The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Warning: spoiler ahead. This book review reveals the main plot, so please close this page if you want to be surprised by the book. UNLESS, you are like me. I watched The Sixth Sense even though my sister had told me the ending and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie despite the fact that I knew he was dead from the start. But I digressed. Back to The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code sparked off a heated debate about Jesus’s life: Was he celibate or did he have a child with Mary Magdalene? Hence the controversy surrounding the book, which helped propelled it to the very top of the bestseller’s list and I think it is still there. It made Dan Brown a very rich man. People love a good controversy. That is why tabloids sell. That is why the rich and the famous are and will always be hounded by paparazzies waiting for them to slip up. Jesus’s life had always been a topic of fascination and when this book ‘dared’ to put out the controversial theory that there is a direct living bloodline of Jesus Christ, the book automatically became a bestseller. Everybody is talking about the book that took the world by storm. Well, nah, it didn’t really took the world by storm, I just liked the phrase. But it did sell by the millions.

The book started off with the seemingly gruesome and baffling murder of the renowned curator of the Louvre Museum. He left behind a series of clues that could only be deciphered by his estranged granddaughter, Sophie Neveu who is a French cryptologist and Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, the hero of the book. And so the race begins to discover the identity of the murderer while the police, headed by Bezu Fache and the unknown murderer are hot on their heels.

The quest for the murderer turned into the quest for the Holy Grail. The curator was killed because he was the head of a secret society called the Priory of Sion. This very secret society holds the clue to the Holy Grail. The question is, what is the Holy Grail? This book states that it is not a ‘what’ but rather a ‘who’. Mary Magdalene is the Holy Grail; she carried Jesus’s seed in her womb. The Church is hell bent on keeping this secret locked up forever. The fact that a ‘woman’ holds such power is a deep piercing thorn in their side for years. If revealed, it will undo the entire history of the Church and plunge christianity into chaos. A madman, so obsessed with the secret is willing to kill to get to it using a monk (gasp!) as his murderer. These are the controversies that so consumed the public and launched many other books debunking The Da Vinci Code.

I read the book and I thought that it made a nice mystery murder novel. I am a Christian, a catholic and therefore this book should have offended me but I wasn’t. It is after all fiction at the end. I have to admit that I wouldn’t mind going to the Louvre and examining Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or The Last Supper, but that is just for the fun of it. The plot made the book interesting but don’t take it too seriously. Just have fun reading it!

And to end this review, I have to comment on the movie version of this book. I have no doubts, given the popularity of the book, that it will hit the cinemas with a big bang. Tom Hanks’ star power alone would ensure a steady flow of cash into the producers’ pockets. Somebody suggested that Harrison Ford should have played the role of Robert Langdon. He was, after all, in a similar position when he played Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade where he was in search of the Holy Grail, which was not Mary Magdalene but a cup. I think that if he were younger, he would have played the role to perfection…there is something about that smirk of his. The role of Sophie went to the French actress of the Amelie fame, Audrey Tautou. I had no clear picture of Sophie, so any actress who can speak French will do for me. So I will wait for the movie to come out and I will watch it. Just for the fun of it.