Da Vinci Code

[eye_of_a_cat]

Above anything else, this book is smug. I can deal with a small amount of smug in thrillers, especially thrillers whose authors can't be blamed for thinking of the blockbuster film rights looming profitably in the future, but this isn't a small amount. The bad guys are smug. The good guys are smug. The author is smug. Smug radiates off the page in waves so thick, in fact, that after a while you feel all light-headed and need to lie down.

It's the smugness that makes it annoying. I don't care when Michael Crichton gets the science wrong or populates his novels with the kind of characters who'd disappear if they turned sideways, but when Dan Brown does it, I'm far less inclined to forgive. Michael Crichton knows we're only reading for the dinosaurs. Dan Brown, on the other hand, is out to tell us The Facts. And when someone's out to tell you The Facts, complete with helpful reminder at the front of the book that these are, indeed, The Facts, it's difficult not to end up a little bit what do you mean the Nag Hammadi texts are the oldest Christian gospels? every time he hits on something you know is wrong, because two can play at this smug game.

Here's what happens, anyway: Professor Robert Langdon, a symbologist from Harvard, is called in to help when the curator of the Louvre gets killed. Along with the curator's granddaughter, Sophie Neveu, he sets off on an elaborate treasure-hunt to discover a) the reason for the murder, b) The Truth about Christian history, and c) the Holy Grail.

I don't know what symbology is, although it seems to have the most enthusiastic undergraduates to ever gasp "Wow!" and "NO WAY!" at the pearls of wisdom falling from their teacher's lips, but Dan Brown definitely did his research on professors: Robert Langdon has published some work on iconography of the sacred feminine, and therefore iconography of the sacred feminine is everywhere. No, really. Pentagrams? Five points, five stages of a woman's life, sacred feminine. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man? Kind of arranged in five points if you squint, therefore all about the sacred feminine. In fact, anything with the number five in it? Sacred feminine. Also anything with pointy up arrows, or pointy down arrows, or both. Also the Star of David. Also...

About halfway through, we've established that Everything In The Entire World Ever proves that there's a long tradition of the sacred feminine suppressed by the early Church/the Vatican/Constantine. Also, that Mary Magdalene - or Mary Magdalene's womb, they're pretty interchangeable - is the Holy Grail. Most of this information is thrown in via clunky dialogue in which one person is turned into a complete moron for the length of the conversation ("So, you're saying that the church's version of Christian history might not be accurate?" "Well, the winners always write history!" "OMFG they DO? I'd never thought of it that way before!" - says Sophie, the highly intelligent police cryptologist), or smug little snippets of internal monologue. These usually begin with "It always amused Robert how few people realised that..." or "Robert always chuckled when he thought of...", which is made slightly less irritating by the likelihood of everyone in his department rolling their eyes when he's not looking.

Sophie is incredibly pretty, has beautiful green eyes (which 'flash danger' at one point), has a tragic angsty past, and is a descendant of Jesus. I think this is all we need to say about Sophie.

There are also orgies (okay, fine, one orgy) and secret societies. Mostly Catholic ones - the Masons get namechecked once, but Catholic secret societies are just that much cooler. We have the best tune to In the Bleak Midwinter, too.

All bad dialogue and Mary Sues aside, though, the sacred feminine thing bothered me. It goes like this: 'Pagan religion' always had a female consort for God, so that male and female energies would be combined and the world would be balanced. The reason we have wars and unrest on such a large scale is because the early Christian church cut Mary Magdalene, who was married to Jesus, out of the Bible as much as possible and recast sex as a bad thing and women as inherently sinful and inferior.

Leaving aside all griping about the Gnostic gospels not proving what he thinks they prove, I don't think I like this idea much. Partly because I grew up under Margaret Thatcher and don't buy that women-are-peaceful-nurturing-souls thing for a second, and partly because I don't think it makes a great foundation for giving women a decent place in religion anyway. It's nice that being mothers and wives and girlfriends is seen as an important thing, I suppose, but I'd kind of like to be important without having to be any of them. If Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, I wouldn't be shocked or traumatised or feel a sudden urge to go around killing people to hide the fact, but I'd be a bit disappointed - in the Bible she's described just as Mary of Magdala, not as anybody's daughter or sister or mother or wife, and I like the idea that her presence doesn't need to be explained in terms of which important men she was related to.