For those who can read it, Salon has an excellent article about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, written by Laura Miller, which discusses the height of the fiction therein. It also gives insight into where most of the pseudo-factual information has come from -- Michael Baigent's Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Especially noteworthy is the information given about the Priory of Sion, and how it was a hoax, crafted in the 1950's by a Frenchman:
The Priory of Sion did exist -- sort of -- but not in any form even remotely resembling the fantastical claims of the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" or Brown. (In one of his few unqualified claims to nonfiction, Brown includes the sentence "The Priory of Sion -- a European secret society founded in 1099 -- is a real organization" on a page labeled "Fact" placed before the prologue of "The Da Vinci Code.") In reality, the Priory of Sion was the invention, in the 1950s, of a man named Pierre Plantard who had a history of fraud, embezzlement and membership in ultra-conservative, quasi-mystical and virulently anti-Semitic Catholic groups. These tiny extremist groups sought the reunification of Europe under the dual leadership of an orthodox Roman Catholic Church and a divinely ordained monarch, somewhat like the Holy Roman Emperor and preferably French....
Plantard wanted to pass himself off as the descendant of the Merovingian dynasty, a family of medieval French kings and, ultimately, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. (In reality, he was the son of a butler and a cook.) With his accomplice, a genuine but dissolute aristocrat and expert forger, Phillipe de Chérisey, he produced a set of fabricated parchments full of encoded and suggestively prophetic verse alluding to this Merovingian fantasy. With a restaurateur interested in drumming up tourist business for his establishment (located in the priest's former villa), they disseminated a story that the priest had discovered these parchments in the church, inside a hollowed-out pillar of Visigoth origins. (The pillar was later determined to be solid.)...
The entire case for the existence of the Priory of Sion and the bloodline of Jesus extending into the French monarchy rests on this cache of bogus documents. There is no other "proof" anywhere that the Priory of Sion ever existed....
Plantard tried intermittently to sustain the fable, but in the 1980s, he got into trouble with French authorities when a financier who Plantard had claimed was a member of the Priory of Sion committed suicide. In the subsequent police investigation, Plantard was forced to admit he'd invented the whole thing.
The article continues to state that, given that information, the remainder of the novel means nothing as a work of historical fiction based in fact. This serves to remind us that the book was and always will be a work of fiction, and should not be considered as the great revealer-of-secrets that it has come to be known as. Consequently, the book from which it takes its cues, while presented as non-fiction, is clearly fictitious in nature.
On November 24, 2004, on the Diane Rehm Show (WAMU.ORG), at 11:00am, there was a panel discussion on The Da Vinci Code, which took these topics to the table. The most notable criticism was of The Last Supper, and its supposed meaning in the book. The show archive is here, but here is a direct link to the RealMedia stream.
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