The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | Lets get real: Great FICTIONAL story,

The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | Women beyond belief

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The Da Vinci Code

	The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown Anchor, 2006 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 3867 reviews view larger image
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The Da Vinci Code

Lets get real: Great FICTIONAL story,

I thought my review of this work would be pretty involved given all of the hullaballoo around it, and the story. I have been under the impression that this book is some kind of very true to life story. I believe, even if it is based on a theory, it is and was never meant to be anything but a story. It is a fantastic story. I thought it was a fantastic book, very engrossing and a nice break from the real world!

It kind of reminded me of "Atlas Shrugged" or "The carpetbaggers"..... I don't know what else to say, If you LOVE picking up a book, and then raising your head three hours later to realize you have been immersed in the story for hours, then this kind of reading is for you.

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Women beyond belief

As a mystery, well, there are better. In the competition for plot twists, historical fiction, art, or cryptography, there's better out there than the Da Vinci Code. But it is a page-turner, and with that excitement succeeds in dramatically raising curiosity about two major questions: (1) what is belief and how does it affect history? and (2) is the image of women in religion timeless, or was it consciously manufactured at certain key periods in history?

One need not be religious in order to care about the first question. And one need not be a radical feminist to consider the second. After all, some basic facts of male-female relations are still with us no matter how modern we get: men rule the world, and declare the wars. Only women bear children, including the boys who will be men. And women are not some obscure minority, but 50% of the human experience.

So if a thriller sprinkled with (partially accurate) historical references is what it takes to get people to examine their beliefs, research history, and apply the results to improving life for the men, women, and children around them, that will be a respectable achievement for this work of popular literature.

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A Blessing in Disguise?

I have to admit: I actually enjoyed reading the book. And I'm saying this as someone who also has a taste for Kafka, Tolstoy, and a range of other authors that are generally said to have produced real "literature."

Was there a difference between those authors and Brown? Definitely. The DaVinci Code read more like a movie. But then again, I like movies too, and all the more so when I'm more involved in it by imagining the scenes and keep turning the pages. It was a fun ride. I certainly had a few entertaining hours.

I could therefore give the book four or even five stars because, well, Brown achieved what he set out to do: to deliver a page turner driven by visual descriptions and fast plot twists. One should never judge a thing by what it was never meant to do. I wouldn't write a bad review on a printer because it fails to work as a lawn mower, and likewise I wouldn't give a bad rating to an entertaining page turner for not meeting my high literary standards.

Nevertheless, I think it's generous to give the book three stars, because Brown himself presents his book as something serious, and that is just pretentious. I'm talking, of course, about that introductory page headlined with the word "FACT" and ending with the sentence, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

This sentence turns the book into a joke that - as is said of German jokes - is no laughing matter. For, as is well known by now, Brown did not only get a few minor details wrong (though he did, too), but put huge boulders of blatant misinformation in the book.

Many books have been written to set the facts straight. One with probably the least bias is Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine by historian Bart Ehrman.

Who knows? Maybe people who were previously unfamiliar with the early centuries of the Christian church are led - via the detour of Brown - to look at the topic on a more factual basis. So the book might turn out, in addition to its entertainment value, to be a blessing after all. Albeit in disguise.

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It's FICTION, kids.

Everyone on the planet has felt the need to weigh in on this book, decrying it as blasphemy, screaming about whether or not the Knights Templars and the Priory were real, or, further, whether they had anything to do with the Sange Real or the Mergovian line, whether Christ died for our sins, whether He lived at all, etc.

First, this is a work of fiction. People became so angered about the alleged premise here that they seem to have forgotten that Dan Brown wrote this book as fiction and sold it as such. Books like Michael Piaget Holy Blood Holy Grail cover whether or not any of this is real. But even accepting that Brown never made any representation and people take things like this way too seriously, this book got too much press. This is not a bad book. It's well-enough written, and relatively fast-paced. But it's not a GREAT book, and not even the best of Brown's "heretical" novels (an honour I would reserve for Angels and Demons.) If this book had been about anything in the world other than suggesting that Christ had a child, it would have been on the bargain rack in most airports behind the unsold John Grishams within a week.

Remember, kiddies: Just because it's controversial does NOT mean it's great literature. (For further lessons on the medicocre-book-propelled-to-international-stardom-by-religion, please see The Satanic Verses) [close]

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