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?

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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