That Damn Book (And Film)

[poliphilo]

The Da Vinci Code comes too late for me. I did all this stuff in the 80s and 90s.

I'm not saying I was in the vanguard. As someone in the Observer pointed out this morning, people like Robert Graves and Margaret Murray were putting together theories involving the Great Goddess, the sex life of Jesus and centuries-old ecclesiastical conspiracies over fifty years ago.

And behind them lies Frazer's Golden Bough- one of the key texts of the early 20th century.

What was once the prattle of a few off-centre scholars and pseudo-scholars has finally gone mainstream.

There was a time when I hoped and half-believed it was all true.

But now I know it isn't.

There never was a Goddess worshipping Golden Age.
The Priory de Sion was the invention of a mid-20th century fascist hoaxer.
Opus Dei may be sinister- but it doesn't employ albino hit-men.

And so on...

That's what irritates me about Brown. If he'd done proper research- instead of cherrypicking the conspiracy websites- he'd have known that most of the ideas he's playing with here were shot to pieces ages ago.

Comments

[methodius.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I enjoyed Rowling's books.

Though I wouldn't class them as great literature, I think they're better written than a lot of kids books (Enid Blyton, for example), and they are certainly better written than The da Vinci code.

A couple of years before Harry Potter appeared on the scene, there was a dearth of good children's books. I browsed a few bookshops looking for some interesting ones, and the only things available were ones by R.L. Stine in the "Goosebumps" series. Have you read any of those? Absolute drek! And that was all that was available if you weanted to give a kid a book as a birthday present or something. Harry Potter was like the breaking of a decades-long drought.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I used to read my kids G.K. Chesterton and M.R. James.

They loved the Father Brown stories.