The story is about Robert Langdon, a Harvard art professor, Sophie Neveu, a cryptographer for the Paris police, the secrecy of the Catholic Church, the mystery of several murders, and finding the holy grail or finding what the holy grail is. The two protagonists try to solve the enigma of who committed a series of murders and what kind of an organization was behind those killers.

The Priory of Scion (the nonmilitary wing of the Knights Templar) has kept the records of Mary Magdalene and Jesus for centuries, moving it around Europe to keep it from the Catholic Church. When the four leaders of the Priory are murdered by an albino monk working for Opus Dei, a succession of events develop and point to the estranged granddaughter of the murdered Priory Grand Master, who is Sophie Neveu herself. The job of discovering who and why her grandfather was killed, plus how to find the Holy Grail through far-fetched connections fall on the shoulder of Neveu and Langdon, whose romantic involvement is bypassed and underrated at the end.
To write a detailed plot for this book would taint its pleasure and destroy the suspense since this is a thriller, especially because the book mixes myth and reality with religion, and when the reader is just about to take up arms, it comes up with a balm that eases all fears. Furthermore, no detailed plot definition is possible unless one repeats the book almost word by word.

a writer to see how much research and conjecture could be brought into fiction.

the suspense and the extent of the research the writer must have made to write this book, so that he can make something that's totally fiction look like the absolute truth.

that the writer used the name of an existing branch of the Catholic church, since a certain blame toward that branch may form in the reader's mind. He might have made up a fake branch.

read another book by this author but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

all kinds of things. When I started reading this book, I thought -at first- it was only a thriller. Then, as I read more, I felt indignant. I thought the book was treading in uncharted, shocking, and delicate territory, but I kept reading it since I liked the author’s style and couldn’t let go of the suspense. At the end, I thought it wasn’t so outrageous, because it was only fiction and because the author wrapped everything up so skillfully.

Dan Brown is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he became an English teacher later. His interest in code-breaking and covert government agencies led him to write his first novel, Digital Fortress. Since Dan Brown’s father was a math professor and a professional sacred musician, Dan Brown was impressed by conflicting philosophies and code breaking from early on. Dan Brown’s books to date are angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Deception Point.

The Da Vinci Code is an engrossing book into which an amazing amount of research must have gone. Some may find the subject matter insulting to their belief systems, but one has to realize that this is, after all, a work of fiction, and a writer’s creative license certainly may give him to make odd conjectures from certified facts, as it always has been ever since the written word was invented.

Don't read this book if your religious beliefs are easily hurt. If you do read it, however, please remember that this is only fiction.
How much some of the story coincides with fact or if any of it is real is a debate for theologians and students of canon history. As a novel, “Da Vinci Code” is excellent for it fakes an intimacy to reality and tends to fool the reader into believing its mind-boggling theories.

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Created Dec 08, 2004 at 9:34am • Submit your own review...