Religious fiction ...(The Da Vinci Code)(Book Review)

The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (Doubleday, 454 pp., $24.95)

WHEN a novel has stuck around the top of the New York Times bestseller list for half a year, there is something interesting going on. Such a book has set off a pretty loud pealing of the electric chimes at the front door of the culture. In the case of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, what's so special exactly? That depends on what makes conspiracy theories so fascinating.

Brown starts out with the bizarre murder of a curator at the Louvre by an albino assassin sent, it would seem, by the Catholic religious order Opus Dei. From there we're off like a bottle rocket, as a Harvard professor of "religious symbology," Robert Langdon, who happens to be visiting Paris, is called in for a consultation with the police. For the curator, before he succumbed to his wounds, had taken off all his clothes, arranged himself and some of the nearby artwork in a most curious fashion, and daubed a cryptic message in his own blood, mentioning Langdon's name.

I don't have to tell you that a book like this needs a love interest for protagonist Langdon, whom Brown supplies in the person of Sophie Neveu, a beautiful police cryptologist. Pretty soon Langdon is himself a suspect in the murder and he and Sophie are on the run from the French law. As we learn, a mysterious group of unknown individuals is trying to keep uncomfortable historical truths a secret, and the albino assassin is mixed up in it.

The conspiracy theory at the heart of Dan Brown's huge bestseller was not invented by him (it has been kicking around for years), but it's a juicy one and he's made the most of it, creating a story with a very effective cliffhanger at the end of almost every one of his 105 chapters. You are pulled along relentlessly--a feat of narrative art that really does deserve to be called art, no matter what Yale literary critic Harold Bloom said recently in mocking the "immensely inadequate" Stephen King (a similarly gifted writer) when the latter won a lifetime literary prize. If you don't believe writing in this vein merits appreciation, try thinking up a plot like the one in The Da Vinci Code yourself.

Since Brown's novel is a novel, it can more forthrightly take advantage of the tension inherent in unlocking ancient doors that perhaps should never be opened. He's witty, succinct, and smart--though the reader will have to be prepared to encounter the phrase "the sacred feminine" more than once, and if that makes you extremely queasy, you had better leave this book alone.

But the best thing about The Da Vinci Code is that the conspiracy is just an awfully neat one. What makes for an outstanding conspiracy? It doesn't have to be real, as this one is surely not, despite Brown's inclusion of a preface boldly headlined "FACT." One requirement is a complex array of lore. Brown has that: He provides many fascinating historical and quasi-historical tidbits--like the symbolic significance of the figure of a rose, the mathematical phenomenon called the Fibonacci sequence, the ancient Hebrew coding sequence called atbash, and much more, with an emphasis on the cryptic meanings of the paintings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, all artfully woven into the plot.