Dan Brown ’s “parade of caricatures”?

Macleans.ca | Culture | Books | Secrecy, power and mortifying the flesh: “Silas, The Da Vinci Code’s pious Opus Dei assassin, is a deranged, masochistic albino monk who likes to pause between murders to whip himself bloody or tighten the flesh-piercing barbed strap he wears around his thigh. Although the competition is stiff, he may be the most over-the-top travesty in author Dan Brown’s parade of caricatures. Given the novel’s runaway success — 121 weeks and counting on the Maclean’s bestseller list — not to mention the upcoming film version, Silas is also a PR nightmare for the real Opus Dei, a conservative and secretive Roman Catholic group. Silas didn’t spring full-blown from Brown’s imagination. The novelist tapped into an existing well of suspicion surrounding Opus Dei — Latin for ‘the work of God’ — that’s as deep-rooted among Catholics as it is in the outside world. It’s that profound split in opinion within his church that brought John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the U.S. weekly National Catholic Reporter, to write Opus Dei (Doubleday), an exhaustive look at the most controversial force in modern Catholicism.”

Harsh.

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