The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I sat down to read this novel not expecting to enjoy it, mostly because it's been so hyped in the few years since its release that I was sick of hearing the name. The only thing I knew about it in advance was a brief line in a 2005 Salient editorial proposing the phrase "I understand religion - I've read The Da Vinci Code" as a candidate for the next Tui ad. From this I gathered that the novel would make a few spurious claims about religion under cover of some sort of crime story. The prospect didn't interest me much, but it was the start of the Christmas holidays and I had nothing better to do, so on the train on the last morning of work for the year, I opened the book and started reading.

32 hours later I put it down in a state of deep amazement. The amazement wasn't merely due to my having enjoyed the book, but also to the speed at which I'd read it - when I was reading, I averaged around 30 pages an hour, which is around three times my academic reading speed. After some thought I put this remarkable increase in reading velocity down to a combination of it being summer [ie nothing else to do], and also, strangely enough, that The Da Vinci Code had turned out to be damn good book.

There have been screeds written about the plot and the truth or otherwise of the claims it makes about certain artworks and their bearing on Christian history. I won't go into that here, because the mystery itself didn't grab me as much as did the sheer beauty of the symbolism. Dan Brown knows a great truth - humans love to be spoken to in symbols. Unlike most novelists, instead of merely turning this truth to his advantage by using symbolic devices [such as metaphor] in his work, he has written an entire novel about symbols.

It works beautifully. I'm a great believer in the symbolic power of religion to join people together in common experience, and The Da Vinci Code draws on both religious and symbolic themes in a way that appeals to me enormously. The murder mystery, too, is taut and well-spun, but quickly takes a backseat to the deeper artistic mysteries. By the end of the novel I was barely interested in the destination - the revelation of the twin mysteries towards which the symbols had been pointing. The ride had been so enjoyable that I wasted little energy on climbing down from it, preferring to keep the enjoyment itself intact in my mind.

I believe everything that's in there about the artworks themselves and so on, but I'd like to find out more in some places. In particular, I simply must find out some good factual information about the Council of Nicea [which my Catholic education naturally omitted from the history of the Church]. And that's surely the best good-book test of all - reading should always breed more reading. When the university library reopens, I'll head to the religious history section.