DaVinci's Code

by Dan Brown

Okay, so I reread _The DaVinci Code_ right around the time the movie came out. I was trying to recapture the hype and excitement from my first reading when I jammed through the book in a couple of days. The second time around, I noticed that the book was poorly written. Brown has the same style as Michael Crichton - fast-paced, short chapters, explanatory dialogue - but it just comes off as a second-rate. Somehow this style of writing seems to flow when Crichton does it, but it comes off as choppy and forced in Brown's books.

However, the _The DaVinci Code_ still contains an exciting story with awesome suspence. I knew who the Teacher was from the beginning, but I kept reading a few times to get to the point when Langdon and Sophie figure it out. And I had forgotten all the details about the grail that are revealed in the book, and it was cool to read all those mini-history lessons again. After rereading the book I was surprised at some of the renewed world uproar over the presentation of religion in the book. Without citing an exact page # I think Brown makes it very clear that his antagonists are not representative of the Catholic church. They are rogue agents with separate agendas, whose faith waivers in light of worldly temptations - a common narrative device in most parables.

I do see the conflict with the central Christian narrative. If Jesus was married it would challenge the foundation of Western history in which women have been marginalized. But that ignores the fact that women had limited roles in Greco-Roman culture, which was highly influential on the growing Christian movement. We don't tell youngsters the of the wretched status of women in Athens when we teach about the origins of democracy. However, the notion that the sacred feminine has been marginalized by popular monotheism seems to be a pretty valid critique. I think that's the main argument of the protagonists in the text, and it only takes a cursory glance at Western history to corroborate that argument on a religious and historical level. When read like that, it's almost as if all the religious people who feel threatened by the story really feel that masculine authority is being threatened. Of course the recent conflict was never presented in quite that way by the press, but that seems to be what it boils down to on a philosphical level. In the faith level, no one wants to have the central story of their spiritual existence tampered with. Christians have been arguing about that type of thing for years. For example, one way to understand the split between Judaism and Christianity is to think of it as different branches of the same story-tree. And it's very easy to resort to violence based on adherence to different details of the story.