Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code

On May 19th the movie version of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code will debut in theaters. Because of the early hype and controversy I took the time to read the book. I’m a sucker for reading things when I am told by anyone that I’m not supposed to read them. I had seen and heard a lot of the debunking work done by those that feel the book is heresy. So I was expecting the usual conspiracy book model which is to take some known facts and fill in the gaps with pure speculation in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. Kennedy assassination books and explanations of Iraq war strategy are great for this kind of manipulation and quite frankly they bore me. History deserves better than sensationalism feeding what we want or wish to be true. To my surprise however, the Da Vinci Code wasn’t a sensationalist pseudo academic book like I assumed. It was a novel of complete fiction. It has good guys, bad guys and bad dialog. It’s a mystery novel set in the world of Christian history and theology. Being that its primary goal is to entertain, it has no more responsibility to accuracy than Star Trek has to the laws of Physics. Every “fact” or historical reference is used not to educate but to move the reader through the narrative.
That having been said the book owes a great deal to all the controversy that has been created around its premise. Taken as a suspense or mystery novel on it’s own merit, minus the supposed threat to Christianity as we know it, it’s a rather average book. By the time I got to the end and to the “surprise” family revelations of Sophie Neveu, one of the main characters, I was glad to be done with it. Now in close step with the coming release of the movie version we have the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, suing Brown for stealing the ideas of their book. Richard Leigh, Michael Biagent and Henry Lincon together authored a review of Christian history with some far reaching, some would say, over reaching conclusions. The lawsuit has no merit what so ever, except to allow the name of their book to mentioned on TV news shows, news papers and, of course, in this column.
People that believe this book is damaging to their faith should be twice hurt to know that their sensitivity and outrage has been used against them to sell millions of copies of this story. Now, as the Ron Howard movie approaches release, the noise level is bound to only increase if for no other reason than to sell theater tickets. It is my hope that and suggestion that we save our outrage for those things that deserve it. The Da Vinci Code is an example of first rate marketing of a second rate piece of work. This is a growing trend not only in media marketing but in politics as well. The burden is on us to take the time to see past the shell game and not be distracted by the game that so many seem to be playing.