Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The da Vinci Code review...

An exciting book. But nothing to write home about. What bugs me about this book is that it is so filled with cliches. I guess for people who are totally ignorant of history it may seem spell-binding. For me it is the Forrest Gump of religious thrillers. The signs of the Holy Grail are litterally everywhere. I was eating a pizza and realized that the pie was round and cut into sentions with five cuts, signifying the "sacred feminine" a term used adnauseum in the book. The second thing that really bugged me about this book is the cliche' use of the Catholic Church. Is there no other sect of Christianity that an author of fiction can use? Also the rediculous, and again totally cliche, bit about how women had to be demonized by the church. Crapola! Has mr. Brown ever heard of the cult of the virgin? Of all the saints to be venerated from the early times until today there is no saint so venerated in Catholicism as Saint Mary. So much so that almost every grand gothic cathedral built in Europe is dedicated to Our Lady (Notre Dame) each adorned with the Rose Window. These grand multimedia extravaganzas were not only venerating Mary but also the seats of Church power for over a thousands years. Hardly banishing women, or the "sacred feminine" to hell.

The author writes in a way and uses "facts" or "informatioin" in much the same way conspiracy freaks use information in the Kennedy Assasination. I am surprised that the author did not try to implicate Oswald in the Grail myth. Like the movie JFK it feeds the white-noise machine of psudo-history, mythmaking, while telling an admittedly great story. I have no problem with the story itself. I love a good mystery told well. However I feel that the melding of fact, fiction, and suposition based on dubius facts or plain whole-cloth begs for a forward by the author explaining that the work is one of fiction.

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