Much Ado About The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code is the reason why am not eating pasta in seven years.

Personal biases aside,I think the book is sooo overrated, a product of Doubleday’s media hoopla, so to speak. Surely, the well-read among us have browsed through better stuff in our lifetime. While going through it, I had to actually peek through the succeeding pages to see when the insanity would end. My high school chum Lei, who maintains her own reading club at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center hit the nail on the head when she said: “It’s like a watered-down Eco. Written for Hollywood, no doubt.It spawned a whole section of supplementary readings in the bookstores here but I wasn’t taken.Am glad it’s dying down.”

Reading The Da Vinci Code elicited the same feelings as when I first read Grisham, you just know that the author was itching to finish the last two chapters because a multi-million dollar movie contract was waiting in the wings. A common criticism of ‘Da Vinci Code’ is the ending: after a stimulating discussion of the Church hierarchy’s role in covering up important facets of Christian history, the author backtracks in his claim by portraying the Opus Dei as having been manipulated by a Grail obsessed historian, Leigh Teabing.

The book itself is not an original, having been patterned after the premises of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail which was first published in the 80’s.I would think that the non-fiction book The Templar Revelation (1997)merits a better read,it is anchored on ample research and documentation about the occult and ancient religion, sans the ludicrous plot of tied-up bodies being stuffed in car trunks and spirited out of a plane that we so conveniently find in Da Vinci Code.

I did have fun learning about the Fibonacci sequence and the ancient ritual of Hieros Gamos (sexual union as a form of spirituality). I would think the book is a hit because everyone loves a conspiracy theory, especially when it strikes at the very foundation of our human faith. The idea that Mary Magdalene was in fact one of Jesus’s disciples and founded the Church is interestingly feminist. And nothing would tickle an intellectuals’ fancy better than the thought that Jesus was not a deity but all-out human, married to Mary Magdalene and siring a child by her in the person of Sarah.

The problem with Da Vinci Code is that Dan Brown presents a set of Facts before the Prologue and unknowing readers think all data presented in the book is factual. However, it is doubtful whether the Merovingian family (descendants of Mary Magdalene) actually founded Paris. Or the exact role that Emperor Constantine played in cosmetizing Christ’s divinity in the Gospels. Records show that early Christians believed in Christ as the Son of God even before the Council of Nicea.The Opus Dei also does not have a bishop or an order of monks. And if Silas was an albino, why did he seem to have extraordinary vision? As we know, albinos have poor eyesight or are nearly blind…

In the meantime, the carnival continues: check out these new titles on murders and secret societies, they might prove to be more interesting than Da Vinci Code: The Rule of Four, The Assassini and The Dante Club.

Am i reading Dan Brown Again? Well, I did not read Grisham again after the first one.

Am I watching The Da Vinci Code The Movie? Maybe. But I’ll not necessarily be the first to fall in line. Let the Italian Confederation and their groupies do that.