The Da Vinci Code
It didn’t take much time for me to finish reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Though I had seen the movie sometime back, I didn’t remember the story that well. But from the moment I started reading the novel, I didn’t feel like keeping it aside even for a meal. It was that interesting. This is the most breathtaking novel I have read in English. You don’t feel like you are reading 600 odd pages.
The novel was given to me by my friend in the UK, Gavinash Sirisena. But it took around two years for me to start reading it due to some reason. I regret the delay now. Now that I have read the book, I am reading more about the book on the Net. I have also accidentally found The Messianic Legacy the sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail as well which would even expand my reading on the subject. I was never this interested in Christianity or Jesus till I read The Da Vinci Code. But now I feel like even reading the Bible. I have got the King James version of the Bible which the literature teachers recommend.
Coming back to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown takes us on an amazing 24-hour journey from Paris to London through the Louvre Museum in Paris to various churches in England with Robert Langdon, a Harvard Professor and a police cryptographer, Miss Sophie Neveu. One doesn’t feel this is a fiction while reading because the author has taken so many real places, organizations and people into the book though some have criticized the novel for its historical and scientific inaccuracies. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail also discusses the same subject, Jesus and Mary Magdalene being lovers and having a child, but Brown says he has not taken the book as research material.
The movie on the novel has been banned in Sri Lanka by the President Mahinda Rajapaksa but the DVDs are widely available in the island. I don’t think there is nothing that can be taken as an attack against Jesus or the Church for that matter and both the book and the movie are works of art.
Nanda Wanninayaka 