kippurcritiquesbadbooks | the Code gets drunk.

the_norseman suggested a drinking game:

Lets make the Dan Brown drinking game!

Take a drink every time:
* A name has a "cute" meaning.
* Someone does something idiotic.
* A character begins a rambling monologue.
* Something happens, but you're not told what.
* He gets something utterly wrong.
* The truth is precisely the opposite (make it a double).

Keep going until the book makes sense, or you pass out.

I think this is an utterly brilliant idea. So, lift up your glasses and find the wine! It's our Dan Brown Drinking Time!

Silas has a car. It's a black Audi that cost 56,000 (okay it doesn't actually say that but still...) He's at the church where the keystone is. I keep on thinking of Delaware because that's the Keystone State. (That's your random fact for the evening). Silas muses on how finding Delaware will make the Opus Dei that much more powerful before musing on his childhood. It's a lovely sob story. He doesn't remember his name, he left home at age seven from an abusive and drunken father who beat him and his mother. And then his father killed his mother... blah, blah, runaway, blah... gets thrown in prison... miracle sets him free after twelve years..he thinks of himself as the ghost... he's rescued by a Priest who names his Silas. I think that deserves a drink.

Then we go to Mr. Priest in the Airplane Who Uses Cell Phones While Flying and Makes the Plane Crash in a Fiery Ball of DOOM. He muses about how the Teacher told him not to contact Silas for the plan to succeed.

And that's it.

Really. The entire chapter. Now, I know that there's something to be said about letting your readers know about your villains to make them sympathetic, but really this is sort of like what Paolini did with Durza. He just infodumps Silas' entire life on us, instead of showing us why he does what he does through out the story. We're saturated with all this information, which is hardly new for a villain's background (in fact it's rather cliche. How many villains out there were beaten and abused before being rescued by someone and were then turned into a weapon?) It's ridiculous, really. And it completely stalled the story, again. I mean, here we were hoping to see Silas actually do something and instead he mopes and angsts. And I don't care! Move on with the damn story all ready. The second part with the priest was completely unnecessary. It doesn't tell us anything we need to know for the story to progress. It was a complete and utter tangent.

So, instead we go back to Langdon, Sophie and Fache.

We're in the midst of the conversation that well... we never heard the beginning of. The chapter begins with Fache expressing disbelief that our lottery numbers were in fact a numerical joke. Sophie has rearranged them into this order: 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21 This, she declares is one of the most famous mathematical progressions in history. I looked at Wikipedia, and there were a lot of equations and my eyes glazed over. But apparently it's correct. Up until the point Spohie says, "Mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci created this succession of numbers in the thirteenth century".

Wikipedia says, however:

The Fibonacci numbers first appeared, under the name mātrāmeru (mountain of cadence), in the work of the Sanskrit grammarian Pingala (Chandah-shāstra, the Art of Prosody, 450 or 200 BC). Prosody was important in ancient Indian ritual because of an emphasis on the purity of utterance. The Indian mathematician Virahanka (6th century AD) showed how the Fibonacci sequence arose in the analysis of metres with long and short syllables. Subsequently, the Jain philosopher Hemachandra (c.1150) composed a well known text on these. A commentary on Virahanka's work by Gopāla in the 12th century also revisits the problem in some detail. Wikipedia"

Two hundred BC is a lot earlier than the thirteenth century. So, that's another drink!

Sophie informs Fache that the dead guy is playing games with them (which is highly unlikely since you know, he went out of his way to do this and all...) and when Fache says she better have a better explanation than that she says, he might appreciate the idea that Sauniere might be playing games with them and if he doesn't well maybe they don't need the cryptography department anymore.

Then Fache's attention turns to Langdon who is still on the phone with the "U.S. Embassy". He hates the U.S. Embassy because they make his job hard. Insert another drink here. When Langdon hangs up he looks awful and all sweaty and such. Fache asks Langdon if he's all right and is told that there was a horrible accident back home and he needs to leave in the morning. He then asks to use the bathrooms.

Fache lets him go, figuring he can't get out, and goes to talk to Bobo wanting to know who let Sophie in to the building. They don't know and they can't find her. However they know that Langdon is still in the potty.

Seeing as how the phone message Langdon got was not from the U.S. Embassy but instead from Sophie we can assume that she told him to go to the bathroom. I now wonder, why is he listening to her? What is it about her that make him trust her? She just told him that the police were out to get him. And now he's going to do what she says, which probably involves some sort of long and dramatic chase scene of sorts where his life is in danger and the police are really out to get him. Wouldn't it be better to just let the police relieve themselves of their suspicions of Langdon and then talk to him, instead of making him run off. Or even have Langdon cooperate with the police while at the same time trying to find the meaning of the limerick? That way he wouldn't have to worry about the police chasing him all around Europe and instead could do things in a quiet and efficient manner. Or perhaps even, I don't know, cooperating with the police on this matter.

Why is it that no one ever cooperates with the police in these stories?

So, I believe that's a total of four drinks!