Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Purportedly a factual account of how we’ve all been deceived these many years, that the Templars and their associates live on and continue to manipulate events so that one day a Merovingian king who is also the descendant of Jesus will take the priest-king throne of the whole world, Holy Blood, Holy Grail was the leaping off point for all number of conspiracy theory novels that ultimately led us to The DaVinci Code.
That would be reason enough to be angry with the book, but the fact that almost the entirety of the piece has been discovered to be based on a very elaborate – and, honestly, not very good – hoax yet somehow continues to thrive and inspire believers is mind-boggling.
Aside from the premise and the usual sort of brain-warping logic such as “Knight A knew Knight B. Knight B was in Country C at the time, so possibly met Baron D. Baron D owed money to Templar E, who had written Gobbledegook F, which implies that King G was Jewish, so Knight A must be part of a secret order devoted to restoring the bloodline of Christ to the throne!” You know; the standard stuff that comes out of conspiracy books. But, anyway, yes. Aside from that, we have a tremendously boring and entirely too theoretical set of circumstances that go in circles and ultimately lead to nothing concrete except the authors’ forced interpretations, which they will drone on about for pages and pages, frequently repeating themselves with only minor variations in the incredibly dry word choices and pacing.
I have a little conspiracy theorist inside, myself, and am very much in the camp that assumes if Jesus was an actual historical personage that he very likely had a family of some sort, but the way this book goes about “proving” that bored me to tears and almost made me want to renounce any of my faith in the concept. For me, that’s a cardinal sin; taking an idea someone enjoys poking at and playing with, then shredding it to tatters due to poor execution and research should lead to Misters Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln being subjected to their own painful excommunication from hidden religious orders.
There’s a lot of venom there, I know. But really, it just isn’t worth the time. You’d be better served by reading The DaVinci Code and just assuming it’s nonfiction. At least it flows and seems to have a point to it.
Insomniac Nightmares 
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