As mentioned earlier, a review of the DaVinci Code. Unfortuately, I'm about three hundred miles away from my copy of the book, so this is all going to be from memory.
The book, as you might have heard by now, is a thriller based on "historical fact," as the author would have you believe. The premise is fairly straightforward: Jacques Sauniere, curator of the Louvre, is found murdered in his own museum, having contorted his body into a dying message. This message is discovered by Sauniere's estranged granddaughter Sophie and a Harvard (of course) professor named Robert Langdon, who are then plunged into the bizarre world of conspiracy theories as they try to decipher the old man's message before they're killed or the Catholic Church beats them to the prize.
The prize, of course, is the Holy Grail, but not the Grail we've come to know and love through such historical works as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Monthy Python and the Holy Grail. The real secret here, as proposed by the author, is that the Grail was indeed the Cup of Christ, but the Cup is in fact metonymy for Mary Magdalene, who was, apparently, Jesus' wife. This is not all that earth-shaking, if you think about it, to any line of mainstream Christian thought, although the Catholics would certainly have to change some dogma and maybe even (gasp!) allow their holy men to get married or even be women.
But I digress. There are two real problems with the book. The first is the incredibly selective view of history that the author takes. In general, any time an author states that "the ancients believed X" or "X symbol meant this to the ancients," its BS, and Mr. Brown does that a lot. It's at least as ludicrous to stereotype the entire premodern world just as it is to stereotype any ethnic group. The author then goes on to state a lot of conspiracy theories, including, but not limited to, the Priory of Sion (who are associated with the Grail, if they ever existed), the Knights Templar, the Freemasons/Masons, and Walt Disney. Of Disney, the author claims that his first four movies (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.) were Grail allegories and uses the infamous "S-E-X" scene in the Lion King as evidence of hidden messages in the films. Now, to be fair, my great-grandfather was a Mason, and he got kicked out of his church for joining a secret society. But that doesn't mean that any of this is remotely true. Unfortunately, the author uses these psuedoreligious groups to bring more credence to his main purpose.
This brings me to the real problem with the book. The DaVinci Code, at its core, purports to be about some sort of nebulous concept of "the sacred feminine," and how some nebulous group called "the Church" has oppressed this since Roman times, and how some nebulous group called "the Priory of Sion" -- or maybe it's the Templars -- or maybe it's the Masons -- has kept the concept of the sacred feminine alive.
Of course, Mr. Brown has decided to conflate the idea of the sacred feminine (whatever that is, he sure doesn't tell us) with Mary Magdalene being Jesus' wife. The Priory of Sion is portrayed in the book as some sort of ancient erotic mystery cult which peforms ceremonies akin to those in Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (the comparison is the author's, not mine), yet they are the guardians of a secret of Christianity. So which is it? The author never explicitly states that he is a universalist, or ba'hai, or whatever it's called these days, but he somehow seems to be able to gloss over a number of Old and New Testament references that would seem to go against the Goddess-worship he presents here. What does an ancient cult whose highest sacrament is celebration of the sexual act have to do with any monothestic religion, for that matter?
If I had the book in front of me, I would quote the page where the Harvard professor, Langdon, decides to explain that Jesus Christ and the Grail are metaphors for a greater expression of the sacred (feminine). I would wonder, then, how the physical remains of Mary Magdalene -- the stated contents of the Grail everywhere else in the book -- ever came to existence.
After exploding all of these controversial ideas to the forefront, the author then doesn't draw any conclusions from them. His characters are flat and don't develop at all during the novel, and never is the question asked: "If this is the nature of God, how, then, should we live?"
In short, the novel just doesn't add up. While it's admittedly easier to be a critic than a writer, I hope that there aren't too many people drawn into the obvious fiction of this book. For a decent piece of supernatural fiction in a similar vein, read That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.
