Harder Than It Looks

In the past, suspense fiction was often dismissed by literary types as forgettable hack-work. No longer, given the genre’s unstoppable expansion. For example, until Dan Brown’s mega-blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, who would have thought it possible to convince millions of otherwise sane readers that Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, that this “fact” was related in several ecclesiastically suppressed Gnostic gospels and that only now, with the help of these texts as well as the subtle clues imbedded in Leonardo’s paintings, can this incendiary truth finally be revealed?

Da Vinci’s ever-expanding popularity is a remarkable cultural phenomenon, despite its clichéd romance (owing much to the one featured in A.S. Byatt’s Possession), frequent historical blunders and flights of outright fantasy (mostly borrowed from existing conspiracy literature). The orthodox-minded are appalled by the book’s presumed battle between patriarchal oppression and...