media consumption

The DaVinci Code

My dad has been bugging me--no, that's too strong a way of saying it--he's been politely asking me every time I see him if I've read this book yet. Well, now I have.

It's pretty much what I expected: a straightforward murder mystery with plot with a few of twists and turns and red herrings, but in the end, a fairly predicatable resolution to the mystery. But that's not the part that makes the book worth reading. The interesting part is all of the esoteric background information underlying the mystery.

Dan Brown has set his murder in the midst of a vast conspiratorial web involving the Catholic Church and its conservative prelature Opus Dei, the Knights Templar secret society, the art of Leonardo DaVinci, early Christian gnostics, the legend of the Holy Grail, and more. I'm not going to spoil the story by listing the details. You can read spoilers at any number of websites that have sprung up to debunk the conspiracy that Brown has used in his novel.

Normally, I might get worked up about a guy who plays fast and loose with historical facts, but for some reason, here I'm inclined to shrug my shoulders and say it's fiction. I think I feel this way mainly because the theory is so all-encompassingly incredible that most readers should be able to see through the claims, or at least not take them seriously until undertaking further investigation.

That said, there is something fishy about Da Vinci's Last Supper, but I'm not about to try to overthrow the Vatican because of it.

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