The Da Vinci Code

Just finished reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Being caught up in all this recent craze about whether what the book says is true about the Church and Christianity, I felt I had to read the book to understand completely.

And it wasn't a bad choice. The book was riveting, to say the least, and very exciting. It definitely qualified as a mystery thriller or a detective thriller, and as I read the "Early Acclaim" on the back cover (I'm reading the Random House large print version published in 2003), every one of them were right. Dan Brown certainly earned his credits as a story teller. I simply couldn't put down the book, and actually finished reading it over a night and a full day.

So what was the problem? Why were there so many brickbats thrown at Dan Brown for the book? I thought it after I had finished the last sentence. It's as though I were a cross-examiner pondering the words of a witness after he had said his piece in the stand.

The answer is simple. Dan Brown took too many poetic liberties with established sacred truths in weaving his story. That's the best I could have summed it all up. And it says a lot about his originality nor his plotting skills. Given other subject matter, the book would have been on par with any Sherlock Holmes mystery. In fact, it reminded me of them. If it had not been about the Christian faith, the book would have been much more acceptable, and but of course, sold much less copies. By using the Christian Church and its theology as a subject matter of the book, Dan Brown stepped into the realm of controversy, and raised his and the book's public profile, and of course, in the process, stepped on too many toes.

I can understand this point. It is every author's dream to sell his book. What use is a book if it simply remains on shelves?

Regarding his assertions about church practices, I guess they have been sufficiently refuted by documentaries and books enough to spawn off a cottage industry surrounding the book. I shall not elaborate further. I guess it is more than enough to say that the book is utterly inaccurate either as history or religious description. Most of the links he draws between historical phenomena are simply laughable and unbelievable.

But Dan Brown is not the first to use religion in a fictitious way. As I was reading the book, I was constantly reminded of the film "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" starring Harrison Ford (one of my first favourite movies). We have the chase for the Holy Grail, the academic hero (Indiana Jones was an archaeology professor with his dad as a classics professor), the evil organisation as the enemy. The similarities seemed so many. It's entirely possible the movie could have served as an inspiration for the story.

I think a crucial reason there has been so much controversy over the book is because people have been reading too much into the book. As classified by publishers, it is sold as FICTION. Even it's subtitle tells it all--The Da Vinci Code: A Novel. Sure it draws on a lot of current facts to build the story, but just after the title page there is already the disclaimer:

"This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental."

Nothing could be clearer than that. And yet some people fell for it hook, line and sinker. This has often been attributed to the page before the Prologue which states a few "facts". However, what people fail to notice is that just before this particular page, there is a title signalling the start of the book proper, after the Acknowledgements. After this title page, everything written till the close of the book belongs to the realm of fiction. Including the "facts". Hence they couldn't be taken as real. Moreover, as you read on, the Catholic Church and Opus Dei do not appear as sinister as is portrayed earlier in the book. So definitely Dan Brown was not out to slander the Church as some persist.

Other than that, it's a good an entertaining read. Maybe this is what it means to be a page-turner. An exciting story, if only it had not been so factually wrong about its descriptions of rituals and history, among other things. Therefore, my advice to future readers of the book: just read it as fiction, and everything will fall into place. Do not read too much into the story or the plot. In conclusion, to quote Robert Langdon in Chapter 1, Dan Brown "clearly has a gift for fiction."