Dan Brown didn't invent the thriller that promises to blow your mind by explaining that everything you knew about religious history was a lie, but The Da Vinci Code has become the benchmark for the genre. In some respects, debut novelist Simon Toyne strives to surpass Brown: while The Da Vinci Code was content to throw the origins of Christianity into doubt, Sanctus posits a brutal conspiracy that stretches back to the dawn of civilization and continues to hide its mysterious "Sacrament" deep inside the Citadel, a monastery carved into a mountain in Turkey.
The opening of the novel is impressively spectacular: one of the monks has discovered the truth about the Sacrament and has been scheduled for execution. Instead, he breaks out of his cell and climbs to the top of the Citadel, where he poses like a crucified figure until news networks broadcast his image all over the world, at which point he hurtles himself to the ground below. But... was he mimicking Jesus on the cross, or was he depicting the Greek letter tau, the origins of which stretch all the way back to the ancient Sumerians?
This is exciting stuff, especially when you throw in an intrepid Turkish police inspector, commando monks sent to recover their apostate brother's corpse, an ancient counter-conspiracy that sees his suicide as the first movement of a long-awaited prophecy, and his sister, a reporter who immediately jumps on a plane to Turkey when she gets the first news of her brother in eight years. Toyne sets all these components in motion and never lets the pace falter, right up to the startling revelation.
But where Brown nurtures the plausibility of his alternative theologies by aligning key narrative details with the world as we know it, Toyne vaults into pure fantasy.
Despite flaws in logic--as well as an ending that isn't really an ending--Sanctus can be awfully fun if you give yourself over to the ride. The non-realistic aspects of the story mean it's not likely to spark the sorts of debate Dan Brown's fiction can, but it reads as though Toyne's real focus may not be on theological revolution so much as sheer entertainment, and on that front his career is off to a rollicking start. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com