Product Description

What is the Da Vinci code and what is all the fuss about? Despite being a work of fiction, the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code has a plot based on a number of concepts and ideas that the author claims to be true. This book explores the locations, historical facts and theories, and the sources of inspiration behind the novel in order to reveal the true key to the Da Vinci code.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #314777 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Stewart Ferris first visited Rennes-le-Château in 1983 and has recently written and presented a documentary in which he investigates theories about the source of the sudden wealth of its nineteenth-century village priest, Bérenger Saunière. It is some of these theories upon which Dan Brown based the theme of The Da Vinci Code. Stewart is also the author of more than twenty other books, published in seven languages.

Excerpted from The Key to the Da Vinci Code by Stewart Ferris. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The key to The Da Vinci Code's success

Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code has been a phenomenal bestseller, with millions of copies of the book sold in 42 languages. It's a pacy, well-structured thriller with plenty of twists and turns; a classic page-turner that's hard to put down. A snippet of information or a clue appears in every chapter, a kind of cliffhanger that is not immediately explained. But the following chapter doesn't always resolve it: Dan Brown switches between plot and subplot, each story strand containing its own cliffhangers, and each storyline wrapped around the other so that by the time the reader has found the answer to one tantalising clue, another one has appeared. The engrossed follower has no option but to continue with the story at break-neck speed. But is that enough to explain the novel's popularity?
The answer lies in the concepts dealt with in The Da Vinci Code. The book is a complex blend of symbolism, historical theories, secret societies and religion, which separately presented would make for some heavy reading. When the information is filtered through to the reader in the context of a novel, however, a much wider audience is exposed to the ideas in the book than would otherwise be possible. Dan Brown has created a modern day Grail quest, and in doing so has revitalised, and to some extent reinvented, an ancient literary tradition that extends back to the famous fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and to earlier written and oral poems.
Admittedly, Grail quests have always been popular, but never this popular. What has Dan Brown done that is so different? How can the hunt for the Grail be so fascinating to people living in the Internet Age?
The answer is fundamental to the novel, to history and to Christian religion, for it concerns the meaning of the word `Grail'. Medieval Grail manuscripts used the word `Sangraal', which was later split into `San Graal', meaning Holy Grail. But the authors of one of the books that influenced Dan Brown, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, suggested that perhaps the word had been split in the wrong place. If instead of `San Graal' the split is changed to make `Sang Raal' then the meaning changes to `Royal Blood'.
Therefore the quest for the Holy Grail changes from a relatively meaningless hunt for a chalice artefact to a search for a holy bloodline - the bloodline of Jesus.
Since the gospels that were chosen for inclusion in the Bible by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century were only those that dealt with Jesus as a divine figure (any writings about Jesus as a man were discarded and suppressed) the Bible contains no references to the personal life of Jesus.
If it were the case that Jesus had been married and had fathered one or more children, this may have created a need in subsequent centuries for the Church to find and destroy any surviving descendants so that the truth of the official gospels could not be cast in doubt.
Hence the search for the Holy Grail has a new meaning - one that makes new sense of historical facts.
If you read The Da Vinci Code and choose to accept the message behind it, suddenly the last two thousand years of European history take on a different perspective. That is the true reason for the novel's success.
The absence of any writings in the Bible about the first thirty years of Jesus' life, the ferocity with which heretical branches of Christianity were eradicated in the Middle Ages, the discovery in 1945 of the hidden Nag Hammadi manuscripts containing gospels that were banished by the early Church: all these things and more seem to slot more neatly into the jigsaw of history than they did before.
Whether the reader believes the theories in The Da Vinci Code or not, the book at least raises questions about Christianity and what it stands for. Not everyone agrees with Dan Brown, and not all of the `facts' as presented in the novel are correct, but at least people are now discussing ideas about a branch of religion that may have been taken for granted for too long.

Customer Reviews

Expensive at any price
The biggest mystery connected with this book is why anyone thought it was worth publishing.

in the first place there really isn't much book here (what did you expect for £2.99?). The book is a mere 8.5 x 10.5 centimetres (just under 3.5 x 4.245 inches) - that's small enough to fit in the average-sized man's shirt pocket with room to spare. Moreover, the main text only takes up 117 pages, with generous margins, leaving room for around 120 words per page!

Of course that wouldn't be a problem if only the comntents of the book were well-research and accurate, but they aren't.

For example, as early as page 11 we get the usual piece of information that:

"... the gospels that were chosen for inclusion in the Bible by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century were only those that dealt with Jesus as a divine figure (any writings about Jesus as a man were discarded and suppressed) the Bible contains no references to the personal life of Jesus."

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong!

1. The gospels in the New Testament were already widely accepted as core documents in the Christian faith within a hundred years of Christ's death in approx 30 AD.
2. Constantine had NO PART in selecting which books would appear in what we now call the New Testament.
3. Far from rejecting documents that revealed Jesus' human characteristics, it is actually the "gnostic gospels" which describe him as being a spirit "appearing to be" a flesh and blood human being. It is the New Testament gospels which describe Jesus as a truly physical, human being who weeps (John 11:35), gets angry (Mark 3:5), felt hunger (Luke 4:2), etc.
4. Likewise we are told about various personal relationships Jesus was involved in, not just those he had with the 12 disciples (see the story of Lazarus in John 11, for example).

In reality, far from explaining "The Da Vinci Code", it all to often simply repeats the errors in Dan Brown's book and in the books his book was based on.

Despite the apparent promise in the title to reveal the "Key to the Da Vinci Code" all we actually get in the first 107 pages is yet another flick through some points in "The Da Vinci Code" which have already been covered in most of the previous books on the subject.
The geographical information about locations in Paris, and the corresponding errors in "The Da Vinci Code" are all described in "The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code" (2004), for example.

In the final analysis this book could have been written with no more knowledge of the subject than could be gotten from reading two or three previous books on the subject.

Not surprisingly, then, the only "key" this book has to offer is a simple tautology:

If ever anyone finds some evidence that proves that the claims made in "The Da Vinci Code" are true, that will prove that the claims made in "The Da Vinci Code" are true.

Well, Doh!

Intriguing
This is an interesting little book. I did not realise when i bought it that it was so small. I think the previous review is well written and actually quite accurately describes the book.

Cheapest and best!
If you want to know more then this is the book for you. Some of the bigger books have obviously been written by writers with no knowledge of the subject matter but put together with help from the internet. This author seems to know his onions from his shallots and has visited some of the places mentioned in Dan Brown's book. It shows in the way the book is put together. Buy this one and save yourself a few quid.