Brown's Code
by Louis Guzman
Hidden in The Da Vinci Code (2003) and its pre-quel,
Angels and Demons (2004) is an unspoken question: What is Dan Brown
up to? What does he want us to know but conceals from us. Is he struggling
with the enigmas of a concealed religion? Or does he have no religion
and loves to toy with the idea. He claims that these works are essentially
fictional Church matters set in a factual background. Could it be
mere literary hype for money's sake?
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This is apparent as reader, including Christian clergy,
painfully find these works at once attractive and objectionable. The
stories are propelled by puzzles hard to decipher. Hold them up close
and you find yourself pulled into interminable fictional black holes.
Hold them at arms length and the sledgehammer blows at Christianity
stand out as more than gratuitous. |
The two stories are spun through interventions of Brown's
reluctant alter-ego (Langdon) involuntarily helping solve riddles
that plague Christianity, perhaps to expiate their terrifying facts.
Could he be searching for answers to his own dilemma created by conflicts
among faith, reason and the unholy facts of his true religion? Is
he a guilt-ridden crypto Christian? |
Angels and Demons reveals the human fragility of the
Vatican and its contrived pageantry at the crucial moment of papal
transition. Church tradition is here merely to be rearranged by Brown.
Worse, Vatican City comes close to utter destruction by an IED of
matter and anti-matter, more powerful than a nuclear explosion. Langdon,
of course, saves the Holy City. The key to Brown's seeming inner feelings
come from the late pope's chamberlain who must now preside over Vatican
affairs until a new pope is elected. Check chapter 94 (pages 377-384
in my paperback) for the chamberlain's diatribe against science and
the changes it has wrought in man's life, returning nothing more than
"soul-less chips and endless profits." Toward the end of
his soliloquy the chamberlain asks, pointing at the cardinals in the
Sistine Chapel, "Are we obsolete? Are these men dinosaurs? Am
I? Does the world really need a voice for the poor, the weak, the
oppressed? He thus defines the church not as a bureaucracy but as
a concerned people. |
The Da Vinci Code, painted into the artist's, "The
Last Supper," digs still deeper into the church's clandestine
trappings, the Priory of Scion, Opus Dei, the "Purist Documents"
and, of course, the fact of the Sangreal (Royal Blood). The last
of these was to prove the work's most sensational non-secret, that
Mary Magdalene, the woman who stuck by Jesus and helped entomb him,
bore his child, Sarah, after the crucifixion, and hence, was the
embodiment of the Holy Grail. Residing in southern France, Jesus'
bloodline through Sarah is said to have merged with a French noble
family and ruled Gaul briefly in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Purist Documents are believed to chronicle these accounts, finding
them will clear the mystery of the Holy Grail. The search takes
Langdon to Scotland and legendary Rosslyn Chapel, where the enigma
is stymied among the secret symbols of the Knights Templar, the
Freemasons, perhaps the Rosicrucians, along with pagan art. The
Holy Grail truth may lie deep beneath the stone floor. Brown leaves
us as ignorant of his purpose as of where the Holy Grail really
lies.
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