It is selling like Potter and I've heard lots of people say how wonderful it is. It drove me nuts. The author continuously teases you with things that the characters know, and you don't. He seems to think that suspense is gained only by dropping hints like anvils, and then making you wait to see what he does with them.

I will say I've never been a fan of most murder mysteries for the same sort of thing. Not only this, but he has what appear to me to be fairly major plot holes, yet everyone praises this book.

What did you think of it, and why?

As I understand it, the reason the book is selling like hotcakes is because the main premise is that Jesus Christ actually got married and had kids. It's a controversial idea, but utterly plausible...and thus, the premise sells millions of books.

Personally, I don't feel the need to read what promises to be a wretched bit of literary trash to extract the premise. But I admit that it is a great premise, and I understand why it sells so many books. Almost all people (Christian or not) believe that Christ would have made an awesome husband and father...a belief that the traditional Christian churches have sought to mollify without admitting that it as a real possibility. So lot's of people will read and praise the book because the central idea is so appealing.

By the way, the scene I overheard had nothing to do with the premise I stated above, I gathered that from new reports and reviews...and that might have been another book altogether. So it could be that The Da Vinci Code has some lame premise that has nothing to do with my post at all.

See also Gibson's passion? I mean come on he's telling the same story we've seen in about a million movies before with a bunch of english white dudes walking around in the desert pretending to be aramaic?

TIP: Writing something? Need it to be hit, make it about Jesus, or Christianity,

TIP 2: Need it to be a HUGE hit? Make it about jesus or christianity and get very creative with concepts on the matter, like say, "...and lo the man known as Heysus, descended into the desert and toked forth from yea marijuana, and then he spoke, yea, it is good, in fact bretheren, it is ALL good"

Just for fun,
Muogin

Getting back to the subject (sort of), the main premise of The Da Vinci Code isn't really the idea that Jesus Christ might have had a wife and children. That's just the part that attracts so many people and is also all contraversial. The main premise is that not only did he have kids, but that there has been a straight line of descent, with all his descendents (there are only ever a few) being watched over by some secret society.

It isn't implausible at all that Jesus was married and had kids, but it is insane to believe that the early Christian Church would have found anything remarkable about that or formed a secret order to watch over his children. Absolutely no teaching of Christ or the early Church would indicate that his descendents were somehow special. And the later, Roman, Church wouldn't have had any sure way to determine who was directly descended from Christ even had anyone bothered to try, which there was no reason to bother doing. Since the second part is even more essential than the first part of the premise (i.e. it isn't actually necessary that there actually be a line of descent from Christ, only that Da Vinci and the rest of the society believe that there was such a line), the main premise as a whole is pretty implausible.

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The main premise is that not only did he have kids, but that there has been a straight line of descent, with all his descendents (there are only ever a few) being watched over by some secret society.

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Actually, I saw a TV documentary about 3 or 4 years ago that seriously suggested this might be the case.

The basic idea was that the whole 'Holy Grail' business was based on a misinterpretation from French, and the original meaning was 'Royal Blood'. They spent a while talking about how plausible it was that a descendant of Christ lived in Western Europe, showed that it was a reasonably plausible idea. Then they came up with some accounts of a secret society that might have been keeping track of it.

I would say that such a society could have come into existence anywhere up to 2 or 3 hundred years after the event, with a reasonable chance of accuracy. After all, if you had somebody important in your direct family between 7 and 10 generations ago, its quite possible that you would know about it. Its the kind of knowledge that gets passed down. For instance, I know that I'm obliquely related to the founder of Boot's Chemists (a large UK retail chain), and that goes back 4 generations (I think), and isn't even particularly interesting!

And the society wouldn't have to start out as such. I mean, just look at the way the Mafia changed in roles after its original creation. The society could just have been a formalised attempt to 'keep the knowledge', the same as early churches were, which grew into what it eventually became.

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TIP: Writing something? Need it to be hit, make it about Jesus, or Christianity,

TIP 2: Need it to be a HUGE hit? Make it about jesus or christianity and get very creative with concepts on the matter,

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Tip one isn't true. Case in point: theLeft Behind series never skyrocketed to number one or anywhere near it. I suspect the Passion copycats and coattail-riders won't do well, either, at least not if they try to do a sympathetic portrayal.

Tip two is true only if the concept is negative toward Christianity or at least scripturally deficient. Case in point: Jesus Christ: Superstar; Andre Serrano's art exhibit, Piss Christ; Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. The more creative (read negative or inaccurate) the better to ensure success.

Though Gibson's Passion isn't as scripturally accurate as we're led to believe (Veronica and her veil, for instance, aren't in the Bible), he is sincere and respectful of the subject matter. He took a gigantic risk once he and his project were spurned by the usual movers and shakers. Hollywood's roadblocks backfired on them, plain and simple. (You'd think they, above all people, would know that even negative publicity....)

The DaVinci Code is only another attempt to cast doubt on the Bible. From "Media Matters" (WordNetDaily.com, 11-03-03):

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Brown contends Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child; Magdalene was chosen by Jesus to lead an early, heavily feminist Christian church; Roman Emperor Constantine invented Jesus' divinity and created the New Testament; and Leonardo Da Vinci left codes in his artwork to preserve the truth (which happens to be the Holy Grail).

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HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL talks about how the real purpose of the Knights Templar was to watch over the descendants of Christ, and that the Merovingian kings were among those descendants.

By the way (BTW), I've talked to others who've read DAVINCI CODE about the discussion here, and they were irritated by the "coyness" (which is what I call it) of the author, too.

To bring this back onto the topic, so the popularity of THE DAVINCI CODE is due to its sensationalistic approach to religion and not to its writing?

I can think of another book which was very poorly written which had a religious subject (more or less) and which did very well, though I think it was more because of its "new age" approach than because of any kind of anti-religion aspects to it.

Have any of you read THE CELESTINE PROPHECY?

If he didn't have kids, then there would still be plenty of people claiming to be closely related (and a good number might even be telling the truth...Jesus might have had any number of nieces and nephews). Even a hundred years after the fact, I don't see anyone sorting that mess out if they weren't keeping careful track of it from the beginning...and there simply is no evidence that they would have. Christ's bodily children are simply not assigned any importance in any scriptural account, either before or after his ministry.

This novel claims to be simple fiction, but it felt much more like a badly done fantasy novel, if for nothing else, it had heroes who just happened to have the pieces that fit each of the authors never-ending puzzles. The biggest annoyance to me was that I have a hard time imagining any secret over a thousand years old that anyone would care enough to kill over, or even bother to keep secret.

Not only that, but BIG SECRET wasn't one except in its smallest details. Certainly not worth killing over, even if you are a nutcase religous fanatic. (Aren't those religous nutcase fanatics fun! We can use them everywhere in fiction, and no one will question us, since there are so many of them in the real world.).

Second, I'm in the middle of reading Da Vinci Code now. I read another of his books a couple of months ago, and while that book (Digital Fortress) also had an interesting premise, his writing style and characterization made me want to scream. Frankly, if all technical professionals behaved in the puerile way that his characters did in that book, the country would be in a pile of trouble.

While his characters in Da Vinci Code aren't (yet) exhibiting the same types of annoying and unbelievable behavior, his obfuscation of important facts and plot points, and especially his "every chapter is a cliffhanger" structural style are still there. Add to this the fact that I'm over a third of the way through and the story hasn't even really started yet, and it's driving me absolutely nuts. Frankly, I don't care what the secret is, I just want it to end.

So why not put it down? Well, normally I would, but the book was given to us by a close relative who liked it a lot. Sigh.... So I'm reading it in little bits at home instead of just plowing through it on the bus to work because I'm too embarassed to be seen with it in public. What we do for family...

Kathleen - thank you so much - my mom gave me Celestine Prophecy way back when it was 'in' and I tried so hard to read it... but I couldn't, and it is one of the few books I have put down. I almost never give up on a book, and I thought something was wrong with me. I felt really bad (what did birdcastle say about what we do for family?!) but just couldn't do it.

My husband travels by air frequently, and has noticed that he always sees three or four people reading DaVinci Code and at least that many reading Grisham. Given the fact that many people who do not read much do read on airplanes, I'm wondering if it's safe to conclude that part of the popularity of these authors is that they appeal to people who don't read much. These folks are more inclined to read for the "secret" or the hook or the controversial element and pay less attention to the less-than-wonderful craftsmanship in writing.

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...the concept of goddess worship and the demonization of Eve. This was the real point to his novel...

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I agree completely. I've mentioned in another thread that I enjoyed the book a lot. Brown was interested in male/female relationships, and the almost total lack of the feminine in traditional Christianity. He was also exploring family relationships.

*Spoilers* (as if anyone cares )

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it had heroes who just happened to have the pieces that fit each of the authors never-ending puzzles.

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*Spoilers over*

Anyway, yeah, the plot may have had problems, and the writing wasn't necessarily Pulitzer quality, but the issues were fascinating. I had no problem suspending disbelief.

A lot of criticism I've read about the book takes the position that "what he wrote isn't true." But it is a work of fiction. It is just a story. It doesn't have to be true.

Mulan might be the closest analog...but while it is accepted that she was a real person, nothing is known about her but the rather fantastic stories. I would rate the Disney version as being narratively more true than the traditional version (in which Mulan is a paragon of feminine duty and virtue before being obliged to run off to war).

We can criticize his writing, his style, his pac but I have problems with criticms like this:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/september2003/feature1.htm

and like this:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2003/nov7.html

because they take the position that Dan Brown was trying to rewrite history. Whether he did a good job of it or not (and it's debatable), I think he made conscious choices to fictionalize (if that's the word I want) a lot more than these people give him credit for.

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“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239)

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Okay, I have to say that this is utterly shoddy premise, and deserves to be criticized. It would be like if I wrote a hard SF novel that had habitable planets six AU from a blue supergiant. Habitable because Earthlike ecologies had evolved naturally in the couple of million years available. And the Crisis review didn't confine itself to criticizing the premise.

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would be too easy to criticize him for characters thin as plastic wrap, undistinguished prose, and improbable action.... Notice how each character is an extreme type…effortlessly brilliant, smarmy, sinister, or psychotic as needed, moving against luxurious but curiously flat backdrops.

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Leaving aside the fact that there is more to this critique than criticism of his research, which other reviewers have praised, the terrible research is a topic worthy of extended comment.

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But despite Brown’s scholarly airs, a writer who thinks the Merovingians founded Paris and forgets that the popes once lived in Avignon is hardly a model researcher. And for him to state that the Church burned five million women as witches shows a willful—and malicious—ignorance of the historical record.

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This is not a minor point. Research this bad deserves to be criticized. Since Brown's work is marketed as mainstream fiction, it is assumed to happen in our world, and getting the facts of our reality this wrong is just as bad as having the hero jump out a window and fall up. Having read the Crisis review, I have to agree that every criticism in it is valid.

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In the end, Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously researched mess.

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The Christianity Today article doesn't even pretend to be a review of The Da Vinci Code, it is simply pointing out that the popular idea that the Council of Nicea invented Christ's divinity (an idea exemplified by The Da Vinci Code, but one that can be refuted without even mentioning the book more than once or twice) is utterly false. Whether or not Christ was really divine, the earliest Christians fully believed that he was.

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A lot of criticism I've read about the book takes the position that "what he wrote isn't true." But it is a work of fiction. It is just a story. It doesn't have to be true.

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But one thing is clear. Dan Brown is trying to rewrite history. He is contradicting known historical fact to preach his message. Not just one or two known historical facts, but a whole host of them.

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You beat me to it, Survivor. I'll add that with the woeful tendency today to get history from popular sources rather than bona fide historical sources, works like the DaVinci Code influence -- dare I say 'damage'? -- the public perception and knowledge base.

Christians of all stripes have a vested interest in the basis of their faith -- and the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ is that in a nutshell. This sort of tinkering and chipping away at his veracity is not a minor annoyance. It's both understandable and imperative that they cry 'foul' and cite their reasons.

My word, corporations get nervous when writers' overuse of product names threatens their trademark rights. And then there was the recent Reagan movie that bastardized his life story.

Film and books are powerful mediums that can be abused. What was it George Orwell wrote? Something about power belonging to whoever controlled the past? Rewrite history, anyone?

When you re-write history, it doesn't matter who you're attacking, it is a bad thing in and of itself. Like that opening bit about the Grail being the goddess...it isn't bad because the goddess was a pagen figure. It's bad because the goddess was a Mediterranean pagan figure, not a Northern European pagan figure.

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"The book easily deceives readers by cleverly mixing truths, half-truths and complete falsehoods. Oliver Stone did the same thing with the Kennedy assassination in his notorious [1991] movie 'JFK,' which most people accepted as totally factual." (Julia Duin, The Washington Times)

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Whether it's "truth value of Christianity," communism, the Kennedy assassination, or Reagan, too many people accept these portrayals as factual. The offending writers/producers are rewriting history, so there should be a proper protest to that sort of fraud. Who better to do it than those who are most heavily invested? The sad thing, though, is the extra publicity the contested works get in the meantime.

It reminds me of The Blair Witch Project, which opened with a seemingly-factual statement that some kids set out to make a documentary and then vanished, and that this film was later discovered. Many viewers thought it was a true story until the "dead" kids showed up a month later on a VH1 interview.

About this "rewriting history" thing:

Da Vinci Code
Blair Witch
The War of The Worlds radio broadcast
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
The Tales of Alvin Maker for crying out loud.

What do they all have in common? They rewrite history. They tell stories in a world that isn't real. A couple of them even fooled people into believing they're real (WWotW and Blair Witch, as mentioned above). But because they're fiction I don't see the harm.

And, Survivor, I don't think it's that clear at all. If Dan Brown had written a scholarly paper, or a "HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY" or some such faux serious work, saying these things, then, yes, I would say your criticism of trying to rewrite history is valid.

Let me repeat this idea: I think if Dan Brown were seriously trying to preach a new pagan/Christianty thing - he would have opened up a church, gotten some kind of theology degree, and maybe written a PhD thesis on Goddess worship in the ancient church. He wouldn't have written a suspense novel. Do we accuse John LeCarre of rewriting history?

We don't write fiction to rewrite history. We write fiction for Entertainment (Brown, Stephen King, everything Grisham wrote after A Time to Kill), and we write fiction to explore serious issues about society and humanity.

Exploring issues is not rewriting history. Here's my take on the book, having read it.

Brown is exploring male/female relationships. He is also examining the importance of family relationships. That's the serious stuff. He is also trying to write a novel that is entertaining (which I thought it was) and suspenseful (which I don't think it was, much). I think all the grail stuff and the Christianity stuff is very fancy window dressing.

BTW - that quote you had, Survivor, about the Knights Templar isn't the premise of the novel at all, it's one detail of many. Besides, Dan Brown didn't make that part of it up, anyway. He got it from the supposed founder of the Priory of Sion, who probably made it up himself. Here is a Non-Dan-Brown related link about the Priory.
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/poseur3.html
Google them.

NOTE: I'm not defending this stuff as legit history, I'm just saying Dan Brown didn't make a lot of this stuff up, true or not, it's already out there.

*edited to delete reference to another post that was never posted.*

[This message has been edited by danquixote (edited April 01, 2004).]

Edited to delete an author who was inappropriately included w/ Le Carre.

I'd also like to postulate that there are a lot of folks out there, even a number who consider themselves devout Christians, who are hazy on the details of both Christian history and its predecessors. And I'll bet that the population of religious iconographers (even amateur ones) is small.

So this means that there are a pile of folks out there who are more or less uninformed of the details of accepted Christian history, and they're taking a work of mainstream fiction as the truth because they have nothing better to go on. And since they don't read much or at all, they're unlikely to be exposed to a refutation, or even other ways of looking at the same subject.

And of course I'm in no way suggesting the opposite - that people who take it literally are necessarily non fiction-readers. Or that anyone who uses it as a springboard for interesting thought and conversation and speculation ... uhhh, you get my drift here (too much CYA writing in my background, it just pops out).

Anyway, I don't think that the same phenomenon would happen to a book like Pastwatch, because it has many other blatantly fictional elements (i.e., time travel) to keep reminding casual fiction readers that this is indeed a work of fiction.

Almost everyone I know has read the book, and none of them have lost their faith over it. Most of them, however, have engaged their faith in a way that I'd never seen before reading the book.

My problem is that people are attacking a work of fiction, which I believe is doing good by creating dialogue between its readers, as if that work of fiction were a treatise on Christian history.

They're overreacting to the book, and they're not thinking about it. The dangerous books - the ones that get banned and get their authors thrown in jail - are the ones that make people think about things they haven't thought about before.

That's what this book does, as poor as the prose may be. People are discussing, and thinking, and asking questions, and honest seekers of truth shouldn't be afraid of that. It's healthy.

I agree with you, too. There are people reading it who aren't all that great at seperating fact from fiction, and there are lots of Christians who have lived most of their lives believing everything that they've been told.

Isn't it great to think that they're asking questions, maybe taking those first tentative steps toward doing some research of their own, and trying now, finally, to discover for themselves what really is true in all this?

You, DQ, were the one that made the point that whether or not the book destroys people's faith is besides the point of whether it is any good as fiction. My point is that this is, in the end, "a poorly written, atrociously researched mess."

However, there are no rules stating a novel can't contradict historical fact. A historical novel has some responsibility to get the facts right, just as a hard sci-fi novel has some responsibility to get its science right. But fiction, by definition, is untrue. It's a made-up story.

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You, DQ, were the one that made the point that whether or not the book destroys people's faith is besides the point of whether it is any good as fiction.

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There seems to be an implication here that I've argued that whether or not a piece of literature harms people's faith is unimportant - and if I've somehow created that impression, I'm sorry. To clarify, let me say this:

I do not believe that it is right for an author to deliberately attack and destroy a person's faith. And I would wish that a person's faith is rational enough and strong enough to withstand that kind of criticism. I'm LDS, like a number of people on this site. I know what it's like to have your beliefs ridiculed, dissected, distorted, twisted, and attacked. It is wrong.

On the other hand, literature that expects me to examine my faith, to take a close look at what I believe and is it true or not? I think that's critically important. It keeps me honest. And you know what? It's difficult to discover I believed something that turned out not to be true, but it's important that we embrace truth when we encounter it.

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As literature, which is what we discuss here, it is sheer merde.

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I stated in an earlier post that I didn't think the book was Pulitzer material. It is by no means high art. However, I do believe the book does have some value as a piece of literature. I believe the author's core themes (which I will reiterate have more to do with family and male/female relationships than with Christianity) are valuable. I learned something from reading it.

And I would challenge the idea, Survivor, that a person can so judge a book so harshly without actually reading it. I admit again, it's not Les Miserables, and I doubt anyone will even be reading it five, ten, years from now, but I found something valuable in it. I also happened to enjoy it.

*edited because my upstairs neighbors woke me up at 3:30am and, well, it's just hard to type.

My question is what is appealing about a story where author is consistantly misleading the reader about nearly everything? How is this a good thing? The story kept changing what THE BIG QUESTION was about, until I stopped caring and then when the author pulled back the final curtain, my reaction was: so what?

Even with the controversial elements cited in other posts, I still don't know why this book is the success it is. I suppose at this point, it is because everyone says it is a success and most people just follow the crowd. But I personally don't understand it.

It looks like crap, smells like crap, and I don't really want to bother tasting it further. I can't imagine how someone could read an entire book and then judge it this harshly...when a book is sheer crap, I know within the first few pages. That was my opinion after laughing my way through one atrociously written scene, and it has been confirmed by every subsequent sampling.

I'm sorry about accusing you of saying something you didn't say.

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I don't think we can complain about details in The Da Vinci code that are not "true." [italics added for emphasis]

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I understand that you now claim not to have meant that whether the book is an attack on faith is besides the point. I don't know why you claim not to have meant this, because it is the only intelligent comment you've offered to the discussion.

The "author's core themes" do not merit literary evaluation except in the sort of PC dogma which passes for literary criticism in a totalitarian society. At least not as you mean it here. As I said, the idea that Christ had a wife and children is a great premise for a book, but idea isn't literature, as we've pointed out a number of times on this forum and as any serious writer instinctively understands.

In analyzing the literary value of a work, we study how the author presents the core themes to the audience, not the core themes themselves. Certainly, some core themes will naturally present better than others. But a book doesn't fail as literature simply because it doesn't have the correct core theme. Nor can it succeed by having the right message.

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I had a feeling that starting this thread would be like tossing a live grenade into . . . pick your favorite metaphor.

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You're right, Ergo.

I can't really figure out which particular...well, no, I can spot the error right off, come to think of it. I used the vernacular for a word that should only be rendered in the French, and I opened with it rather than using it for the summation. That set a whole different tone for me when I wrote it and for anyone else that reads it.