Ok, if Brown makes important mistakes that are of real consequence, I think that most of us would agree that they should be discussed - especially has he has added a 'facts' page to the beginning of his novel.

but what about the silly errors?

About the soap or the windows in the 'gents' at the louvre; or the routes across Paris; or which station to catch a train; or the speed or petrol consumption of the smart car; etc.

Are these 'minor' points even worthy of discussion?


Janimal writes:

What do others think?

Of course. How can one trust Brown with the big message if he can't get the simple easily checkable facts correct?

I am with Peter on this one. Some of them were silly little errors--but the issue remains--they are easily verifiable bits of info. The window in the gent's didn't bother me (without the window there was nowhere else for the story to go)--but getting the correct train station, the routes across Paris, and the smart car are all things that would have taken very little effort to get right-and would not have disturbed the story-line. If you are reading a book-that lists specific elements as "fact"--you trust the book to get other "facts" correct--when they don't it becomes a distraction to the story. There were a few times in the book--that it struck me Brown had gotten something wrong (like the train station) and a made a note to double check it--in some books if there are too many errors like that I just put the book down and do not finish it. If you are going to include real places you need to get it right or should make the setting a fictional place. I am this way about movies as well. If you say the film is set in London film it in London--cause I assure you we can tell the difference. There was a movie a few years back called "Bird on a Wire" with Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn--part of the movie was supposed to be set in Detroit including a ferry boat crossing the river--there are no ferries in Detroit, and across the river is Canada. Detroit wasn't integral to the story--so they could have set it in Seattle where it was filmed.

It also occures to me if the author doesn't catch the stupid errors-shouldn't the editor-isn't that what they are paid for?

I disagree. I don't think it's important to the overall message to have the minute details correct. I'm looking at the big picture here.

Hi Jena. Welcome to the forum.

Thanks for your comment.

Perhaps some people don't mind, but I'm with Peter and Kateyes on this.

I don't like to be misled or lied to, even in a work of fiction, even if the details are minor ones, and especially when I've been told that 'his research is impeccable'. How can you trust DB to get the important things right, if he can make so many easily-identifiable minor mistakes?

Things that make me go 'hmmm... ':

Is the FACT page also a work of fiction? Kind of like Orson Welles' radio 'news' broadcast of H.G. Wells (no relation) book of the same name...

Did Brown and his editor INTENTIONALLY allow small errors in the book, then 'call attention' to them via the FACT page in order to detract attention from the larger Error (capital 'E') in the book? (If you're still unsure as what this Error is... my explaining it to you probably isn't going to make much difference. )

Or do I give Brown faaaar too much credit for thinking he might be this intelligent?

Lastly... his wife was his researcher. Could his editor have been, say... his mother? :p

Why accept as correct the big thing Brown says that cannot be checked, and yet over look all the other things he gets so wrong that can be checked.

Thanks for the welcome PDM.

Let me ask you a question. If the book were any other fiction book - would you be critical of an incorrect subway stop or a street name? I truly believe that in order to discredit Brown - that people are now starting a so called "witch hunt" regarding what is in his book.

Maybe he spent more time researching the main theme of the book and less time on minute details? I find it more valuable to look at the big picture than a very small portion of it. IMHO that is.

The fact page contains two items. The Priory of Sion and the Opus Dei. I believe both of them exist or existed.

Originally posted by JenaS62:
...The fact page contains two items. The Priory of Sion and the Opus Dei. I believe both of them exist or existed.

Unless there is a secret organisation of the same name, which we don't know about, the 'Priory of Sion' is a modern hoax.

The facts page also says that:
'All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals .. are accurate'

Let me ask you a question. If the book were any other fiction book - would you be critical of an incorrect subway stop or a street name? [JenaS62]

That would depend on how it was presented. If it was presented as a fictional place, then that would be fine, but if I was told about all the 'impeccable research', and there was a 'facts' page and real buildings were described on real streets, then yes.

Just because a book is a work of fiction, I don't expect the factual elements to be altered to fit. I know this happens in some books and films - 'Saving Private Ryan' caused a stir because of this - and I think it's wrong. It spoils the book for me.

We have been discussing the DvC book for the past two years on this forum, so its not 'just now. And we are not trying to discredit Brown - he's done that all on his own

If there is a forum on another popular book, no doubt any errors would be remarked upon. But it i sthis book that there is so much interest in -- hence you and many others joining in the discussion.

Maybe, but we all know that neither of the two main themes (elements in Leonardos pictures and the bloodline of Jesus) are his own idea. The only research he did (it seems) is to take the idea from someone elses book. Brown was cleared in court of plagiarism but he himself acknowledges he used HBHG as a source by using the names of two of its authors and the characteristics of the third for a major character.

i live in corwall, and i know the region very well. it is regularly used for film shoots and i can tell you that the apparent relationships between places we see on the screen virtually never ever bears any relation to real goegraphy. do you suggest i stop watching movies? i'm sorry, but grow up people! most of you would have no idea about these fiddling little errors in his book if you hadn't been tragic enough to dig them out and research them in the first place. life is too short!!

the Opus Dei
-----------------

Yes it exist but Brown make a big mistake! In the book Silas is a monk and he is part of the opus dei.. too bad in the opus Dei there aren't monk.

About the subject I think little error are not importart... instead the larger error are. Like Silas who's a monk.. like Costantino who created the divinity of crhyst when there are document to prove that the chrystians trusted in the divinity of chryst before costantino and many other.

Yes daVinci.i.n.a.s, that brings us to the question:

Which errors are important and which are the silly ones? Somewhere there might be an overlap, perhaps?

This is just plain rude. You may need to research the errors but many of us are knowledgable enough to have found them jarring on our first reading of the book.

And if that is your attitude, why do you keep posting here?

wowee!! aren't we the omniscient one!!

Janimal, please stop trying to stir things up. This forum is here for us to discuss these matters, so that is what we do. You know that. Telling members of the forum to grow up is unacceptable.

Okay, I have to say I agree with Janimal on this one. You people need to get a life. Do you watch the old John Wayne movies? In "The Cowboys" they are moving through the high plains and he mentions "running into Fort Smith, be back by dark." Look at a map, it couldn't have been done...but it didn't take away from the movie. It was one line and if you don't know where Fort Smith is in relationship the the High Plains, you wouldn't even know what he said was wrong.

This book is a novel based loosely on some fact. It raises a lot of questions. It has probably done more towards getting people to talk about religion outside of church than the last million emails that say you don't love Jesus if you don't forward the email. It has errors in it, get over it and enjoy the story and debate the questions is raises. I found typos too!

Don't sweat the small stuff, life is just too short.

I think we all have lives.

And I think we all like to discuss and debate issues.

I can see absolutely nothing wrong with that. People discuss all sorts of things. Indeed, we discuss all sorts of things.

I'd say that if this doesn't appeal to certain people, then they are probably in the wrong place.



'It has errors in it, get over it and enjoy the story and debate the questions is raises.

Exactly - that's what we are doing.

Have a look at this:

Topic: It's only fiction - Should we just 'get over it'?
http://www.wineintro.com/forum/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=000250#000000

It is true that, to save money, many filmmakers film in one place and claim it to be another--happens all the time (and is called "creative geography"); they also film in a studio and make it look like a location. I normally don't mind too much, except when the error really intrudes on my awareness, as when mountains suddenly appear in the background of the extremely low budget "Halloween," presumably set in Illinois (but filmed in Pasadena, CA.). Unfortunately, this takes me out of the experience. Ideally, this would be only momentarily, but if the problems continued, I would have a hard time watching it (as I do some old historical epics, at least not with a very camp sensibility!).

Minor errors in a film and book irk me even more than large ones because, as I noted on another thread, I can't properly suspend my disbelief. A couple are not a problem, but if there are a lot, I start looking for the errors instead of getting involved in the story. And in TDVC there are so many errors (both large and small) that I found very easy to spot, with no research (part of that is the fact I'm probably a lot older than most people discussing this book). I have done some additional research, but that is because I'm actually engaged in an academic study on the book and film (college profs must "publish or perish").

When I get to the point that I'm no longer engaged in the story, then nit-picking the novel becomes a type of fun exercise, to make up for the disappointment of reading it. A truly engaging novel (or film) would not have me doing that--even if I knew it wasn't really accurate. For example, it doesn't diminish my appreciation of "The Graduate" on iota to know it was partly filmed at USC instead of UC, Berkeley (despite the statements in the film that Benjamin has gone to Berkeley to find Elaine). But when a novel is badly written, and the author goes out of his way to say it is accurate, then the very obvious errors have a way of getting under the skin.

I agree docbb

The major error in the film that really annoyed me was that dan brown got the knights of st john mixed up with the knights of sion.
It was the knights of St John started by the pope in the 11th century,but they had a bit of an argument.These boys started to do thier own thing and got a bit rebellious and independent and so promptly got rounded up and fried at the stake.
Brown obviously knows nothing about sion which is usual ,but its a right insult to associate such a free thinking bunch as being founded by the catholic church.They survived all that by being secret and there have been some even bigger baddies including stalin who did not like people who could think for themselves and sent the poor sods off to freeze to death in siberia.Burn or freeze.I suppose the communists just like to do it differently.Hitler tried to be different and used gas.
the st john lot were crusaders and based in rhodes and then later in Malta.They had a big knowlege in medicine especially first aid,also know as the hospitallers.Its were the name hopital comes from and also the st johns ambulance.
I spent some time living in malta and saw some of thier stuff.
Sion have been around for thousands of years and could you really imagine people like isac newton and da vinci running around with swords..

Not the Knights of St John. They were the Knights Hospitaller (the origins of the St John Ambulance Brigade).

It was the Templars who were arrested and some of them burned. Some of their confiscated commanderies were given to the Hospitallers.

Some authors have claimed that the Knights Templar were part of the Priory of Sion, but, unless there was really a secret organisation that no-one knows about, that seems unlikely as the 'Priory of Sion' has been shown to be a modern hoax.

The knights of St John and hospitaller are the same templar group.They use the maltese cross.They were templars.Catholic Christian crusaders who spent a lot of time fighting in the holy lands and against the turks.From battles they learnt a lot about first aid emergency treatment.
The st Johns ambulance and the name hospital originate from them.
The knights of Sion have been around for a lot longer and involve the elite of the military and scientific.Accepting certain truths some of the St Johns knights would have got involved with sion.
The st john templars did start to act independently and so were crushed by the pope.They started keeping the looty for themselves instead of putting it in the church coffers.Pope and the boys said also that the templars worshipped an occult being called bohamet.That was probably a lie as usual, as they never denounced jesus despite torture.

This is getting off topic, so I am transferring the discussion to the following thread:

Topic: The Knights Templar
http://www.wineintro.com/forum/cgi-bin/u...&p=5#000065

I agree that the main theme of Dan's book is what's most important, not errors in minor details. A FICTION novel is allowed to have FICTIONAL details, in the same way that "Harry Potter", "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" have them. That does not change the fact that fictional books often contain information that is based on reality, or which may become a reality in some future time. All good Science-Fiction and Fantasy novels contain a certain amount of truth. For example, in "From The Earth To The Moon" by Jules Verne, the author describes a rocket flight from the United States to the Moon during the 19th Century; the description of the flight time and distance was almost exactly the same as the real first flight to the Moon that occurred almost a century after Jules Verne wrote the novel. In his day, scientists regarded rocket flights into space as being pure fantasy. They treated Jules Verne as a laughing stock for daring to suggest that there was any FACTUAL REALITY contained in his work of FICTION, in the same way that many religious people today are closing their minds to the possible truths contained in "The Da Vinci Code".
The main themes (not the fictional details) of Dan Brown's book are soundly based on concepts that have been thoroughly researched by such authors as Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (in their "The Templar Revelation"), Margaret Starbird (in her "The Woman with the Alabaster Jar", "The Goddess in the Gospels", and other books)and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (in their "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" which started all this controversy back in 1982).

Er 'soundly based'?! 'Thoroughly researched'? This would be the Holy Blood Holy Grail that swallowed the 'Priory' hoax hook, line and sinker? The Templar Revelation that managed to get the attributions of the figures in The Madonna of the Rocks totally backwards? The 'Margaret Starbird' whose idea of 'research' is praying and then making 'intuitive leaps' or opening her Bible to random pages?

There might be a weird alternative reality out there where these books are 'thoroughly researched', but here on Earth they are correctly regarded as works by amateur New Age kooks, riddled with errors, misrepresentations, selective evidence and wild leaps of logic.

I agree that the research in these books needs to be questioned, but then, sometimes the research of experts needs to be questioned too and while some 'new age' books might well be 'riddled with errors, misrepresentations, selective evidence and wild leaps of logic', you can never be sure whether some of the way out theories might one day be discovered to be true.

Or maybe they never will - yet we should remember that lack of evidence does not always mean that something is untrue.

I believe that we should all question what we are told and what we read & check things out as best we can, to work out what seems logical and likely.

But I also believe in keeping one's mind open to possibilities, that may not be proven, but which, nonetheless, could, just possibly, be true.

I do not see point in debating the fiction or non fiction of the dan brown film.
The film put forward some suggestions about the life of christ.
Some evidence was described and then some obvious intentional daftness,as a compromise also to not make the film look to be taken seriously.
At end of film,implication was that there is only one descendent of christ,when there would be thousands.The crusader knights were st john and hospitalliers not sion.

As I've noted elsewhere on this board, movies often pretend to be one place when filmed in another, usually due to the constraints of movie-making. It is a convention that usually is understood by the movie-going public (though not as much as I'd thought from reading through many responses to TDVC). However, if there are too many obvious geographical errors in a film, they interfere with one's identification with the characters and enjoyment of the story. Same with historical errors (although I would treat a supposedly historical spectacle like "Gladiator" differently than a film that was more real-to life, like "A Beautiful Mind" (both of which got numerous complaints about their factual and historical errors). Movies also get lots of people complaining about technical errors which occur (e.g. continuity mistakes, booms and crew visible in shots, etc.).

And, yes, many historical novels that make errors are criticized--by readers, viewers, and now on webpages and message boards (and sometimes they are savagely critiqued, depending on what the subject is. For example, while pure fantasy is usually given a pass, a lot of "realistic" speculative science fiction gets reamed by scientists and others, etc.).

As with movies, it is the sheer aggregate number of errors that determine whether or not I enjoy the experience of reading or not. And with TDVC, the combination of big and small errors really detracted from that. And in my mind, any published film or book, but esp. one where an author goes out of his way to say it is factual, is fair game for criticism.

I second that!

hmmmm lets see...

'Are the 'silly errors' worth discussing?'

SHOT's ANSWER : erm...no!!!! and my reason...its fiction. who cares whats right or wrong??? it makes a good damn story thats all i care about!!!

I'd agree to a degree if there wasn't all the hype about 'facts' and 'research' ~ but even then, only to a degree.

If I read a book about England, where they had Edinburgh as the capital and everyone speaking French, I'd find that annoying, even in a work of fiction.

You can't play fast and loose with facts, even in a novel, unless the weird 'facts' have some kind of explanation for them.

That's my opinion, anyway.