the technology is not foolproof and nature will not play by human-imposed rules. Animals get sick because their habitat is not right for them, and… no population will remain all of the same gender if nature can help it. Creatures will procreate. So nature exploits the human-introduced element (amphibian DNA in the dinosaurs) to solve this problem (in some species of amphibians, individuals in a population can change gender is circumstances demand this).

Again the fractal expands a stage, and the inherent mistakes in the pattern are compounded further still: the computer system fails to keep track of all animals, and the animals have moved to ‘off-limit’ parts of the island… to breed. The main characters discover that the system underestimated natural instincts, both in the animals and in the humans – human arrogance but also basic greed which leads to sabotage.

The failures in the pattern are now so extensive that they cannot be brought back under control, because the system is being crippled by thousands of tiny mistakes at the most basic level of the pattern.

Extending the pattern one more time, those compounded mistakes reach critical mass and then entire system – consisting of the island and how the dino’s were meant to be kept under control while keeping human visitors safe – collapses.

The result is bloody disaster. Because the subject of the system has an appetite, the story ends literally in blood and carnage. However, the system failure that Crichton described is exactly how tiny mistakes in, for example, aviation safety can eventually lead to a situation where an aircraft crash becomes an unavoidable fact.

Lesson learned:

I love the study of pattern behaviour, so this book is one of my favourite stories, with or without dinosaurs. My bias aside, the lesson in storytelling that Crichton teaches is profound.

Two weeks ago we saw how Dan Brown uses uncomplicated plots to introduce complicated subjects to his audience. In “Jurassic Park”, Crichton does the opposite: he uses an uncomplicated subject (dinosaurs = dangerous) to explain and demonstrate a very complicated concept (fractals and system theory) to his audience.

The benefit of this method is that you reach audiences on multiple levels. Those who want sensation, get rampaging dinosaurs and will be satisfied. Those who want a more intelligent story, get the system theory and will be satisfied. As such, “Jurassic Park” is a very good example of how to write a story that appeals to a wide audience with vastly different interests.

Plus it’s a lesson in marketing: a book on system theory won’t sell nearly as well as a book about dinosaurs wreaking havoc!

The Bare Bones of… “Jurassic Park” (book)

What: “Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton.

Why: Because the book is so much deeper than movie!

Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!

Since I don’t think there is anyone on the net who doesn’t know the overall story.

Summary:

At first glance, that overall story is very basic. A rich guy finds a way to resurrect dinosaurs, makes a dino-zoo on an island, but the insurance insists a couple of experts vouch the island is safe. It isn’t, and one employee’s sabotage doesn’t help. The carnivores do what they do best, resulting in all-round mayhem. Not everyone is dead in the end (the dino’s certainly aren’t), but the body count is considerable.

So far the familiar part of the story.

In the book, however, the dinosaur island is only a demonstration of Crichton’s more profound story. The evident danger the dinosaurs pose serves the main storyline, while the concept of dino’s living in modern times serves to spice up what is otherwise an apparently uninteresting plot: the core of the story is the island’s security system.

Because it fails. Not just the epic computer meltdown that features so prominently in the movie, but far subtler failures, like faulty presumptions. The dino’s are all female and cannot reproduce, but nature will take its course and soon the investigators find eggs. Hatched eggs. Of carnivores. Another misfit is that the state-of-the-art computer system counts the dino’s, but only to the number there should be. Any number above is ignored and not displayed, so that this reproduction taking place goes unnoticed for too long. Back-up systems that work well on paper, but don’t stand up to real life. And only then the sabotage – and humanity’s inherent stupidity – is thrown into the mix, with disastrous consequences. The insufferably arrogant mastermind of the dinosaur breeding program has just enough time to realise that this was perhaps not such a good idea before he is eaten by a contingent of his own creations.

Oh, and some dino’s have already made it to other islands nearby. Islands in habited by humans…

Story Skeleton:

Crichton tells his story based on fractals. Quick explanation: fractals are patterns that can be repeated endlessly in such a way that a cluster of patterns combined constitutes the same pattern as the original elements. Therefore by enlarging this into infinity, the same pattern repeats itself into infinity.

“Jurassic Park” has a staged structure. In the first stage, the basic pattern is introduced. In the second, the pattern is enlarged to the next stage, so several of the basic patterns together form the new pattern.

The basic pattern, Crichton shows us, is solid and dependable, and the second looks just as well-thought out. He demonstrates this by means of the an island park featuring live dinosaurs, and all the security measures that have been taken to make sure the project and the animals remain under human control.

But as the fractal pattern extends to the next stage, the inherent mistakes in the basic pattern become visible: the technology is not foolproof and nature will not play by human-imposed rules. Animals get sick because their habitat is not right for them, and… no population will remain all of the same gender if nature can help it. Creatures will procreate. So nature exploits the human-introduced element (amphibian DNA in the dinosaurs) to solve this problem (in some species of amphibians, individuals in a population can change gender is circumstances demand this).

Again the fractal expands a stage, and the inherent mistakes in the pattern are compounded further still: the computer system fails to keep track of all animals, and the animals have moved to ‘off-limit’ parts of the island… to breed. The main characters discover that the system underestimated natural instincts, both in the animals and in the humans – human arrogance but also basic greed which leads to sabotage.

The failures in the pattern are now so extensive that they cannot be brought back under control, because the system is being crippled by thousands of tiny mistakes at the most basic level of the pattern.

Extending the pattern one more time, those compounded mistakes reach critical mass and then entire system – consisting of the island and how the dino’s were meant to be kept under control while keeping human visitors safe – collapses.

The result is bloody disaster. Because the subject of the system has an appetite, the story ends literally in blood and carnage. However, the system failure that Crichton described is exactly how tiny mistakes in, for example, aviation safety can eventually lead to a situation where an aircraft crash becomes an unavoidable fact.

Lesson learned:

I love the study of pattern behaviour, so this book is one of my favourite stories, with or without dinosaurs. My bias aside, the lesson in storytelling that Crichton teaches is profound.

Two weeks ago we saw how Dan Brown uses uncomplicated plots to introduce complicated subjects to his audience. In “Jurassic Park”, Crichton does the opposite: he uses an uncomplicated subject (dinosaurs = dangerous) to explain and demonstrate a very complicated concept (fractals and system theory) to his audience.

The benefit of this method is that you reach audiences on multiple levels. Those who want sensation, get rampaging dinosaurs and will be satisfied. Those who want a more intelligent story, get the system theory and will be satisfied. As such, “Jurassic Park” is a very good example of how to write a story that appeals to a wide audience with vastly different interests.

Plus it’s a lesson in marketing: a book on system theory won’t sell nearly as well as a book about dinosaurs wreaking havoc!

“Kalbrandt Institute” snippet

Adan had been prepared to discover that the keys to the gate and the front door no longer fitted, but they did. When the front door popped open, he tentatively pushed it open, careful not to make a sound in case his return had yet to be detected. No draft passed him as he entered. A good sign. In the study, the clock struck the hour. All was dark, as it should be. Or…?

Adan’s breath hitched when he glimpsed a sliver of light shining under the parlour door. From the outside, the windows had all looked dark, but no matter how often he blinked, the light was still there. When at last curiosity overcame trepidation, he inched closer. The parlour door opened by itself as if to invite him in.

The light came from a single lamp that stood on the parlour table. Next to it lay a large sheet of what appeared to be thick paper, as well as a small black object that shone in the light. A warm breeze encouraged him to come closer.

From file F/25852/YA, Paris 1849.

“6 Reasons to Add the Bodleian Library to Your Book Bucket List”

Sharing this great blogpost by Goodreads because yes. 6 times yes!

“6 Reasons to Add the Bodleian Library to Your Book Bucket List”

Cheers,

 

P.S. If there is anyone who can teach me how to integrate web pages – and if that is at all possible – without stealing the thing, please drop me a line?

The Bare Bones of… “Inglourious Basterds” (movie)

What: “Inglourious Basterds” by Quentin Tarantino.

Why: Tarantino’s love of gratuitous violence is not my thing, but I love dark humour, weirdness and good stories. Violence aside, he delivers just that. This movie of his stuck with me in particular for its sheer audacity where genre conventions are concerned.

Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!

Summary:

France, World War II. Landa, a German SS officer has tracked a Jewish family hiding in a farmhouse. In an interesting conversation with the famer, Landa confirms his suspicions, and the Jewish family beneath the floor is murdered by Landa’s soldiers. Only the teenage girl Shosanna manages to escape, but not without getting noticed.

Four years later, American-Jewish soldiers, led by Aldo Raine, come to Europe to ‘scalp’ the Nazi regime. Literally. They do not so much kill as butcher the German soldiers they find. With exception of one, who is allowed to tell the tale to his superiors, albeit with a Swastika carved in his forehead.

In Paris, Shosanna – having assumed the name Emmanuelle – and her boyfriend Marcel run a cinema. A young German sniper named Zoller has his eye on her, but she keeps refusing him. Avoid him is more difficult, as Zoller is the star of ‘Stolz der Nation’, a propaganda movie that he convinces Propaganda Minister Goebbels to show at Emmanuelle’s establishment. Full of hate, Emmanuelle/Shosanna is not keen to host a Nazi party in her cinema, but considering that Hitler himself and various top-ranking officers will be attending, it does provide a golden opportunity for revenge.

The plans for the movie premiere reach the ears of the British intelligence. Actress Bridget von Hammersmark plans to meet in a small café with the Basterds, but there are German soldiers in the establishment as well. Although the latter are drunk out of their minds, they are sober enough to recognise that a real German would order three drinks by sticking up his thumb and two fingers rather than three fingers and not thumb (a true fact, which is a detail I love). The Americans are called out and they end up in a shoot-out in which everyone but Raine and Hammersmark die.

The show must go on, however. Raine and two of his men who can pass as Italian film crew will attend the party at the cinema, with explosives strapped to their bodies so they can blow up the Nazi high command. Their infiltration is a stellar show of second hand embarrassment, since Raine in particular is so over the top it is almost credible. More problematic is the presence of Landa, who has good reason to believe that Hammersmark was at the café where that shooting took place, and is therefore a traitor.

Emmanuelle and Marcel haven’t been idle either. Emmanuelle barricades all the doors in the cinema and has edited a piece of footage into the propaganda movie to announce to the audience that they will die there and then. Zoller is still flirting with her, fails again and they get in an altercation as she works. Shots are fired and they both die. But the edit is in and when it begins to run, Marcel, standing behind the projection screen, sets fire to the stack of highly flammable nitrate film – of which a cinema has plenty!

The infiltrated Basterds in the audience manage to escape, but not to save their lives. Using the explosives they smuggled in, they make sure that the whole cinema blows up sky-high, with almost everyone inside.

Almost everyone. Landa survived and, because that is the sort of thoughtful man he is, has prearranged the terms of his surrender – or rather desertion – to the Allied forces. But before he is handed over, he is intercepted and a Swastika is carved in his forehead.

Story Skeleton:

Tarantino made fame with “Pulp Fiction”, another movie in which he twisted the standard concept of storytelling by weaving a number of only marginally related story arcs into one whole that, to some extent, makes sense. The drugs and the shootings I could do without, but such a bold change I can appreciate. “Inglourious Basterds” is the only other movie of his I appreciated to the same extent. That is in part because of its historical setting – always a favourite of mine – but more so because it is evidently not a run-of-the-mill-historical story.

In the historical genre, the story fits within the actual historical events. Setting is accurate, events and characters are often fictional, but fit the time in which the story takes place. Where the accounts of history are incomplete, the storyteller may speculate, but that speculation has to stay true to the facts we do know.

A matter of genre

“Inglourious Basterds” is a great example of a genre called ‘alternate history’. In this genre, history is not treated as an unshakeable fact. I like to distinguish ‘alternate history’ from ‘alternate universe’, because in the latter the rules of science are changed (for example, a story set in our world, past or present, but with the additions of dragons: Naomi Kovac’s “Temeraire” books).

“Inglourious Basterds” is a great example of a genre called ‘alternate history’. In this genre, history is not treated as an unshakeable fact. I like to distinguish ‘alternate history’ from ‘alternate universe’, because in the latter the rules of science are changed (for example, a story set in our world, past or present, but with the additions of dragons: Naomi Kovac’s “Temeraire” books).

When it comes to alternate history, the storyteller only deviates from history as we know it. In this, he has only has three options for his story arc:

Partial divergence: the story starts with or on the premise of an existing point in history, deviates from factual events, but ultimately falls in line with known history once more.
Complete divergence: the story starts on the premise of an alternate history and tells a story in that alternate setting, possibly – but not always – reverting back towards a more recognisable course of events.
In-story divergence: starts with or on the premise of an existing point in history and from there diverges from the historical sequences of events to arrive at a completely different outcome – with all due consequences for the world after the story ends.

The first two options are most common, because they are, in a way, safe. The storyteller can speculate about the most outrageous or poignant concepts and events that eventually – and usually that is the joy of such stories – ties back into the ‘our’ course of history by a clever and credible plot twist. Very nice, very entertaining.

The third option is rarer. Everyone knows the course of history (by and large, anyway), so a wild deviation from that will feel fake and incredible. So if it is done, it tends to involve low-key events that would not change our present as we know it. Or not by much.

Lesson learned:

Killing Hitler before he canonically killed himself classifies as a big, world-changing event. So with the above experience in mind, I spent most of his movie watching out for the little tell-tale signs that would betray how the assassination would fail. Because, as we all know, Hitler did not die in a cinema fire.

Such clues were abundant. The antagonist, Landa, is very smart and conniving. Wonderful! A true adversary and therefore a true obstacle to the protagonists. Said protagonists, however justified their thirst for revenge, are ruthless butchers. Raine has a seat-of-your-pants kind of smartness, but his success stems from being brazen and carrying a bigger gun more than wit. The infiltration at the cinema goes so wrong for them on so many levels that you can hardly believe they will succeed. Emmanuelle is a third party influence to be reckoned with, but her plan is born from desperate opportunism rather than meticulous planning. She gets a chance, she takes it. All in all, enough reasons the assassination will fail.

I must confess that until the cinema indeed exploded with (almost) everyone inside, I was convinced this would be another ‘partial deviation’ story. I howled with laughter when Tarantino proved me wrong.

Therein lies the lesson of this uncompromising movie: play with the audience’s expectations. Know what they think they will see, let them believe that is what they see but keep at least two major options open until the hammer falls. That is how you keep an audience at the edge of their seat.

Kalbrandt Institute snippet

Okay, when I planned to write  15.000 words this weekend, I knew had I probably bitten off more than I could chew. But, aim high and you will always get more than you would have achieved otherwise. Which is true: 6.000 words is not a bad count for two days productivity, and Sunday isn’t even done yet.

So to celebrate, here is a small – and very much a first draft – taste of what I have been working on this weekend:

Kalbrandt’s jaw worked. Every fibre in his body burned. He spat down his bile of contempt at the corpse. “Kyrillos Tzavaras, I should have killed you twice over for that, you son of a whore!”

“He is dead!” Angela cried. “He’s already dead. Why desecrate his body, too?”

Kalbrandt snorted. “Bodies are objects, tools discarded when broken. There is nothing to desecrate here.”

“Is that what you will say of me when I am gone?”

“It is what I will say you for your body, yes.” When that caused a tear to run down her cheek, he put a finger under her chin and made her face him. “You have known me all your life, Angela. You know how I think. And you know better than to make the mistake of believing that your body and you are the same thing.”

This is a piece of the 5th and final short story integrated in the main plot. I love this stage of a book. The plot is about to reach its conclusion and all the foreshadowing and details are coming together.

Except for the few that I’ll leave for the rest of the KI books

Take care,

Housing in 19th Century Paris

In “Dark Eyes”, Mercedes and Eric own the building with their shops on the group floor and their own appartment on the second floor, while the floors higher up are rented out to students and house the servants.

For those of you interested in learning more about who lived where and what their apparments might look like, I found a wonderful blog-post about Parisian housing in the 19th century:

Parisians at Home and the Secrets d’Alcôve

Be sure to check out the related links at the bottom of the page as well.

Enjoy!

The Bare Bones of… “The Da Vinci Code” (book)

What: “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown.

Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!

Summary:

Robert Langdon, an academic specialised in symbols and symbolism, is in Paris for a lecture when he is called to a murder scene. Jacques Saunière, a renowned curator who had an appointment with Langdon but never showed, is found dead in the Louvre, his body put on display beside a riddle written in his own blood. One of the police officers involved is Sophie Neveu, a cryptographer trained by Saunière.

At this time the reader is already aware that someone else has killed Saunière, namely a very religious albino by name of Silas. The involvement of the religious organisation Opus Dei is also revealed, but how all the pieces connect is, of course, a mystery for now.

Sophie sneaks Langdon out of sight and warns him that he is a suspect for the murder. She helps him escape the Louvre, and from there on they embark on a search for the answer to Saunière’s riddle while chased by the French police.

Sophie, not only trained by Saunière but also his granddaughter, discovers her grandfather has sent them on a treasure hunt. And a treasure hunt it is. She and Langdon follow clue after clue, no matter how far-fetched or remote, to discover that Saunière was the main keeper of a great secret: the Holy Grail, or Sangreal.

In the meantime, the albino is still busy fulfilling his divine mission, which includes killing the other three keepers of that secret.

Sangreal, however, can be both San Greal (Holy Grail) or Sang Real (Royal blood). It is true that a lot of speculation exists on this, but Dan Brown goes all out. In the rest of this breakneck treasure hunt that takes Langdon and Sophie from France to London, every symbolism of the holy feminine in existence in European history is tied together towards Mary Magdalene and the possibility that she was the Christ’s wife.

At this point I was very happy to have purchased the illustrated version of the book, since most of the symbolism Dan Brown brings up is visual: drawings and paintings (including Da Vinci’s, obviously), statues, ornaments, etc. Having a reference to what we are meant to see helps to follow the clues Langdon and Sophie are following, if not their reasoning.

Numerous riddles, puzzles, symbols and double-crossings later, the great secret is revealed: Sophie is not Saunière’s granddaughter, as she always believed, but his ward. After the religious and occult symbolism, we are now treated to a touch of Freemasonry. In the Rosslyn church in Scotland, Sophie is reunited with the people who have sought to protect her as a child, and she is given the family she thought she had lost when she as young.

And she learns that she is the last surviving descendant of Mary Magdalene and therefore, so it is suggested, of Jesus Christ himself.

The French police officer turns out to belong to the Opus Dei, and with the bishop responsible for ordering the albino to murder the people he has. Langdon and Sophie are cleared of the murder charges and Langdon returns to Paris with one last riddle: where are the bones of Mary Magdalene? Connecting the dots (quite literally) he follows the treasure hunt back to the Louvre, where it is suggested that her remains are entombed deep below the inverted glass pyramid of the museum.

Story Skeleton:

I’m a sucker for stories involving occult mystery, so I was onto this book like a cat on fish when this came out. In my defence, I had never read a book by Dan Brown before this one, so I went in without knowing anything about his writing style. By the end, I was entertained, but not satisfied. The reason for that was the story structure.

For all the commotion at its release, “The Da Vinci Code” is really nothing more than the average thriller. Yes, the subject sets it apart from the crowd, but beyond that the novel is a relatively simple action-driven ‘plot boiler’: a story consisting of a series of action sequences strung together, wherein each ends with a cliff hanger which must be solved and the solution thereto initiates the next sequence.

It’s a tried and tested way of storytelling you will find in just about every action movie, but I’m not sure if it lends itself to a story that floats on cross-cultural history and religious symbolism. Mysterious events and hidden knowledge wrapped up in a book-long chase give the impression of an intelligent story, but the high-speed action hardly does the message justice. Something is going to get short changed, and it’s not the action…

Nevertheless, Dan Brown deserves merit for two things:

Firstly, he didn’t end the story by letting the Secret go up in flames. The Secret of sangreal was hidden before the story and stays hidden afterwards, but it is not destroyed by circumstance, as some stories in this genre are known to do.

Secondly, he wrapped up at least Langdon’s story by answering the final question: ‘why does anything in the story matter?’ Most plot boiler-style thrillers I have read don’t bother with a justification beyond ‘that is what this character does’. That may be entertaining while it lasts, but not a satisfying read.  Dan Brown gave his main character more credit than that, although one can argue about his style.

Lesson learned:

Plot boilers are relatively uncomplicated story structures. The different conflicts don’t run parallel to each other, but come one after the other. First one problem, then the next. It is a comprehensive structure that makes even a challenging subject like that of “The Da Vinci Code” accessible to the mainstream public. Accessible and thus more appealing. That makes the plot boiler a perfect means to introduce complex and expert concepts to a wide audience. In short, blockbuster material!

 

Next week I’ll hold the spyglass to a type of story with only two possible endings…