Popularly, The Da Vinci Code reintroduced the story of The Holy Grail, which was first introduced into literary lore by Chrétien de Troyes in his 12th-century epic, Perceval, le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail), and a bit later by Robert de Boron in his Joseph d'Arimathie. Romance was added to the story by Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzival in the early 13th century, and the same story set to musical theater by Richard Wagner in his last opera, Parsifal, first performed in July 26, 1882. Thus, there is nothing new in the tale of the Grail. When The DaVinci Code was first published, America’s Protestant Puritan population was all a-twitter as if The Da Vinci Code were the first vehicle to entertain Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s erstwhile marriage. Much heretic blood was shed in antiquity over such theories well before there was even a printing press.
First and foremost, The Da Vinci Code stands as a breezy Summer read. Subsequent readings of the book, coupled with a bit of research on the subject (Michael Baigent, et al.’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Justo L. Gonzalez’s Church History: An Essential Guide and his three volume A History of Christian Thought) show the story rushed, compressed, and threadbare in places. Nevertheless, The Da Vinci Code was the father of a thousand novels devoted to antiquities, hermeneutics, and esoterica, as well as millions of Christian sermons and homilies addressing its subject as heresy or a starting point to a dialog about Faith’s importance and/or lack thereof.
The vast majority of The Da Vinci Code’s offspring are banal at best and cultural waste at worst. Some of the better stories directly related to The Da Vinci Code include novels addressing the historical protectors of The Holy Grail - the Knights Templer: Steve Berry’s The Templar Legacy and Raymond Khoury’s The Last Templar and novels dealing with the Last Supper and the “secret” Holy Grail directly: Javier Sierra’s The Secret Supper and Kate Mosse’s superb Labyrinth.
But authors did not thankfully restrict themselves to Jesus and his ostensible family. Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s thinly writtenThe Sign of Four was hot off the presses after The Da Vinci Code. It is pretentiously flawed and written but did expose the provocative mystery of the 15th century manuscript Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to light, obviously a product of the authors’ Ivy League education. Chris Kuzneski’s The Sign of the Cross is clever but incomplete in melding the Roman Catholic gesture with a yarn about the ancestors of Pilate and their link to the Vatican. So what’s next for the genre? Well, Matilde Asensi’s The Last Cato, of course.
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1 - The Candid Professor
The Hypnerotomachia is not a manuscript.