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To describe Javier Sierra's The Secret Supper (2004; trans from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel 2006) as the thinking reader's The Da Vinci Code would be trite and misleading, even if in many ways accurate. Sierra's book is an historical novel in which, in 1497, a senior member of the Inquisition, alerted by an anonymous informant, goes to the monastery in Milan where Leonardo is painting his great mural The Last Supper. According to the informant, the painting is dangerously heretical -- the work of Satan. Our Inquisitor, who serves as the book's primary narrator (and who, obviously, is not the nicest of guys), must try to solve two mysteries: the identity of the informant, and the riddle of the painting. There's plenty of Cathar heresy and Mary Magdalene thrown in.
The novel's a little slow to get under way but, once it starts moving, it's absorbing stuff -- I found the pages turning happily. I have no way of knowing if the book's underpinning is valid or complete hokum, but certainly it convinced me for the purposes of the fiction. The translation, despite a few proofing errors (like "edging on" for "egging on"!), is generally the smooth ride you expect from Alberto Manguel. I had the odd sense when finishing the book that I'd at last got out of my mouth the bad taste -- which I'd not even realized was there -- left over from when, a couple of years back, I read (and detested) The Da Vinci Code as research for my parody Da Easter Bunny Code. At last I was reading a Leonardo da Vinci conspiracy-theory novel that I could enjoy as rattling good fun rather than be forcing myself to read.
(There's one irritating element near the end of the novel, when all the characters are implausibly slow to notice something that's patently obvious, but I forgave the book this.)
The novel's a little slow to get under way but, once it starts moving, it's absorbing stuff -- I found the pages turning happily. I have no way of knowing if the book's underpinning is valid or complete hokum, but certainly it convinced me for the purposes of the fiction. The translation, despite a few proofing errors (like "edging on" for "egging on"!), is generally the smooth ride you expect from Alberto Manguel. I had the odd sense when finishing the book that I'd at last got out of my mouth the bad taste -- which I'd not even realized was there -- left over from when, a couple of years back, I read (and detested) The Da Vinci Code as research for my parody Da Easter Bunny Code. At last I was reading a Leonardo da Vinci conspiracy-theory novel that I could enjoy as rattling good fun rather than be forcing myself to read.
(There's one irritating element near the end of the novel, when all the characters are implausibly slow to notice something that's patently obvious, but I forgave the book this.)
