The Da Vinci Code

A friend built up suspense about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code for weeks before lending it to me. She raved about it. I should have been prepared for disappointment because she'd raved about another book on hidden prophetic codes in biblical Hebrew texts. One glance at the "mathematical algorithm" decoding convinced me of that book's invalidity.

Still, Brown's book lingering on the best sellers lists even after his next publication entered gave me pause. I breathed deeply and plunged in. My first reaction was to investigate the issues Brown presented in his introduction. A quick Internet search revealed one of the purported sources is a well-known hoax. I thought I'd missed something in the reviews I'd read. The book had to be speculative fiction.

Finally my friend convinced me that she believes all the poppycock is real. It's true that he mixes in real names of people, places, and events with a fantastic "what if" about other events and descriptions. That's like believing everything Susan Vreeland wrote in her lilting novel, The Passion of Artemisia, actually happened because there really was a Galileo, and some of that Italian artist's paintings survive to this day.

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