The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

I said last post that I would move onto less theologically-laden stuff, yet I found myself re-reading The Da Vinci Code. I can explain this: The Da Vinci Code is a novel, a work of fiction that says, at the beginning, that it is a work of the author's imagination - it shouldn't upset or annoy anybody unless they are in any way religious, historically-minded, or possess any intelligence whatsoever. There. Problem solved.

Except it isn't, because Dan Brown - the writer with a name so generic that it's almost impossible to remember - has wrapped the entire thing in what he claims is fact. For instance one of my partiuclar issues with it can be found in Chapter 28, page 173, where we have Mr. Brown's summary of the Witch hunts in Early Modern Europe: 'During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women', outlining the reasons as solely misogynistic. This is a common account of this period of history that many people find attractive: the Church burning countless numbers of women because they hated and feared them.

I might mention that few witches were burned alive; most would have been executed beforehand. Then I can add that the Church, and to a large extent the Inquisition, were the ones keeping the death rate down; the secular courts were more likely to sentence defendants to death. If the Inquisition or Ecclesiastical courts found people guilty of witchcraft, their preferred tactic was to try to reconvert the defendent back to Christianty.
A more accurate estimation of the death toll, according to Brian P. Levack, was around 600,000 witches, of both genders. Gender ratio was 90/10 for females/males in Britain, 70/30 in Germany, where most of the prosecutions took place, and 50/50 in France. In some areas, Normandy and Iceland to name but two, it was only men who were prosecuted for witchcraft. And there is a big difference between people 'tried' for witchcraft, people 'prosecuted' for witchcraft, and people 'executed' for witchcraft; The Spanish Inquisition, over the 16th and 17th centuries, tried a lot of people for witchcraft, prosecuted a fraction of them, and sentenced a minute number of them to death (the number was less than 20, if I remember rightly). Oh yes, and some of those were acquitted before they were actually executed. 
This is the stuff lurking at the back of my brain since I myself studied the topic of witchcraft; which Dan Brown certainly did not. I'm not saying that the figures I give here are totally accurate, because this is not an essay, but just a small look at the sort of things you can discover if you actually look at the topic in question - rather than just take Dan Brown's word for it.  Good old Mr Brown shoves this little nugget of outright nonsense in amongst a bewildering array of other historical fictions, so that by the end of the book you end up more than a little incredulous.

However, despite its numerous historical and factual inaccuracies (see: untruths, lies), I can only conclude that it is okay. I don't hold that it is, in the words of Stephen Fry, 'complete loose stool-water', and 'arse-gravy of the worst kind', even though I admire the sentiment. It's just a cheap thriller that got way too much exposure, covering its nonsense with a veneer of 'This is all True!'. It feels as though it is completely constructed of cliches, but at the end of the day everyone loves a massive conspiracy theory, especially one involving the Vatican and two thousand years of history. But it's a novel, something written to entertain, and I am sorry to say it entertained me, even if it was for entirely the wrong reasons.
The story: What's to tell? A dull, somehow sexy author-surrogate figure who is presented as being as grey as a brick (even making Tom Hanks boring, which is a feat in itself) ends up mixed up in a murder-suspect/conspiracy theory about... something to do with the art of Leonardo di Vinci supposedly holding hidden clues about the identity of the biological descendents of some chap called Jesus who apparently did stuff a couple of thousand years ago - wasn't he a guy in the last book I reviewed? - and something something about Swiss bank vaults and how they have to get away from the police and find the buried treasure that could spill the beans on what the Catholic Church don't want everybody to know about. And an albino monk who was the one what did it. And the Knights Templar. Yeah, that's the plot.

Dennis Wheatley did a similar thing with claiming Fact at the beginning of some of his novels; he said that there were real Satanists and Black-Magic practitioners at work across the world, and that he had witnessed them himself. Somehow this seems about as credible and necessary as everything that Dan Brown did.