Many years ago, I watched that classic B-grade science fiction romp, Flash Gordon The tagline, “Pathetic Earthling…Who can save you now?,” encouraged me not to take the movie too seriously, I upped my suspension of disbelief factor a few notches, and ultimately had a great time as I watched high school jock Flash vanquish the Emperor Ming and his evil minions.

I wish that I had approached the Da Vinci Code with a similar mindset. Friends had recommended it to me because: A) I’m going to France soon, and B) I study comparative religions. After holding out to see if I could borrow a copy from the library or a friend, I finally broke down and purchased the audiobook version–and finished all 16 hours in two days. I listened to it at lunch, while walking, while doing data entry, while falling asleep at night.

Dan Brown spins a good yarn–I’d like to think of the Da Vinci Code as a sort of Agatha Christie meets John Grisham meets the X-Files. The main characters on the run are straight from a Indy Jones flick: the Harvard prof, actually described as “Indiana Jones in tweed,” a beautiful and sympathetic French police officer, and an old, eccentric, bachelor gazillionaire who also happens to be a Knight of the Crown. There’s dark religious conspiracies and persecuted secret societies, (including clandestine meetings with Vatican authorities) and Brown points out the omnipresent evidence of these secrets hidden away in real world stories and art and suspicious historic coincidences. There are countless codes to break, mysteries and murders to solve, and Brown has the maddeningly effective habit of dangling two or three of these carrots in just beyond the reader’s reach at any given moment. As soon as your teeth make a satisfying crunch into one answer, a couple more pop into view.

There’s one thing that keeps me from recommending the Da Vinci Code wholeheartedly, however. The 454 pages are packed full of information which appears to have relevance in this real world of ours–facts about political, art, and religious history. Brown presents his characters as the world’s leading experts in certain subject areas, which can lure the careless reader into thinking that though the book is fiction, the background research is true and solid.

I found a few major errors in the areas where I have some familiarity (history of Christianity)–it makes me distrust the information Brown presents through his characters in other areas, like etymology, art history or symbology. Also, his scholar-characters make incredible leaps of logic and present these as matter-of-fact, in-your-face evidence (like making significant esoteric connections between Disney’s red-haired Little Mermaid and the red-haired disciple next to Jesus in Da Vinci’s Last Supper). They do not strike me as believable academics.

A couple of notes:
- Almost all of the 454 pages of action take place within a 24-hour period.
- It’s ego-boosting to solve puzzles faster than professionally trained crytopgraphers and world famous Harvard symbologists.

All-in-all, I enjoyed reading the Da Vinci Code. I would have enjoyed it more if I had gone into it with the same attitude I had when I went to watch Flash Gordon, or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, or Hellboy.