The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
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Book Reviews of The Da Vinci Code
Book Review: Draws heavily on the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Summary: 5 Stars
Of COURSE it's fiction, but the research behind the story is impeccable, and it makes the story very plausible. The author, Dan Brown, draws heavily on the book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln who spent more than a decade in researching the historical facts behind the story. I did some research of my own. The organizations named indeed exist or existed as claimed: the Prieur du Sion dates back to 1099, and whose grand masters included such luminaries as Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton--not exactly lightweights--and apparently one of the more modern (1885) leading figures was a priest named Berenger Sauniere, abbe at Rennes-le-Chateau (also the surname name of the murdered curator in the story), and was followed by the Knights Templar, the Ordre du Sion's military arm, (which was originally founded during the Crusades by Godfroi de Bouillon, who was named King of Jerusalem by the Pope, and was the leader of the first Crusade, AND who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jesus through Mary Magdalene; and the Opus Dei, which still exists at its headquarters at 243 Lexington Avenue in New York, exactly as stated by the author, and exactly as he described it.
The novel is obviously placed in the future, as the Pope is described as more liberal than the present pope, John II, and is his successor. The criticisms by present members of Opus Dei on their unofficial website qv:(Opus Dei: their unofficial homepage) quite apparently overlooked that fact in their criticism of The Ds Vinci Code. Actually, as the story unfolds, Opus Dei members involved fared quite well, and were certainly not maligned.
This book has caused a firestorm of criticism, primarily from the orthodix Christian community who are outraged by the claim that Yeshua (better known by his Greek name: Jesus) and Mary of Bethany (better known as Mary Magdalene) were married, had a child, and whose bloodline is still extant today. This is a "heresy" that the Catholic church tried to stamp out by murdering 15,000 residents of Provence, on the Mediterranean coat of France; a crusade which the Vatican launched in 1209 and lasted a generation. That was followed by the Inquisition, which tortured and killed thousands more for their "heresy." These are historical facts, disputed by no one.
This is a crackerjack of a tale, and it is little wonder that it ranks third in sales on Amazon (out of their over two million titles).
To begin with, the curator of the Louvre, in Paris, is murdered and an American, Professor Langdon--an expert in religious symbology--becomes involved, as does the curator's granddaughter, who is a cryptographer. The two of them set out to solve, not only the crime, but the mystery of the Holy Grail. I prefer not to tell more of the plot.
There are many surprises and unexpected twists in the story, but underlying it all is a generous history lesson that tells much about the early history of the Christian faith, much of it relating to the Gnostic Gospels which were found in the Egyptian desert near Nag Hammadi in 1945; the Roman Emperor Constantine and his part in suppressing most of the eighty some Gospels in favor of the four which were "blessed" by his scholars at the Council of Nicaea, and where the idea of the divinity of Jesus, the immaculate conception and the resurrection were given coinage by his "scholars".
The Da Vinci Code certainly has an agenda: to give the legend of Mary Magdalene a wide audience, which it does in spades--and obviously, judging by its wide readership, it has achieved its purpose handsomely and quite plausibly.
Those who most strongly ctiticize The Da Vinci Code obviously do not do so because of the writing, editing, or research. All of those functions are quite acceptable if not outstanding. So, their criticism is because the story undermines their own religious faith. An understandable reaction.
But, this book is an education in itself. I have done a great deal of research myself in this area, and I can tell you that I admire Dan Brown's effort immensely. He has done well to bring, even if it is in fictional form, so much information
in such an assimilable form to so many people, most of whom will not have heard it before.
Joseph (Joe) Pierre,
author of The Road to Damascus: Our Journey Through Eternity
and other books
Book Review: An Exemplary Specimen
Summary: 5 Stars
On May 19, 2006, Sony Pictures released a movie version of Dan Brown's Book The Da Vinci Code. Its release was but the cinematic aftermath of a book whose success announced the defeat of American orthodox Christianity. For the America of the early 20th century is a decidedly and callously post-Christian culture. And as if a wealth of leading social indicators were not enough to confirm our retrograde post-Christianity - our 50% divorce rate, the widespread practice of abortifacient medications and medical procedures, the coarseness and vulgar evil of our popular culture, our abysmally low rates of Church attendance -confirmation of our no-longer-even-nominal Christianity is furnished by the commercial success of the best-selling DaVinci Code and its virulent anti-Christianity.
Justice demands that one makes neither more nor less of something than ought be made of it. As a work of literature, The Da Vinci Code is neither brilliant nor groundbreaking, neither new nor original; it is a popular novel marked by the kind of literary depth for which "shallowness" is too charitable a term. But as a symptom of spiritual illness, as a demonstration of the terminally diseased soul of American religiousity, and as damning evidence of the evacuation of large swaths of the American population from orthodox Christianity into titillated heresy, The Da Vinci Code is exemplary.
The Da Vinci Code's doctrines are abhorrent to the tradition of Catholic and Christian orthodoxy. In its denial of the celibacy of Christ - and its concomitant portrayal of Catholicism and orthodox Christianity as a brilliant coverup of the truth about Jesus - the book grinds several axes: against the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood, against the Bible and its authority, but also and even more dangerously against Christ's divinity. Its sources for these doctrines are hairbrained, dubious, extra-Biblical, and anti-Traditional. But that quartet of adjectives can fit most, if not all, films produced in Hollywood about the Christian religion.
For in a sense, however, neither the book's contents, nor its contemporary success, should come as any great surprise. The distinction between the Jesus of history and Christ of faith, first posited by the school of Higher Biblical Criticism in Germany in the 19th century, paved the way for the kind of skepticism sown ubiquitously broadcast in the 20th century. The movement of theological Modernism, once vilified and now cautiously accepted in the Catholic Church (still, in some circles, vigorously opposed), also prepared the ground for the late 20th century's apostasies and dissents in the Roman Church.
So it is not surprising that some crackpot, leftist, and anti-Catholic writer cooked this story up. What is surprising is the number of people calling themselves Christians and Catholics who read and believed Dan Brown. One hundred years ago, the book would have been placed on the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibtorum, roundly condemned from every Catholic and orthodox Protestant pulpit in America, and been met with disgust from the pews. So diluted and diffuse is the orthodox consensus these days, that churchgoers pass copies of the book to one another.
The New Testament teaches that there will be a falling away from orthodox faith before the end of time: "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear" (2 Timothy 4:3). This is known as the Great Apostasy. It was the opinion of the deceased writer and ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin that we are in the midst of this dreaded and long foretold event.
The Da Vinci Code is what it is: an anti-Christian and anti-Catholic book of mediocre literary quality. Read it, if you will. But should you agree with its ideas, do not try to pretend that you are a Christian. You are not.
The five stars are for the anti-intellectual, illogical example of diseased thinking and corrupt history which this book represents.
{Adapted from a review I wrote to Philadelphia's Bulletin}
Book Review: lch
Summary: 1 Stars
So this page-turning thriller was on the best-selling list for a gazillion months and put Catholic and fellow Christian faithful in a defensive uproar. I'm fairly well read and, yes, I've earned a few bucks with my prose. I'm also a sucker for historic tales, ancient folklore, mythology and Old Testament characters who lived for 800 years and begat like rabbits. OK, I decided, now that it's in paperback, I'll give it a read. What I concluded was this: Those who found The Da Vinci Code an affront to their faith could have could have ended the argument before it reached the level of theological debate by countering that Brown's work is a literary steaming pile. I read page after page, waiting for the moment when I would start to give a rat's ass about The Da Vinci Code's protagonists. What a bunch of twits. Langdon is a leading authority in the obscure field of symbology (I don't know if I spelled that right, but I'm not about to go back in that book and check it). Apparently, there are enough people in the world who crave more symbology that Langdon's books sell better than Brown's, entitling him to the academia equivalent of rock start status. Sophie is effectively portrayed as a cuddly French chick who's easy on the eyes -- someone a man might make a hit on before the first 300 pages if he wasn't a dipwad like Landgon. She's got some inner deamons that make her interesting enough, but she's been isolated from folks like you and me in a cradle of artsy culture so high-falluting most French probably couldn't tolerate it. And then they hook up with that insufferable aristocratic British snob Teabing. From cradle to some approptiately haught estate near (but, of course) Versaille, this memeber of the Royal Lucky Sperm Club has never had to lift a finger to earn buck or a pound or a Euro. So he's been free to pursue his fascination with Bigfoot rumors about how the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei and those cool Holy Grail Knights from the third Indiana Jones movie have contrived through the centuries to keep the lid on damning evidence that Jesus made a baby girl and God had originally intended women to be in charge of everything. Or something like that. Oh, I forgot, Teabing's crippled so I should feel bad about talking bad about him. Anyway, this trio of prententious intellectual clods sit around do what pretentious intellectual clods do -- make lofty, self-affirmed pronouncments about how the world's going to turn upside down when this cat gets out of the bag. The point is that these characters aren't very approachable and Brown does little to convince me that this secret will destroy Christian faith as we know it. Hell, it's been more than 100 years since Darwin presented pretty clear evidence for evolution, yet the Christian faithtul still pack churches around world. But back to how bad this book is. Trite doesn't begin to describe some of the wincing turns of phrase. I would give you some examples but, like I said, I'm not going back in there. One of the more laughable scenes of upper-crust idiocy occurs when Langdon and Sophie meet up with Teabing in his metrosexual parlor. By now, Sophie and Langdon have somehow eluded the grasp of professional killers several times, been on the run and are exhausted. With a straight face, Brown describes how Sophie's delirium is sated by a spot of tea and her hunger is satisfied by... crumpets. Yes, crumpets. Hell, Teabing, shut up about your conspiracy theories, roust your beligernet butler and have him fix these people something to eat. Offer Langdon a stiff drink. I sure needed one at this point. By now I'm pulling for the albino. Then they escape the jaws of death yet again and, naturally, high-tail it to England on Teabing's private jet. I hoped maybe Teabow would turn back upon discovering he'd left his Grey Poupon behind. I stopped reading it about 30 pages later when it became clear that the Albino wasn't going to get a chance to wack any of these intrepid protagonists. I don't know how it ends. I don't care. However, there were plenty enough nuggets of research on the subject to entice me into watching a few nice documentaries laying out this whole conspiracy on the History Channel and Discovery. Who knows? You might like it. This is just my opinion.Book Review: "Three may keep a secret. . . ."
Summary: 2 Stars
The Da Vinci Code begins with an engrossing prologue that sets up all the elements of a swashbuckling mystery thriller, but the book deteriorates immediately afterwards. Despite the interesting subject matter, author Dan Brown flounders at writing suspense and creates characters too stale and clichéd to carry the story forward in an engaging way. Following the successful opener, Brown begins the action with a corny formal introduction to his protagonist, Robert Langdon, a debonair academic recycled from an earlier novel whom Brown clearly plans to parlay into a franchise of future bestsellers. Brown isn't sure how to characterize Langdon or the supporting cast and prefers to typecast, simply namedropping the Hollywood leading man he imagines playing his hero in the movie adaptation. (Hint: it's no coincidence that Langdon seems a crude knockoff of Indiana Jones, minus the gritty personality and rugged wardrobe which make the latter interesting.)None of the book's literary flaws are as grating, however, as the dialogue, which Brown renders so clumsily that it reminded me of nothing so much as a story submitted in college creative writing by one of the dimmer bulbs in the class. Readers will quite literally cringe during most dialogue and especially during two flashback scenes whose inclusion in the book is downright perplexing, one in which Langdon lectures college students on pagan sex (or something) and another in which Langdon visits a prison to conduct an advanced seminar on Leonardo Da Vinci with the hardened inmates. The words Brown puts in their mouths positively fail the laugh test. Let's just say Brown is quite clearly not a dutiful researcher of the relevant vernacular. These scenes thankfully end quickly, but the awkwardly constructed dialogue between Langdon and the female lead is relentless, inducing Richter-scale cringing at the mere contemplation of the inevitable sex scene (which Brown mercifully leaves to the imagination but which shall certainly figure more prominently in the movie, should one be made).
Yet the dialogue is for the most part not at all flirtatious and is most frustrating when written in the same formal narrative tone as a history textbook. This is the device Brown uses whenever he must give readers some background on Da Vinci or early Christianity. Rather like the know-it-all scientist figure in every Michael Crichton novel, Langdon or another character appears periodically to succor readers with dry soliloquies that also serve as the Cliffs Notes to the stale revelations of the upcoming chapter. Despite the bad writing and deus-ex-machina quality of these diversions, some are actually fairly interesting and probably the only motivation available to actually finish the book, since the "suspense" is largely illusory. Each of the numerous plot twists is predictable fifty to a hundred or more pages in advance, so much so that it would be hard to identify which developments Brown intended to be surprises but for his narrative intervention: Brown kindly informs us that a character is "stunned" or "speechless" whenever he unleashes such impotent bombshells, apparently to compensate for his failure to arouse these emotions in readers.
Worse still, when one looks to the supposed mystery at the heart of the novel, one realizes that "there is no there there." So much of the mystery unravels from the characters talking to one another -- and so little from their actually doing anything -- that by the end it seems the book would not have been substantially different if Langdon had simply stayed in his hotel room and conducted a lecture into a Dictaphone. Most of the lectures concern the secret society bearing the ominous appellation "The Priory of Sion," but if the plot has any credibility the Priory utterly failed to keep anything secret, since every character knows all there is to know about it (and constantly tells us). That's adequate if one approaches The Da Vinci Code as a fictionalized historical essay, for whatever that's worth, but as a suspense novel it fails. By the end Brown has little to reveal that he hasn't already told us, and the suspense concludes not with a bang but a whimper.
Book Review: A good book, but it dosen't live up to all of the hype
Summary: 3 Stars
Review by Richard Grayhttp://www.rich-gray.com
Robert Langdon, a famous Harvard Symbologist, gets woken by the police late one night while in Paris to give a lecture. He finds that the elderly curator of Louvre has been murdered, his body stripped naked, laid spread eagle, with a pentacle carved into his body and a coded message written beside him. Robert also finds that he is the primary suspect for the murder, and that the French police chief, Fache, may need to convict Langdon to save his own job.
Helped by police code-breaker, and the granddaughter of the Louvre curator, Sophie Neveu, Langdon flees the crime scene in hope of either making it to the US embassy to avoid being convicted of a murder he didn't commit, or solve the strange code left by the body in hopes of proving his innocence.
At the risk of spoiling anything (though if you've read any of the controversy around this book this part is probably already spoiled) Langdon finds that in order to prove his innocence he must find The Holy Grail which is protected by a secrete society called The Priory of Sion. The 'Holy Grail' isn't actually a cup that held Christ's blood, it is actually the bones of Mary Magdalene, the woman who Jesus is supposed to have married, and documents that show Jesus and Mary had children and that Jesus was not divine, simply a great prophet.
As you can probably tell from the last paragraph, this book has ruffled the feathers of many Christians out there, particularly Catholics. Langdon puts forth an alternative version of history that is more or less well researched and will probably seem more appealing to those who are not upset by the idea of Jesus having a wife, or that Jesus is not necessarily divine.
However, this is not to say that all of the claims that Brown makes, or seems to support in this book, are on steady ground. Much of this book is built around proving that Da Vinci believed this version of history by examining his artwork. Some of these 'symbologist' proofs are very interesting, and others are stretching it. There is also the looming, annoying flaw in his logic that just because Da Vinci believed a certain version of history, does not make that version of history correct, regardless of wether or not he was the head of the Priory of Sion.
All of the controversy aside, this is an enjoyable read, though I don't think that, as a novel, it deserves all of the attention that it's getting. Brown is a very skilled writer as far as crafting his sentences and paragraphs, but the plot is a bit formulaic and even verges on unintentional silliness. The ultra short chapters, the constant running and narrow escapes, and how the main characters literally take turns solving the little puzzles makes things a bit tiresome. The plot structure reminded me of the Doctor Who episodes I used to watch as a kid, only instead of time lords, Cyber men and Darleks, you have art symbologists, Opus Dei, and the Priory of Sion.
The book is best read just one short chapter a day (some chapters are short enough to be put on a daily calendar) and if you try to read much more than that the repetitive plot structure might start to get on your nerves. There were points in the story where, if I read too much of it at once, I'd say to myself, "For non-divine Christ sakes, not another puzzle. Just find the blasted thing!"
People who thoroughly enjoy riddles, cross word puzzles, and constant narrow escapes will probably give this book 4 or 5 out of five stars. If you don't fall into that category then this is a solid 3 stars. Also people who don't read very often, or who prefer short, sweet chapters will probably find this book a safe bet. It's a good book, but it just doesn't live up to all of the hype. If the alternative version of history is what draws you to it, then you might be better served by picking up a copy of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" which seems to be one of Brown's predominant historical sources.
Richard Gray
http://www.rich-gray.com