The Da Vinci Code

I actually debated whether to post a review of this book, not wanting anyone to know that I'd read it. But I did read it and what's the point of feeling shame? This is how I came to read it: I showed some pictures of Paris to a girl working with me this summer and she decided I had to read the Da Vinci Code because it described the places I'd visited in Paris. And she was right, descriptions of the Louvre and other Paris locations took me right back there. My long-suffering husband grabbed it first and read it in an afternoon - it took me two days (the pacing is frenetic). This is not an intellectual effort, despite the author's pretensions, but I suspect that this is the closest many of its readers will ever come to experiencing a scholarly work. The plot is thin and strains credibility, the characters are equally lean cliches. I'm no expert but I suspect that the doctrines Brown puts forth, i.e. the worship of the feminine and his bastardized version of Gnosticism, are dubious at best. The book starts with a murder and becomes a search for the Holy Grail which turns out to be the tomb of Mary Magdalene and the secret documents entombed there. An incredible amount of action is packed into just one night and a day as the characters flit around Paris and its environs, fly to England, flit about London and points north, are repeatedly held at gunpoint, tour museums, banks and old churches etc.. Personally I think the timeframe is unrealistic, although perhaps they are travelling in a Tardis - a theory no more preposterous than others put forth in this novel. And it is just a novel, not a great one but a page turner, nonetheless. What is sad is that the author has sold this poorly researched fabrication as fact to a public of millions who are only too willing to buy into the latest conspiracy theory. The movie might be good though.