Davinci Code... FIN

Well, I finished the DaVinci Code this weekend... I don't really know what to say. I can't fault the book on it's historical merit, though there are plenty of titles out there nursing this book into a controversy. The academics are all there in the book. Dan Brown has simply culled the most intriguing theories about the holy grail and written a story around them. The basic premise of the book is not so shocking as the mainstream media is pretending it is. As Dan Browns hero states several times in the novel, the information has been leaking out into pop culture for years. To Mr. Browns credit there were a few tangents that will probably lead me to new discoveries from this book, but the bulk of it is pretty light.

Most annoying were the apparently clever puzzles and riddles with which the protector of the grail frustrated would be seekers. If the characters were worthy of the credit the author equips them with, the puzzles he provides would have made this a 150 page book instead of 350. It's just to painful to be so far ahead of the characters in a book like this. Waiting patiently for them to solve a riddle is sometimes agonizing. You'd think the grail would be long gone before these guys even got started. Or that the protector would have been fired long ago. Once the trajectory of this book became clear, I more or less finished it on principle.

Now all this isn't to say I didn't enjoy the book. As my friend Chris has pointed out, it was written to be a movie. "Robert Langdon has 24 hours to figure out why he's being framed for murder and find the holy grail to prove his innocence." LOL. I hear that Dan Brown's first novel Angles and Demons is being worked up for the big screen as well.

No what does intrigue me about this book is the fact that it came to me (via my mom) and it drops into line with a whole series of books which seem to just happen to be based on the gnostic texts of the Nag Hamadi Codex. So much of the scholarship that gives Dan Brown his plot is coming out of that find. In the last 4 months at least 4 different books have pulled up the Nag Hamadi finds within their pages. Though The Gnostic Gospels is direstly about those texts, VALIS was a surprise, Sophie's World toouched on them and now The DaVinci Code as well.

My final comment? It's worth reading for the action and if you aren't familiar with the basic premise of the Holy Grail as the blood-line of Christ, then it's a good introduction. It reads very easy. I averaged at least 50 pages a night before bed and it took less than a week. It isn't ground breaking or anything, but it is entertaining... and outside of the riddles and puzzles, it does keep you on your toes a little. It won't make the top ten list, but I'm not sorry I read it either.

P.S. The real giveaway in this book was naming the character Sophie Neveu. If you're familiar with the Nag Hamadi texts, you know that Saint Sophia is the incarnation of Christ as a woman. Divine Wisdom. You have to just read until Brown gets around to making that clear.