The DaVinci Code Hysteria

Dan Brown is one lucky S.O.B. — he is already a rich man and will be a whole lot richer before he fades from the national awareness. I have to give him credit, he came up with a clever idea and, whether by design or accident, managed to to write a novel that concurrently fascinated and pissed off a whole lot of people. That combination pretty much guarantees big time book sales.

When I read about The DaVinci Code I thought it sounded like a lot of other books I’d read — Michael Baigent’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Margaret Starbird’s The Woman With the Alabaster Jar among them. I tried to read The DaVinci Code a couple of times but the writing was so lame in my opinion that I couldn’t get into it. It is NOT literary fiction by any means. Finally, I came across the illustrated version and read that. It was much more interesting because I finally caught the unique flavor of the book despite Brown’s abysmal dialog-writing skills. I subsequently read Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress, earlier works by Brown that were pretty interesting. Maybe, because I had no knowledge of his subject matter, I could overlook the writing style for the story.

Digital Fortress, about international level code-breakers working for the N.S.A. (No Such Agency), is enjoyable if only because the look inside that very mysterious world of people who think in patterns and probabilities intrigues. Angels and Demons, set in the Vatican like DaVinci Code, is about a rebel revival sect of the ancient Illuminati.

Now the movie of The DaVinci Code is coming out and I am dumbfounded by all the hysteria around it. Church groups are advertising special “education” programs to prepare good Christians for what they will see if they attend the movie. Some countries have banned it. Lots of church groups are condemning it. The Vatican itself has pretty much ignored it but plenty of speculation about that is going around, too. With each new bit of craziness, more books fly off the shelves — 45 MILLION to date!

There are a couple of things about this I find interesting. For one thing, there is not a single idea presented in The DaVinci Code that is particularly original. Brown just took a lot of theories that have been floating around for centuries and spun them, very cleverly, into a thriller. Books like Michael Baigent’s, Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, countless books on the Templars and Mary Magdalene have been around for years. But, as we know, movies are always more “dangerous” than books because a lot more people go to movies than actually read.

The Catholic Church and the Vatican have become popular villains in fiction. It is actually a tough world for writers in the villain department — it used to be that communists were the designated villains. Then drug lords. These days pedophiles are high on the list of villainy and, because of the pedophilia scandal connected with the Church, the Church has been drawn into that.

Also, the Vatican is fascinating to many — myself included. Though it is a sovereign nation, the smallest in the world, it is shrouded in centuries of mystique. Power, art, mysticism, opulence, and more power always capture the imagination. I am in the middle of Daniel Silva’s The Confessor, a beautifully written thriller about a secret Vatican cabal that keeps secret the Vatican’s alleged collaboration with the Nazis. It’s a good read.

So, is Tom Hanks, complete with bad haircut, in The DaVinci Code a genuine threat to the Church and Christianity in general? Here’s what all the hysterics seem to have forgotten — Faith is a gift. If you are a person of Faith it doesn’t matter if Jesus was married or not. Personally, I always sort of hoped he was — his life was awfully short and awfully bleak otherwise. Faith is — well, faith. We believe because we have been given this gift of assurance that there is something beyond our minuscule selves worth trusting in. The details don’t matter. A badly written novel or a movie, however popular, won’t change the beliefs of a person of faith.

I’ll wait for the DVD. In the meantime, there are a lot of well-written novels to read.