The Da Vinci Code
If Dan Brown's superbly publicised
book The
Da Vinci Code hadn’t been about stuff that is way out of its league it would have been a very pleasant read. Of course it is well written and the milieu is extensively researched and depicted to create an illusion of reality strong enough to keep you spellbound. There is some clever perception management on some pages. Enough to pacify uneasy Christian minds into a mode of ‘Dan Brown has respect for Christians after all’. The writer is also careful to give God and Jesus Christ the honoured capital letter in the third person - as in ‘His’ and ‘Him’ etc. That being said, I need to state that if I were the kind of person threatened by people who belittle my faith as it is done in some cleverly disguised, but nevertheless patronizing dialogue; or not able to read the
story as fiction only, I would have been deeply offended by some of the the assumptions of The Da Vinci Code. But I nevertheless enjoyed the skillful tension building of the story line. I stayed objective, waiting for the denouement. I could hardly contain myself not to turn to the last page to find out who/what the Grail might turn out to be. Visions of ancient human bones, maybe a grinning gold plated skull. Even so, I ask myself and Dan Brown and his extatic readers and critics: What does the exact nature of the woman Mary Magdalene's relationship with the man Jesus Christ matter? She was honoured enough to be the first person to see him after he’d risen from the dead. Jesus must have loved her deeply in any case to have appeared to her as soon as possible and set her mind at ease. I also saw in my mind’s eye a jewelled cup (after all, Da Vinci did not paint it into his famous Last Supper) so imagination could run wild. Brown cleverly tantalises us with his description of Bishop Arangirosa’s (the references in his name only hit me after I’d finished reading the book!) ring. There is no reason why he shouldn’ t be able to describe a jewelled chalice in such a way as to awaken extreme bling-lusts. Brown IS a skilled story teller and an accomplished writer. I can at least say this in his favour: At least he succeeded in creating real sympathy for the
character of Mary Magdalene, who is described in the Bible in typical Biblical terms – a charcoal sketch in stark reality to serve the purpose of showing Christ’s Divinity as opposed to the all too human pettiness and double standards of the apostles. But all in all, even if I were a post New Age Pagan worshipper, I wouldn’t buy into the 'Goddess' Mary Magdalene. What did she (the Bible as well as Dan Brown’s character) do to gain such a title? Or rather, I should say, what did her shadow character as ‘the Holy Grail’ done? Giving birth to children who gave birth to children, none of them very God-like? Sophie, admittedly a lovely girl, is subservient to the learned Professor Langdon. The brother is a very friendly and dedicated strawberry haired tour guide in a church. Maybe Dan Brown intends to turn them into Clarke Kent and Spider Girl-types in his follow-up novel(s). I hadn’t read any yet, I'll have to wait and see. At the end of the Da Vinci Code, regretfully so, I found the book ending in an unfortunate anti-climax whimper, not in the bang I was waiting for. P.S. Providing the Internet version of Leonardo's Last Supper (is anybody allowed to take a picture of the real painting?) is not deliberately altered, I tend to agree with Dan Brown that the character on Jesus’s right hand is indeed a woman!
WillaLinstrom
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