It’s after hours in the Louvre, and those of us who work in library-museum-archives environments know just how creepy such public places can become late at night. But if you do work there - for long enough so it becomes familiar ground, another home in a real sense - it can also feel like your own living room. That’s how the Louvre feels to curator Jacques Sauniere, even after he’s mortally wounded by an after hours visitor. He knows just what he needs to do, in his last few minutes of life; and he knows exactly how to do it, even while the Louvre’s activated security system holds him trapped within the gallery where the Mona Lisa and other Da Vinci paintings hang.
What Sauniere must do is leave a message, or messages, for his estranged granddaughter. As a police cryptographer, Sophie Neveu will have access to the crime scene. Jacques Sauniere must find a way of passing on to Sophie all the secrets that he dies to protect, without revealing those secrets to anyone else. Anyone else, that is, except the man Sauniere makes sure the police will also summon to the gallery where his body lies: American symbologist Robert Langdon, who soon finds himself cast in the role of chief suspect as Sauniere’s killer.
All the things that writing teachers tell their pupils not to do, author Brown does in this book. He writes in chapters so short that if they were sentences in an essay, he’d be losing points for choppiness. He flashes back repeatedly to his characters’ past lives. He uses more different character viewpoints in one book than some novelists use in an entire lifetime’s literary output. He supplies background information, history as his plot requires it to be presented, in multi-paragraph chunks. He writes richly detailed setting descriptions, that according to conventional writing advice ought to have his readers putting the book aside in boredom. But - amazingly, and wonderfully - for this author, in this book, those techniques work. Do they ever work! Because Brown paces the novel masterfully, even the driest (if presented in another framework) passages slip by without interrupting the story’s flow. The mystery deepens from chapter to chapter, with resolution coming in unexpected yet reasonably logical ways. Even the villians (who aren’t always who you think they will be, by the way...) command the reader’s empathy.
I found some of the resolutions awkward, and perhaps a bit rushed after all the build-up preceding them. I came away from the book a bit concerned about readers who may take all that its author presents as fact, for plotting purposes, as just that: historically certain truth. But approached as a work of speculative fiction, which is the only way I could approach it, this is one cracking fine read! I don’t wonder at its sales record, which I’m sure its controversial subject matter has greatly increased.