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The Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown
ISBN: 0385504209
Format: Hardcover, 464pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated
Greetings,
A topic of much debate since it first hit the shelves in 2003, Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code' is a fascinating masterpiece that you just can't put down.
The novel follows the path of Robert Langdon (a Harvard professor of Symbology) and Sophie Neveu (a French Cryptologist) as they try to uncover the secrets behind the murder of the elderly curator of the Lourve, Jaques Sauniere. The trail of codes leads Langdon and Neveu across the country and over continents as they try to uncover the secret for which Suniere died.
To the amazement of Langdon and Neveu, the cryptic clues lead them to the works of the great Leonardo Da Vinci, and a secret society called 'The Priory of the Sun', and a secret so big that it would change the face of Christianity forever if it were ever to be known. It is a secret that many have died for, a secret that many people want kept a secret. The Roman Catholic Church would and have killed to make sure that the secret was never revealed and the members of 'The Priory of the Sun' would and have killed to protect. Without giving too much of the plot away the secret has to do with the lineage of the French royal family, and the true story of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and the sacred feminine.
A story like this would be lovely but it would not have caused such a twist in the knickers of the Churches of the world if Dan Brown had simply written a nice little thriller about how maybe Jesus was just a man after all. It would have been laughed off as ridiculous, and although the book has been published as fiction it begins with a list of very interesting facts upon which the book is based.
It is these facts that have the world in an uproar of debate. Is the Da Vinci Code really just a story, and if it is, why would the Catholic Church go to such trouble to ban it. Why would they debate the questions it raises if it did not warrant debate?
The phenomenal success of the book has been universal it has inspired television specials, endless reviews and Columbia Pictures signed a contract to produce the book as a motion picture earlier this year. I wish them all the luck in trying to squash all the intricacies of the plot into a 2-hour film. If you plan to wait for the movie then I can tell you now you will be missing out on a lot of the plot. The endless twists and mountain of facts and evidence could never be adequately shown on the screen. Not that it wouldn't make a good movie, in fact my first thought after I finished reading it was "This would make a terrific film."
The concept that Dan Brown has come up with is not as original as some people might think. As you would find, if you were to investigate some of the resources that Brown himself used while writing the novel, people have been trying to figure out the hidden meanings in the cryptic messages that Da Vinci left behind in his artwork for centuries. Whether or not you believe that Dan Brown has unraveled these secrets is beside the point, the book is an amazing story that is a whirlwind of twists and turns as he pulls you deeper and deeper into the climax which does not disappoint. A delectable brainteaser for every intelligent reader out there who is bored with predictable 'twists' of other mystery novels.
Amanda Johnstone
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