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THE DA VINCI CODE
by Dan Brown
Doubleday, March 2003
454 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0385504209


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

THE DA VINCI CODE is an intricate puzzle novel involving the lost gospels of Christ, the secrets of the Knights Templar and the Masons, goddess-worship, the Roman Catholic Church and the Opus Dei religious movement. Such an elaborate puzzle has to start on a firm foundation, building from some truths we know o the elaborate speculations and fabrications of the author.

In the first few pages we learn that the American Embassy in Paris protects all the Americans who perform major or minor transgressions in France, sending them home to America for minor punishments.

Then we learn that the "golden ratio," an incredibly important ratio in nature and art (approximately 1.618....) is represented by the Greek letter "phi" f (a circle with a vertical line through it). Except, phi, always pronounced by mathematicians to rhyme with "fry" or "die", is pronounced "fee" (to rhyme with "see") in the book, and the major character not only does not correct this, but goes on to use that pronunciation.

After these two clangers, can we accept anything else?

The book goes on, and makes a great many additional assertions about procedures at museums, Swiss banks, the French police, private airports, and many other institutions. Many of these are plausible. Some, such as key assertions about tracing beacons using GPS technology, are less so (Geographic Positioning Systems require a view of the sky [and of the system of satellites] to operate--they are useless indoors).

For all this, the plot is well-drawn, and major characters credible. An American professor of religious symbology is suspected of the murder of a French museum curator who is an expert on the Holy Grail. The curator's estranged granddaughter, an expert on codes and ciphers for the French police, and helps the professor on a madcap chase through Paris and beyond as they decipher clues left by the professor and stay a step or two ahead of the police.

Despite the obvious weaknesses, the plot does work, with many intricate puzzles to solve. Some are obvious and should be more so to the characters than they are (is there any literate person who does not know the system used by Leonardo da Vinci to encrypt his diaries?). Some are less obvious and interesting--who knew that the "rot-13" encryption built into the Unix operating system (a=n, b=o, etc) has its origins in a system used in Hebrew 2500 years ago? But, can we trust that information any more than we can trust the pronunciation of the Greek letter "phi"? (I think, yes: I have some vague recollection reading of such a system having been used that long ago, and the "Caesarian" cipher ["a"="c", "b"="d"] is of the same nature, although I do not believe it is confirmed that Julius Caesar actually used it.)

The action is fast and furious, and the characters are generally believable. Their motivations are credible and well laid out for us. However, this novel does not delve into deep psychological motivations.

It does not surprise me that such a popular book would contain such basic errors. There are obvious mistakes even in Tom Clancy's early books (American military uniforms from WW II to Vietnam were "olive drab"--a kind of green--and not "khaki"--a kind of tan; South American armies also use olive drab, rather than khaki, as most pictures of Fidel Castro will confirm). Still, people accept books if the author can be convincing enough about the things he knows about--and we know about--and manage to keep to a minimum the things he gets flagrantly wrong.

Indeed, there are many things that are obvious to the reader, and the author's attempts to conceal them are merely annoyances. There are a few episodes in the first few chapters where important clues are mentioned but not fully revealed for a few pages. And the nature of the event that estranged the French code expert and detective from her grandfather is very obvious. What is not obvious is why she did not figure out what is going on, at least on a surface level, or why it should have affected her (not a religious person nor culturally puritan [Anglo-Saxon]) so strongly, even into young-adulthood. But it is necessary for the plot that the granddaughter be estranged from her grandfather at the time of his death, and some other possible sources of estrangement that are mentioned in the "back story" might make it harder for them to reconcile.

He succeeds in carrying off his plot because most of Brown's information about the Masons, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei, and some other issues was credible, and agreed with what I had read elsewhere, though his interpretation of what the Knights Templar were looking for, or found, or were protecting seems unique to Brown, as does a lot of his interpretation of the early history of the New Testament. Still, he manages to carry that off fairly well. Thus, he manages to carry off a conclusion involving Opus Dei that would be impossible with the present Pope, but might possibly occur with one of his successors. But that is late in the book, after Brown has established a lot of credibility. Even so, I could think of ways he could have achieved the same result with more and better historic precedent (and possibly more in accordance with the very little I know of Canon Law). But, that is at the end of the book, where it doesn't much matter, though it may leave some readers with a feeling of annoyance.

I enjoyed the book because of its fast-moving plot and sympathetic main characters. I suppose I will read more books by the author, but I will not rush to buy them: I will wait for the paperbacks, or perhaps to borrow them, as I did this one.

Reviewed by David Chessler, December 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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