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The
DaVinci Code by Dan Brown Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Templars Readers who love Cussler and Ludlum will
enjoy Dan Brown’s fast-paced thriller, The
DaVinci Code. Starting with a murder in the Louvre, Brown unveils a
centuries-old secret society (not unlike the Templars), and its conflict with
the Catholic Church over the centuries, adding in some intrigue from Opus
Dei, a modern secret society with unusual practices. Mystery readers will
find the clues obvious, catching on to what’s next dozens or hundreds of
pages before Brown leads protagonist Robert Langdon in the right direction.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 6 (pp. 32-9): Having squeezed beneath the security gate,
Robert Langdon now stood just inside the entrance to the Grand Gallery. He
was staring into the mouth of a long, deep canyon. On either side of the
gallery, stark walls rose thirty feet, evaporating into the darkness above.
The reddish glow of the service lighting sifted upward, casting an unnatural
smolder across a staggering collection of Da Vincis, Titians, and Caravaggios
that hung suspended from ceiling cables. Still lifes, religious scenes, and
landscapes accompanied portraits of nobility and politicians. Although the Grand Gallery housed the Louvre's most
famous Italian art, many visitors felt the wing's most stunning offering was
actually its famous parquet floor. Laid out in a dazzling geometric design of
diagonal oak slats, the floor produced an ephemeral optical illusion—a
multi-dimensional network that gave visitors the sense they were floating
through the gallery on a surface that changed with every step. As Langdon's gaze began to trace the inlay, his
eyes stopped short on an unexpected object lying on the floor just a few
yards to his left, surrounded by police tape. He spun toward Fache. "Is
that . . . a Caravaggio on the floor?" Fache nodded without even looking. The
painting, Langdon guessed, was worth upward of two million dollars, and yet
it was lying on the floor like a discarded poster. "What the devil is it
doing on the floor!" Fache glowered, clearly unmoved. "This is a
crime scene, Mr. Langdon. We have touched nothing. That canvas was pulled
from the wall by the curator. It was how he activated the security
system." I Langdon
looked back at the gate, trying to picture what had happened. "The curator was attacked in his office, fled
into the Grand Gallery, and activated the security gate by pulling that
painting from the wall. The gate fell immediately, sealing off all access.
This is the only door in or out of the gallery. Langdon felt confused. "So the curator actually captured his
attacker inside the Grand Gallery?" Fache shook his head. "The security gate separated
Sauniere from his attacker. The killer was locked out there in the hallway
and shot Sauniere through this gate." Fache pointed toward an orange tag
hanging from one of the bars on the gate under which they had just passed. "The PTS team found flashback residue from a
gun. He fired through the bars. Sauniere died in here alone." Langdon pictured the photograph of Sauniere's body.
They said he did that to himself.
Langdon looked out at the enormous corridor before them. "So where is
his body?" Fache straightened his cruciform tie clip and began
to walk. "As you probably know, the Grand Gallery is quite long." The exact length, if Langdon recalled correctly,
was around fifteen hundred feet, the length of three Washington
Monuments laid end to end. Equally breathtaking was the corridor's width,
which easily could have accommodated a pair of side-by-side passenger trains.
The center of the hallway was dotted by the occasional statue or colossal
porcelain urn, which served as a tasteful divider and kept the flow of
traffic moving down one wall and up the other. Fache was silent now, striding briskly up the right
side of the corridor with his gaze dead ahead. Langdon felt almost
disrespectful to be racing past so many masterpieces without pausing for so
much as a glance. Not that I could see anything
in this lighting, he thought. The muted crimson lighting unfortunately conjured
memories of Langdon's last experience in noninvasive lighting in the Vatican
Secret Archives. This was tonight's second unsettling parallel with his
near-death in Rome. He flashed on Vittoria again. She had been absent from his
dreams for months. Langdon could not believe Rome had been only a year ago;
it felt like decades. Another life. His last correspondence
from Vittoria had been in December—a postcard saying she was headed to the
Java Sea to continue her research in entanglement physics . . . something
about using satellites to track manta ray migrations. Langdon had never
harbored delusions that a woman like Vittoria Vetra could have been happy
living with him on a college campus, but their encounter in Rome had unlocked
in him a longing he never imagined he could feel. His lifelong affinity for
bachelorhood and the simple freedoms it allowed had been shaken somehow ...
replaced by an unexpected emptiness that seemed to have grown over the past year. They continued walking briskly, yet Langdon still
saw no corpse. "Jacques Sauniere went this far?" "Mr. Sauniere suffered a bullet wound to his
stomach. He died very slowly. Perhaps over fifteen or twenty minutes. He was
obviously a man of great personal strength." Langdon
turned, appalled. "Security took fifteen minutes to get here?" "Of course not. Louvre security responded
immediately to the alarm and found the Grand Gallery sealed. Through the
gate, they could hear someone moving around at the far end of the corridor,
but they could not see who it was. They shouted, but they got no answer.
Assuming it could only be a criminal, they followed protocol and called in
the Judicial Police. We took up positions within fifteen minutes. When we
arrived, we raised the barricade enough to slip underneath, and I sent a
dozen armed agents inside. They swept the length of the gallery to comer the
intruder." "And?" "They found no one inside. Except . . ."
He pointed farther down the hall. "Him." Langdon lifted his gaze and followed Fache's
outstretched finger. At first he thought Fache was pointing to a large marble
statue in the middle of the hallway. As they continued, though, Langdon began
to see past the statue. Thirty yards down the hall, a single spotlight on a portable
pole stand shone down on the floor, creating a stark island of white light in
the dark crimson gallery. In the center of the light, like an insect under a
microscope, the corpse of the curator lay naked on the parquet floor. "You saw the photograph," Fache said,
"so this should be of no surprise." Langdon felt a deep chill as they approached the
body. Before him was one of the strangest images he had ever seen. The
pallid corpse of Jacques Sauniere lay on the parquet floor exactly as it appeared
in the photograph. As Langdon stood over the body and squinted in the harsh
light, he reminded himself to his amazement that Sauniere had spent his last
minutes of life arranging his own body in this strange fashion. Sauniere looked remarkably fit for a man of his
years . . . and all of his musculature was in plain view. He had stripped off
every shred of clothing, placed it neatly on the floor, and laid down on his
back in the center of the wide corridor, perfectly aligned with the long axis
of the room. His arms and legs were sprawled outward in a wide spread eagle,
like those of a child making a snow angel . . . or, perhaps more
appropriately, like a man being drawn and quartered by some invisible force. Just below Sauniere's breastbone, a bloody smear
marked the spot where the bullet had pierced his flesh. The wound had bled
surprisingly little, leaving only a small pool of blackened blood. Sauniere's left index finger was also bloody,
apparently having been dipped into the wound to create the most unsettling
aspect of his own macabre deathbed; using his own blood as ink, and employing
his own naked abdomen as a canvas, Sauniere had drawn a simple symbol on his
flesh—five straight lines that intersected to form a five-pointed star. The pentacle. The bloody star, centered on Sauniere's navel, gave
his corpse a distinctly ghoulish aura. The photo Langdon had seen was
chilling enough, but now, witnessing the scene in person, Langdon felt a
deepening uneasiness. He did this to himself. "Mr. Langdon?" Fache's dark eyes settled
on him again. "It's a pentacle," Langdon offered, his
voice feeling hollow in the huge space. "One of the oldest symbols on
earth. Used over four thousand years before Christ." "And what does it mean?" Langdon always hesitated when he got this question.
Telling someone what a symbol "meant" was like telling them how a
song should make them feel—it was different for all people. A white Ku Klux
Klan headpiece conjured images of hatred and racism in the United States, and
yet the same costume carried a meaning of religious faith in Spain. "Symbols carry different meanings in different
settings," Langdon said. "Primarily, the pentacle is a pagan
religious symbol." Fache
nodded. "Devil worship." "No,"
Langdon corrected, immediately realizing his choice of vocabulary should have
been clearer. Nowadays, the term pagan had become almost
synonymous with devil worship—a gross misconception. The word's roots
actually reached back to the Latin paganus, meaning country-dwellers.
"Pagans" were literally unindoctrinated country-folk who clung to
the old, rural religions of Nature worship. In fact, so strong was the
Church's fear of those who lived in the rural miles that the once
innocuous word for "villager"—vilain—came to mean a wicked
soul. "The pentacle," Langdon clarified,
"is a pre-Christian symbol that relates to Nature worship. The ancients
envisioned their world in two halves—masculine and feminine. Their gods and
goddesses worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and yang. When male and
female were balanced, there was harmony in the world. When they were
unbalanced, there was chaos." Langdon motioned to Sauniere's stomach. "This pentacle is representative of the female
half of all things—a concept religious historians call the 'sacred feminine'
or the 'divine goddess.' Sauniere, of all people, would know this." "Sauniere drew a goddess symbol on his
stomach?" Langdon had to admit, it seemed odd. "In its
most specific interpretation, the pentacle symbolizes Venus—the goddess of
female sexual love and beauty." Fache eyed the naked man, and grunted. "Early religion was based on the divine order
of Nature. The goddess Venus and the planet Venus were one and the same. The
goddess had a place in the nighttime sky and was known by many names—Venus,
the Eastern Star, Ishtar, Astarte—all of them powerful female concepts with
ties to Nature and Mother Earth." Fache looked more troubled now, as if he somehow
preferred the idea of devil worship. Langdon
decided not to share the pentacle's most astonishing property—the graphic
origin of its ties to Venus. As a young astronomy student, Langdon had been
stunned to learn the planet Venus traced a perfect pentacle across the
ecliptic sky every four years. So astonished were the ancients to observe
this phenomenon, that Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection,
beauty, and the cyclic qualities of sexual love. As a tribute to the magic of
Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads.
Nowadays, few people realized that the four-year schedule of modem Olympic
Games still followed the cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the
five-pointed star had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified
at the last moment—its five points exchanged for five intersecting rings to
better reflect the games' spirit of inclusion and harmony. "Mr. Langdon," Fache said abruptly.
"Obviously, the pentacle must also relate to the devil. Your
American horror movies make that point clearly." Langdon frowned. Thank you, Hollywood.
The five-pointed star was now a virtual cliche in Satanic serial killer
movies, usually scrawled on the wall of some Satanist's apartment along with
other alleged demonic symbology. Langdon was always frustrated when he saw
the symbol in this context; the pentacle's true origins were actually quite
godly. "I assure you," Langdon said,
"despite what you see in the movies, the pentacle's demonic
interpretation is historically inaccurate. The original feminine meaning is
correct, but the symbolism of the pentacle has been distorted over the
millennia. In this case, through bloodshed." "I'm not sure I follow." Langdon glanced at Fache's crucifix, uncertain how
to phrase his next point. "The Church, sir. Symbols are very resilient,
but the pentacle was altered by the early Roman Catholic Church. As part of
the Vatican's campaign to eradicate pagan religions and convert the masses to
Christianity, the Church launched a smear campaign against the pagan gods and
goddesses, recasting their divine symbols as evil." "Go on." "This is very common in times of
turmoil," Langdon continued. "A newly emerging power will take over
the existing symbols and degrade them over time in an attempt to erase their
meaning. In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols, the
pagans lost; Poseidon's trident became the devil's pitchfork, the wise
crone's pointed hat became the symbol of a witch, and Venus's pentacle became
a sign of the devil." Langdon paused. "Unfortunately, the United
States military has also perverted the pentacle; it's now our foremost symbol
of war. We paint it on all our fighter jets and hang it on the shoulders of
all our generals." So much for the goddess of
love and beauty. "Interesting." Fache nodded toward the
spread-eagle corpse. "And the positioning of the body? What do you make
of that?" Langdon shrugged. "The position simply
reinforces the reference to the pentacle and sacred feminine." Fache's
expression clouded. "I beg your pardon?" "Replication.
Repeating a symbol is the simplest way to strengthen its meaning. Jacques
Sauniere positioned himself in the shape of a five-pointed star." If
one pentacle is good, two is better. Fache's eyes followed the five points of Sauniere's
arms, legs, and head as he again ran a hand across his slick hair.
"Interesting analysis." He paused. "And the nudity?" He
grumbled as he spoke the word, sounding repulsed by the sight of an aging
male body. "Why did he remove his clothing?" Damned good question, Langdon thought. He'd been wondering the
same thing ever since he first saw the Polaroid. His best guess was that a
naked human form was yet another endorsement of Venus—the goddess of human
sexuality. Although modern culture had erased much of Venus's association
with the male/female physical union, a sharp etymological eye could still
spot a vestige of Venus's original meaning in the word "venereal."
Langdon decided not to go there. "Mr. Fache, I obviously can't tell you why Mr.
Sauniere drew that symbol on himself or placed himself in this way, but I can
tell you that a man like Jacques Sauniere would consider the pentacle a sign
of the female deity. The correlation between this symbol and the sacred
feminine is widely known by art historians and symbologists." "Fine. And the use of his own blood as
ink?" "Obviously he had nothing else to write
with." Fache was silent a moment. "Actually, I
believe he used blood such that the police would follow certain forensic
procedures." "I'm sorry?" "Look at his left hand." Langdon's eyes traced the length of the curator's
pale arm to his left hand but saw nothing. Uncertain, he circled the corpse
and crouched down, now noting with surprise that the curator was clutching a
large, felt-tipped marker. "Sauniere was holding it when we found
him," Fache said, leaving Langdon and moving several yards to a portable
table covered with investigation tools, cables, and assorted electronic gear.
"As I told you," he said, rummaging around the table, "we have
touched nothing. Are you familiar with this kind of pen?" Langdon knelt down farther to see the pen's label. STYLO DE LUMIERE NOIRE. He glanced up in surprise. The black-light pen or watermark stylus was a
specialized felt-tipped marker originally designed by museums, restorers, and
forgery police to place invisible marks on items. The stylus wrote in a
noncorrosive, alcohol-based fluorescent ink that was visible only under black
light. Nowadays, museum maintenance staffs carried these markers on their
daily rounds to place invisible "tick marks" on the frames of
paintings that needed restoration. As Langdon stood up, Fache walked over to the
spotlight and turned it off. The gallery plunged into sudden darkness. Momentarily blinded, Langdon felt a rising uncertainty.
Fache's silhouette appeared, illuminated in bright purple. He approached
carrying a portable light source, which shrouded him in a violet haze. "As you may know," Fache said, his eyes
luminescing in the violet glow, "police use black-light illumination to
search crime scenes for blood and other forensic evidence. So you can imagine
our surprise . . ." Abruptly, he pointed the light down at the corpse. Langdon looked down and jumped back in shock. His heart pounded as he took in the bizarre sight
now glowing before him on the parquet floor. Scrawled in luminescent
handwriting, the curator's final words glowed purple beside his corpse. As
Langdon stared at the shimmering text, he felt the fog that had surrounded
this entire night growing thicker. Langdon read the message again and looked up at
Fache. "What the hell does this mean?" Fache's eyes shone white. "That,
monsieur, is precisely the question you are here to answer." To discover how Langdon answers the
question, read The
DaVinci Code, a perfect vacation book to haul to the beach, take on the
plane, or read in the car (but not while driving). Some articles have
reported that Brown’s Louvre scenes bear an uncanny resemblance to a device
written earlier by another novelist. Don’t let that worry you while you read
this book; it didn’t distract me in the least. This story is original enough
for my taste. Steve Hopkins, June 21, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
DaVinci Code.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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