I read terrible books for fun
Previously on The Da Vinci Code, our numbskull heroes jumped on a plane to Britain and flew about for a bit. While they were doing that, Teabag hinted strongly that he wanted Sophie to give him the cryptex, because they are still clutching that thing and no closer to solving what it’s about.
I must admit, I’m quite tired. Continue reading “The Da Vinci Code 71-73: More Annoying Scavenger Hunt Clues”
This is it. This is the chapter I warned you about, a chapter so densely packed with absolute bullshit that it needs a post all to itself. It’s long, it’s messy and it’s heavy on the art and church history, so let’s just get into this. This is…
By the way, I still hate Leigh Teabing. Leigh can’t just show Sophie the picture of what he claims is the Holy Grail. Oh no. Leigh has to lead them into the ballroom, which he has converted into a ‘study’ by cluttering it with an eclectic array of crap that I think is supposed to make him seem eccentric and charming. Continue reading “The Da Vinci Code 58: Extremely Ron Howard Voice”
…may very well contain the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything, but probably doesn’t. Still, at least our heroes are no longer in the back of that taxi. It was rapidly becoming the new Louvre in terms of OH MY GOD JUST CHANGE THE SCENE ALREADY.
Thankfully they are about to detaxify in front of a Swiss bank. Continue reading “The Da Vinci Code 42-44: A Bunch of Inevitable Box Jokes”
Last time on The Da Vinci Code we discovered why the Mona Lisa was smiling (no, really) via a lengthy and unnecessary flashback in which Robert Langdon went to prison and lectured a bunch of convicts. He also said ‘shit’, which is how you know he’s super cool. Then Sophie and Langdon wandered around the Louvre some more and found another anagram written in front of the Mona Lisa, but you’re not allowed to know what it is yet because we have to keep you reading this piffle somehow.
Anyway, let’s read some more, shall we? (help)
Seated at Sauniere’s desk, Lieutenant Collet pressed the phone to his ear in disbelief. Did I hear Fache correctly? “A bar of soap? But how could Langdon have known about the GPS dot?”
A moment of silence for our fallen comrade, Bar of Soap.
Also Collet is at Sauniere’s desk and that statue of a knight is no longer staring at him in a ‘Hey, I’m a plot point’ way it was before. Huh. I daresay we’ll come back to that in the foulness of time.
Anyway, the jig is well and truly up for Sophie and Langdon, because the police have figured out they’re still in the Louvre. Now, you’d think after an elaborate stunt involving soap, GPS, semi-trucks and trashcans being thrown through toilet windows, anyone with any sense would take advantage of the situation and figure out a way to skedaddle, wouldn’t you?
You’d think.
But guess what?
Yeah. Our heroes are still titting around in the Louvre.
Collet was flabbergasted by Sophie Neveu’s bravado. She’s still inside the building?
Yes. Yes, she is. ‘Bravado’ is not the word I would use, but consider my gast similarly flabbered.
Robert Langdon had proven an elusive quarry tonight…
Yeah, for about twenty minutes. Which you spent chasing a bar of soap and he remained…uh…exactly where you left him, actually. And he’s still there.
Incidentally, I think this was where I completely gave up trying to understand how time works in this novel.
It’s time to find out what the writing on the Mona Lisa said! Are you excited? I’m excited. I’m so excited that I’m in danger of having some kind of spasm.
“The Priory,” Langdon whispered. “This proves your grandfather was a member!”
Sophie looked at him in confusion.
“It’s flawless,” Langdon said, nodding as his thoughts churned. “It’s a proclamation of one of the Priory’s most fundamental philosophies!”
Yes, but what does it say? Get on with it.
SO DARK THE CON OF MAN
What? That’s it? So someone is a shady used car salesman?
Oh boy. We’re about to get into it, everybody. And I’m not going to hold back, because we’re going from 0-to-mansplainapalooza in less than sixty seconds. If you thought the chapter where Brangdon is explaining why the Mona Lisa smiles is the highest setting on this shithose, I’m afraid you were sadly mistaken.
There is always more. And it’s always worse.
“The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonised the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.”
Yeah, I think a large percentage of the nation of India would probably take exception to that statement. And China. They’ve got quite a few goddesses, I’m told. Or are we just talking about white people here? And even if we are talking solely about Western Europe then we’re clearly talking about a parallel universe. Matriarchal paganism? As practised by the Athenian Greeks, who – despite venerating a goddess – liked to keep their own women locked up out of sight and sound, and were comically appalled by the striding, outspoken women of Sparta? Or perhaps the Romans, whose culture enshrined the right of the Paterfamilias to straight-up murder his wife if it turned out she’d been sleeping with her dance instructor?
The Priory of Sion is very bad at history.
Sophie’s expression remained uncertain. “My grandfather sent me to this spot to find this. He must be trying to tell me more than that.”
At this point Sophie’s looking for anagrams, which you would think was a reasonable assumption after she missed the last one. But not Langdon. Oh no. In this chapter about the cruel supression of the female perspective, you know what his response is to her?
He pretty much brushes her off so he can stand around and ruminate for two pages. There there, dear. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Just stand there and look cute while a man has important thoughts. There’s a good girl.
So dark the con of man, he thought. So dark indeed.
So dumb the brain of Dan, she thought. So dumb indeed.
Yes, the ‘con of man’ is the way men supposedly suppressed the sacred feminine at the bidding of the Catholic church. And it’s dark. The dark con of man. Woof. You really had to strain to get that one in, Danbert.
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that could arguably be called the most blood soaked publication in human history. Malleus Malleficarum…indoctrinated the world to the ‘dangers of freethinking women’ and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them.
Langdon then goes on to clutch his pearls – while simultaneously ignoring the actual real life woman at his side – over the ‘scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers’ and other women who were executed as witches by the nasty old Church.
There you go. Langdon has explained the witch craze – a vastly complicated and multi-faceted aspect of history, comprising of many disparate incidents spanning centuries, continents, social classes and generations. And he’s done it in a paragraph.
Aside from absolutely everything else wrong with this catastrophic dumbing down, I have one word for him.
Protestantism.
Like all fabulously rich and powerful institutions, the Catholic Church has done some straight-up monstrous things in its two thousand year history. And in the interests of full disclosure, I have no dog in this hunt; I’m a godless heathen and fine with it. So I’m not in the business of defending the Church that set fire to poor Joan of Arc, issued a fatwa against Elizabeth I and pulled out numerous women’s toenails in the interests of making them admit to witchcraft.
But I do find it kind of objectionable the way that Dan Brown turns the Catholic Church into this spooky Other on which everything can be blamed, especially in this instance.
Because Protestants? They fucking loved a witchhunt. The most famous Protestant translation of the Bible – the King James Version – was commissioned by an enthusiastic amateur witchfinder, for God’s sake. And Calvinism made it twice as easy to snag some poor crone and accuse her of poisoning your cow. No longer was everyone a sinner in the universal Church of sinners, but now some were Elect and some were not, and if you weren’t then you’d better have a damn good explanation for that weird mole on your left buttock.
Radical Protestantism and the ducking stool went together like ergot and hallucinations, like Salem and twitchy teenage girls. So settle the fuck down, WASPy. You don’t get to shunt all the blame on this one.
Anyway. Back to the book.
Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests nor Islamic clerics.
We are going to conveniently ignore the fact that reform Judaism and the Anglican communion, at the time this book was written, had been progressing with the ordination of women for over thirty years. And a happy postscript – 2016 saw the arrival of the first female imams.
The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos – the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole – had been recast as a shameful act.
Well, I think we’ve just figured out why the Italian ex-girlfriend took off to hang out with manta rays. Can you imagine? You want to bang and he’s all ‘it’s a sacred act of spiritual union’ and you’re like ‘whatever, but can we not call it that thing you call it? Can’t we just fuck?’ Ugh.
The male ego had spent two millenium unchecked by its female counterpart.
Says the man still ignoring the woman tugging urgently on his sleeve.
Sophie finally gets his attention while he’s mentally rambling about the Hopi and their respect for the balance of nature, a thought so fantastically white-boy airhead that I suddenly have this hideous insight into his CD collection. And that Robert Langdon almost definitely owns a copy of the nineties What-The-Fuck-Were-We-Thinking classic, Enigma – The Cross of Changes.
Can you picture it? I can. You just know that he broke that one out when he wanted to get New Age Gregorian during a spot of Hieros Gamos.
Christ, that poor ex-girlfriend.
Anyway, someone’s coming, and this time it’s a security guard with a gun. Cliffhanger! Will Langdon get shot? Keep reading. (No. He won’t. Because there’s still over half a book to go.)
We are back at Saint-Sulpice, where Silas is once again demonstrating the kind of inconspicuous stealth that makes him such a deadly killer of men and nuns.
In other words, he’s about to smash open a marble floor with an iron candle holder.
…he realised he could not possibly shatter the covering without making considerable noise. Iron on marble. It would echo off the vaulted ceilings. Would the nun hear him? She should be asleep by now.
Wait. So Silas thinks that when the custodian of the church opens up the church at 1am for huge, angry-looking men with red eyes, she just shrugs, goes ‘Yeah, let yourself out and lock the door behind you’ and fucks off back to bed?
And also that she can sleep through the sound of someone attempting to crack open a marble floor with a large lump of iron?
I love Silas. Every time you think he can’t get worse at his job, he does.
Silas’s next brilliant plan is to muffle the iron in some sort of cloth so that it doesn’t make a noise. He doesn’t care to defile the altar cloth, so instead he peels off his cloak and goes to town on the floor in his underwear. No, stop laughing. He does. That actually happens.
Knowing he was alone in the great church, Silas untied his cloak and slipped it off his body. As he removed it, he felt a sting as the wool fibres stuck to the fresh wounds on his back…
…scattering forensic evidence all over the church.
He smacks through the floor – somehow – and finds a stone tablet with Job 38:11 written on it. Meanwhile, Sister Sandrine is watching all this from the balcony and figures out – from the wounds on Silas’s hunky monky body – that Opus Dei is looking for the keystone. She hurries back to her room, retrieves a sealed envelope and then does something that makes me want to recommend her to MENSA.
She picks up a telephone.
Are you listening, Sauniere? She doesn’t doodle on the Mona Lisa. She doesn’t arrange her bleeding giblets in some kind of scavenger hunt clue. She doesn’t write stupid anagrams all over everything. If there is information that needs to be conveyed to another person, she picks up a telephone and starts talking.
These fucking people, I swear. Talk about making everything needlessly complicated.
Of course, because this is The Da Vinci Code, Silas hasn’t found dick. He scurries to the church Bible, looks up chapter and verse and finds this.
HITHERTO SHALT THOU COME, BUT NO FURTHER.
Yeah, guess what? All those chapters were pointless. It’s a red herring. This book delights in wasting your time.
Last time on The Da Vinci Code, Sophie succumbed to the contagious flashbacks that started with Langdon, who appears to be some kind of Typhoid Mary for that kind of thing. The results were almost as creepy as watching old episodes of Jim’ll Fix It in a darkened room, which is unfortunate because I think the author intended them to be charming.
Sophie found a key and it was something to do with the Priory of Sion or some such shit, but nobody really cared because we were all too busy pouring out the hand sanitizer for our fallen homie, Bar of Soap, the most exquisitely realised character in the novel so far.
Opens with this pair of interesting sentences.
Silas gazed upwards at the Saint-Sulpice obelisk, taking in the length of the massive marble shaft. His sinews felt taut with exhilaration.
I’m not sure how these lines escaped from the memoir Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Life, but I’m enjoying them almost as much as Silas is. Silas gets down on his knees and (stop that giggling at the back there) knocks on the floor until he finds a hollow spot. Up in the balcony Sister Sandrine sees him and realises he’s here for a secret purpose. She knows that because she has a secret of her own.
She was a sentry. And tonight, the ancient wheels had been set in motion. The arrival of this stranger at the base of the obelisk was a signal from the brotherhood. It was a silent call of distress.
Why does nobody in this book know how to use a phone?
…answers my question, or maybe provides a retort, as Bezu Fache has figured out that Sophie pulled a fast one when she said Langdon had a call from the Embassy. And that’s all that happens. Bye, chapter twenty five. We hardly knew ye.
Oh shit. We’re back in the Louvre, and Dan Brown is about to Dan Brown all over the Mona Lisa. Those of an art history disposition may want to look away now.
Painted on a poplar wood panel, her ethereal, mist-filled atmosphere was attributed to Da Vinci’s mastery of the sfumato style, in which forms appear to evaporate into each other.
Oh, let’s repeat a thing we’ve been through before because it’s the only thing you actually looked up. We won’t mention the use of chiaroscuro because it’s even harder to spell. While I’m being pissy, can I also say how annoying I find ‘Da Vinci’? Leonardo Da Vinci literally means Leonardo of Vinci, or Leonardo from Vinci. He didn’t have his father’s name because he was illegitimate. I wouldn’t normally whine about a thing like this, but there’s something about Langdon/Brown’s (Brangdon’s) insufferable intellectual posturing that makes me want to smack him down over every last little, footling thing.
The Mona Lisa was still twenty yards ahead when Sophie turned on the black light and the bluish crescent of penlight fanned out on the floor in front of them. She swung the beam back and forth across the floor like a minesweeper, searching for any hint of luminescent ink.
Your screen treatment yearnings are showing again, Dan.
The Mona Lisa’s status as the most famous piece of art in the world, Langdon knew, had nothing to do with her enigmatic smile [snip] Quite simply the Mona Lisa was famous because Leonardo da Vinci claimed she was his finest accomplishment.
Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. That’s the most famous, most mysterious smile in the world and there is nothing you can say that will make it any different.
The Mona Lisa was, in fact, one of the world’s most documented inside jokes. The painting’s well documented collage of double meanings and playful allusions had been revealed in most art history tomes, and yet, incredibly, the public at large still considered her smile a great mystery.
No mystery at all, Langdon thought, moving forward and watching the faint outline of the painting take shape. No mystery at all.
Did you get that? Brangdon knows why the Mona Lisa is smiling. He’s that good.
Most recently Langdon had shared the Mona Lisa’s secret with a rather unlikely group – a dozen inmates at the Essex County Penetentiary. Langdon’s jail seminar was part of a Harvard outreach programme…
NO NO NO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO.
Robert Langdon lecturing convicts about art. I barely glanced at the next paragraph and already I have a strong, stomach-churning presentiment of what comes next. He’s going to turn on the bullshit hose up to blast and all of the prisoners are going to gargle that shit down and ask eagerly for more. Then they’re going to tell him he’s cool and offer to give him gang tattoos, which he politely refuses because he doesn’t want hepatitis.
I may have to start drinking for this one.
Langdon claims that Leonardo painted the horizon line of the portrait lower on one side to give emphasis to the female side. No, really. He says it was to make her look larger from the left as an inside joke, because historically the concepts of male and female are assigned sides. Left is female and right is male. I don’t even know.
“I heard he was a fag,” said a small man with a goatee.
Langdon winced. “Historians don’t generally put it quite that way, but yes – Da Vinci was a homosexual.”
“Is that why he was into that whole feminine thing?”
Yeah, outside of drag performers gay men aren’t really that into ‘that whole feminine thing’, goatee guy. They’re more into it for the whole masculine thing. You know. Cock.
Someone mentions ‘chicks with dicks’ and…
Langdon considered offering an etymological sidebar about the word hermaphrodite and its ties to Hermes and Aphrodite, but something told him it would be lost on this crowd.
I wish he wouldn’t keep doing these teacher time flashbacks. They make me hate him more with every passing moment.
He then goes on to say that the Mona Lisa is deliberately androgynous. Uh, wait. A minute ago he was saying she was bigger on the left as a tribute to the sacred feminine or some such shit. I suppose it’s too much to ask for him to at least keep his smug nonsense consistent.
“…actually Da Vinci left a big clue that the painting was supposed to be androgynous. Has anyone here ever heard of an Egyptian God named Amon?”
You will never believe where this is going. Guess. Go on. Take a punt.
Done?
If you guessed ‘a famous but fictional brand of condoms’ give yourself a pat on the back. And maybe consider checking into a psych ward.
Yes, really. In the world of The Da Vinci Code there is a brand of condoms named Amon, because Amon is the Egyptian God of fertility. There’s a guy with a ram’s head on the box. People buy these and nobody seems to grasp the unfortunate implications of sheepshagging. No, I don’t know, either. I think I need a lie down.
“Well done. Amon is indeed represented as a man with a ram’s head, and his promiscuity and curved horns are related to our modern sexual slang – horny.”
Why is this happening and how do I make it stop?
Someone says ‘no shit’ and Langdon says ‘no shit’ right back. Look at him, dropping the s-bomb after 167 pages. Guess we should start calling him Professor Slangdon now.
But our newly streetwise hero has not finished. He points to Amon’s counterpart, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, Isis. Again, I feel like drinking, because the thing I’m about to recap is so astoundingly fucking stupid that it may very well break your brain. Are you ready for this?
He scrambles the letters of AMON and ISIS to make MONA LISA.
Langdon nodded. “Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da Vinci’s little secret, and the reason for the Mona Lisa’s knowing smile.”
Okay, stand back, because I’ve had it. This is going to get messy.
The Mona Lisa is called the Mona Lisa because ‘Mona’ is a contraction of the Italian address ‘Madonna’, meaning ‘my lady’. She is named Lisa because her name was probably Lisa – Lisa Gherardini, whose married name was Lisa del Giaconda, hence her Italian name, La Giaconda, which is also one of those serendipitous Italian puns meaning ‘cheerful’ or ‘smiling’. The French name La Joconde, is a transliteration of the Italian. The point is that the Mona Lisa has many names and may not have even been referred to as the Mona Lisa in Leonardo’s life time. In fact it may have even been rude to refer to it as such and so she may – as she is today in Italy – been have referred to as Monna Lisa.
Where is your anagram God now, Langdon?
As for asserting that you know why the Mona Lisa is smiling, well – yeah. I’m just going to leave that one alone, because look at it. There’s nothing I can add to make this claim look any more stupid. It’s like putting a dunce cap on Donald Trump; funny, but ultimately redundant.
Any-fucking-way, back to the Louvre.
Sophie spots blood with the black light, leading her to believe that her grandfather definitely came here. These are dainty spots of blood, by the way – ‘a tiny droplet of dried liquid’. Again, I’m really not sure that ‘tiny droplets’are what happens when you’re shot in the gut with a Heckler and Koch USP 40, but let’s pretend.
Then they shine the black light and there are six words written on the glass in front of the Mona Lisa.
I’M TICKLING YOUR BALLS AGAIN, SUCKERS.
No, they’re not that. But they may as well be.
In the last chapter we learned that O’ draconian devil, oh lame saint is an anagram for Leonardo da Vinci and The Mona Lisa. Well, Robert and Sophie did. Most of us have already figured this out about twelve chapters ago because we might have done a crossword or two at some point in our lives.
[Sophie’s] shock at over the anagram was matched only by her embarrassment at not having deciphered the message herself.
Sophie spends about a page feeling ashamed of herself, but she shouldn’t be. It’s not her fault she’s a poorly drawn fictional character who’s been dumbed down to make the hero look smarter.
Her grandfather’s voice had called out from beyond with chilling precision.
Leonardo da Vinci!
The Mona Lisa!
Why his final words to her referenced the famous painting, Sophie had no idea, but she could think of only one possibility.
That your grandfather was also an idiot? Seriously – even the solution is stupid. If you’re dying of massive internal bleeding and have a limited time to get your point across, why would you write out Leonardo da Vinci and The Mona Lisa when you could just write Mona Lisa? “Who painted the Mona Lisa?” isn’t even a Children’s Edition Trivial Pursuits question. It’s the kind of brain-teaser you get on the back of a Smarties box.
Oh God, and now Sophie’s having flashbacks. Is it contagious or something?
She remembers going to the Louvre as a child to see the Mona Lisa. This is mostly so that she can worry about whether she’s going to be pretty when she grows up, and to demonstrate that Dan Brown knows about the sfumato technique popular in high Renaissance art.
Child Sophie asks her grandfather if he knows why the Mona Lisa is smiling and he winks and says maybe one day he’ll tell her.
Okay, the flashbacks are annoying enough, but for the love of God, could men stop winking in them, please? It was creepy enough when Langdon winked at his students but when you’ve got old people winking at small children it just comes off all Werther’s Original. And that’s never a good thing.
Sophie realises she has to get to the Mona Lisa, because her grandfather might have left her another message there. She tells Robert to get to the Embassy and he agrees for the space of a page before having some unspecified symbological revelation about the letters P.S. on the message.
In that instant, Langdon felt Sauniere’s puzzling mix of symbolism fall into stark focus. Like a peal of thunder, a career’s worth of symbology and history came crashing down around him. Everything Jacques Sauniere had done tonight suddenly made perfect sense.
I’m guessing the P.S. didn’t stand for Perfect Sense, because this is The Da Vinci Code.
…returns us to Saint-Sulpice and reminds us that time works differently in this novel than it does elsewhere. Silas has been pretending to pray for about ten minutes, while elsewhere we’ve been catapulted back in time to Harvard circa 1994 and into the winky mists of Sophie’s art-gazing childhood. And back again.
I know it takes a while to get around the Louvre, but this is ridiculous.
Silas discovers a thin strip of brass on the floor of the church, which is supposed to be a Rose Line, which is basically the X that marks the spot of the keystone. A quick Google reveals that this isn’t an actual thing that exists but in this case I’m going to let the Church of Saint-Sulpice do my fact checking for me, since they have clearly had enough of this shit.
Fifteen years ago they issued this – perhaps suitably – pissy statement.
Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent bestselling novel, this line in the floor is not the vestige of a pagan temple. No such temple ever existed in this place. It was never called a Rose Line. It does not coincide with the meridian traced through the middle of the Paris Observatory which serves as a reference for maps where longitudes are measured in degrees East or West of Paris. Please note that the letters P and S in the round windows at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the church, and not an imaginary secret society.
They also refused to let Ron Howard film in the church. That’s probably why they took away the church’s italics in this printing. To teach them a lesson.
…takes us back to the Louvre where Sophie is about to go look at the Mona Lisa. Her grandfather’s dead body is lying abandoned some distance away, which is kind of weird now that I think about it. Are the forensics teams completely done already? Or are they supposed to have left the Louvre to run after a cake of soap like the rest of the Keystone Cops?
But never mind. The plot demands that Sauniere’s corpse is unattended, so there.
Sophie is full of regrets about not being in touch with her grandfather for all those years, but then she justifies it to herself by thinking about him in the terms usually reserved for 1970’s British celebrities who later turned out to be absolutely enormous child molesters. I don’t exactly recall what was The Thing that made Sophie cut him off, but it seems she did so so ruthlessly and completely that his winking in chapter twenty-one just grew another layer of creepy.
Sophie enters the Salle des Etats, but – because nobody in this book can do anything without taking one step forward and five steps back – remembers she needs a black-light. So she hurries back to the unattended crime scene, averts her eyes from the body (oh God, please tell me someone has at least covered up Grandpa’s dick by now?) and scuttles off back to the Salle de Etats where she bumps into Langdon, who has not run for the Embassy like she told him to.
He asks her if the initials PS mean anything to her and she says they mean Princesse Sophie, her grandfather’s nickname for her.
“I know, but did you see them anywhere else? Did your grandfather use the initials PS in any other way?”
Uh…PlayStation? Parti Socialiste? Postscript? Psalms? Pulmonary stenosis? Static pressure? Pacific Southwestern?
He asks her if she’s seen them as a monogram or on stationary, prompting her to recall how she was hunting for her birthday gift when she was nine and came across a necklace with a key pendant.
Most keys were flat with jagged teeth, but this one had a triangular column with little pockmarks all over it. Its golden head was in the shape of a cross, but not a normal cross. This was an even-armed one, like a plus sign. Embossed in the middle of the cross was a strange symbol – two letters intertwined with some flowery design.
Her grandfather catches her and tells her off about respecting people’s privacy, but later buys her a bicycle to show there are no hard feelings.
By the way, the dialogue in these child Sophie flashbacks is enough to make you vomit longer and harder than Emma Bovary on her deathbed.
“I saw letters on the key, and a flower.”
“Yes, that’s my favourite flower. It’s called a fleur-de-lis. We have them in the garden. The white ones. In English we call that kind of flower a lily.”
“I know those! They’re my favourite too!”
“Then I’ll make a deal with you.” Her grandfather’s eyebrows raised the way they always did when he was about to give her a challenge. “If you can keep my key a secret, and never talk about it ever again, to me or anybody, then someday I will give it to you.”
Feeling queasy yet? No? Have some more. He tells her the key has her name on it.
Sophie scowled. “No it doesn’t. It says PS. My name isn’t PS!”
Her grandfather lowered his voice. “Okay, Sophie, if you must know, PS is a code. It’s your secret initials.”
Her eyes went wide. “I have secret initials?”
“Of course. Granddaughters always have secret initials that only their grandfather’s know.”
“PS?”
He tickled her. “Princesse Sophie.”
She giggled. “I’m not a princess.”
He winked. “You are to me.”
Goddamnit, Pop-Pop. What did we say about winking? And in conjunction with tickling? The winky level of creepy was bad enough but when you add in tickling and the Awful Unspecified Thing you did back in about 1994 we’re taking the creepiness level way past Werther’s Original and heading for Operation Yewtree.
Sophie – thankfully – returns to the present and admits to Langdon that she may have seen such a monogram before, although she does keep her promise and doesn’t reveal it was a key. Langdon asks her if the letters appeared with a fleur-de-lis and Sophie is flabbergasted by how he could possibly know that.
Langdon exhaled and lowered his voice. “I’m fairly certain that your grandfather was a member of a secret society. A very old covert brotherhood.”
Sophie felt a knot tighten in her stomach. She was certain of it too. For ten years she had tried to forget the incident that had confirmed that horrifying fact for her. She had witnessed something unthinkable. Unforgivable.
I’m trying to think of unforgivable things that people did in the mid-Nineties. The first thing that popped into my head was the Macarena. So, I’m just going to pretend it’s that.
Oh my God – there’s plot happening here. Langdon says that the PS and the fleur-de-lis is the logo of the shadowy Priory of Sion, a secret organisation so secret and shadowy that they…uh…have a logo? What?
Langdon explains that the Priory membership has included some of the greatest men in history – Botticelli, Newton, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.
“The Priory has a well-documented history of reverence for the sacred feminine.”
“You’re telling me this group is a pagan goddess worship cult?”
“More like the pagan goddess worship cult.”
Really? Because so far their meetings sound like sausagefests. Nothing says reverence for the sacred feminine like a boy’s club, apparently.
Langdon says the PS and the fleur-de-lis that Sophie saw as a child are proof.
“It could only have been related to the Priory.”
No, it couldn’t, Robert. For all you know PS could stand for Piss Society and what Sophie mistook for a fleur-de-lis was actually a golden, stylised representation of a warm, reeking fountain of human urine, as appreciated by watersports enthusiastics everywhere. Do we really have to once again go over how many things the letters PS stand for? Or how many things the fleur-de-lis represents?
The house of Bourbon? The city of Florence and…actually pretty much the arms of every other aristocratic family in Europe. And flags. Lots of flags. If its presence is indicative of the presence of the Priory of Sion then people in the know include France, England, Bosnia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and the entire province of Quebec. Oh, and the famous Italian Farnese family, whose luminaries included an actual Pope. What I’m getting at is as that as a heraldic device the fleur-de-lis is so dirt common that it may as well be a colour. What are we going to do next, Bob? Impart everything blue with some kind of occult significance?
Wait, no. Isn’t that what happened with David Icke?
Anyway. Yes. Let’s not get into that. It’s transdimensional lizards all the way down and it’s far too early in the morning for that kind of thing. We’ll leave our muttonheaded heros gawping in the black-lit Louvre and toddle off to the banks of the Seine, where the best drawn character in this book so far is – sadly – about to bite the big one.
A few miles away, on the riverbank beyond Les Invalides, the bewildered driver of a twin-bed Trailor truck stood at gunpoint and watched as the captain of the Judicial Police let out a gutteral roar of rage and heaved a bar of soap into the turgid waters of the Seine.
Bar of Soap
2002 – 2003
An all too brief candle
Requiescat in pace
Please excuse the brief hiatus. I’m currently in the process of moving house and a lot of things are going on, including the nervous twitch I’m developing every time I hear someone tearing at a reel of parcel tape. You know how it goes. However, I have queued a bunch of posts to see you all through while I traverse the cardboard box laden hellscape that is my life for the next few weeks, so check back on Mondays and Thursdays to wallow in the unbelievable silliness of the book that – paradoxically – is keeping me kind of sane in the middle of current chaos.
Is that weird? No, don’t answer. I know it’s weird. Anyway, avanti.
*
I may as well come clean.
I’m enjoying this book. I know. It’s sick and wrong and dirty, but it’s fun. I’ve read some bad bestsellers in my time but at least this one isn’t boring yet. And I know boring. I read the whole first chunk of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. And the entire Twilight series. I’ve survived monolithic lumps of exposition about Swedish financial journalism, and watched crap vampires stare at mopey teenage girls for four whole books, all in the diminishing, desperate hope that something would finally fucking happen.
There’s no such problem with The Da Vinci Code. Everything is happening and everything is stupid. It’s actually quite refreshing.
Anyway, where were we?
Langdon is currently still lurking in the loos at the Louvre, and Sophie is not answering her phone, much to the chagrin of our favourite nosy French policemen – Collet et Fache.
Someone calls from the station to say that they have no idea about draconian devils and lame saints, and did Fache know that they didn’t send Sophie Neveu? They then discover that Sophie is the last scion of the happily demented House of Sauniere, but have no time to ponder this information because an alarm goes off in the Grand Gallery and according to his GPS dot, Robert Langdon has just jumped out of the toilet window.
…picks up exactly where we left off, with Fache and friends running around like poulets sans tetes trying to follow the GPS dot. At first they think Langdon has killed himself, but then the dot starts moving and the only other thing in the vicinity is a truck, which leads Fache to believe Langdon leapt aboard out of the window like Indiana Jones or something.
Sadly we know Robert – who almost certainly wouldn’t know what to do with a bullwhip – is far too much of a wuss for that. It’s actually Sophie who takes control of the situation by embedding the GPS dot in a bar of soap, smashing the window with a trash can and then tossing the dot onto the back of an idling truck. I like Sophie. She’s obviously all kinds of peculiar but at least Dan is giving her something to do, unlike Langdon, who has spent the last handful of chapters hanging out in a toilet feeling sorry for himself, like Eeyore in Harris tweed.
Langdon decided to not to say another word all evening. Sophie Neveu was clearly a hell of a lot smarter than he was.
I give him points for self-awareness, although currently Sophie’s far-flung bar of soap is coming off brighter than Langdon. I’ve yet to see any evidence of the man’s blistering intellect.
Oh dear. We’re in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, with Silas. That probably means that nice, harmless nun is about to get horribly murdered.
As he followed Sister Sandrine down the main aisle, Silas was surprised by the austerity of the sanctuary. Unlike Notre Dame with its colourful frescos, gilded altar-work and warm wood, Saint-Sulpice was stark and cold, conveying an almost barren quality reminiscent of the ascetic cathedrals of Spain.
I’m consistently impressed by how bad Dan Brown is at describing places and things. He does so in such banal terms that the gorgeous backdrops of his settings may as well not exist at all; whole setpieces feel like they could just as easily be taking place in bland, square white rooms as the Grand Gallery of the Louvre or the Church of Saint-Sulpice.
Silas asks Sandrine if he can pray alone for a moment, and she goes up to watch him from the balcony.
The sudden dread in her soul made it hard to stay still. For a fleeting instant, she wondered if this mysterious visitor could be the enemy they had warned her about, and if tonight she would have to carry out the orders she had been holding all these years.
It turns out Sister Sandrine also has a dark and mysterious connection to something bigger than herself, but that’s The Da Vinci Code for you. And then the chapter ends, which means she doesn’t get murdered.
Yet.
While the police are chasing them, Langdon and Sophie are somehow still mooching around the Louvre.
Langdon felt like he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. The newest aspect of this mystery was a deeply troubling one: The captain of the Judicial Police is trying to frame me for murder.
Goddamn, Robert Langdon is a badly drawn fictional character. And Dan Brown is horrible at conveying human emotion. If I were Langdon I’d be screaming by now, demanding to know what the fuck is going on and thinking that this whole thing would be much, much easier if only I could find a strong cup of coffee somewhere. But no. Instead he’s thinking about jigsaws and the best he can muster is a beard-stroky ‘Hmm, deeply troubling.’
His fake leap out of the bathroom window was not going to help Langdon’s popularity with Fache one bit. Somehow he doubted the captain of the French police would see the humour in chasing down and arresting a bar of soap.
I think this is the closest thing I’ve seen to a joke in this book so far. While The Da Vinci Code is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time, it’s probably safe to say that none of the characters have much of a sense of humour. So far the book has taken itself very, very seriously indeed, which ironically is what makes it absolutely hilarious.
Anyway, Sophie and Langdon are still chewing over the significance of the cryptic squigglings at the murder scene. Yay.
“Using the Fibonacci numbers was my grandfather’s way of waving another flag at me – like writing the message in English, or arranging himself like my favourite piece of art, or drawing a pentacle to catch my attention.”
Sophie, while we’re hanging around recapping shit we’ve said five times already, it bears repeating; your family is very, very strange. How did you used to send each other Christmas cards? Write out a bunch of prime numbers and hack off a finger?
Sophie then reveals that the pentacle has special significance for her, because she and her grandfather used to play Tarot cards and her card was always pentacles. Langdon immediately starts musing on the female figures in the Tarot in a way that I’ve already come to dread, because I know that mansplaining will surely follow.
Originally, Tarot had been devised as a secret to pass along ideologies banned by the church.
Not true. Tarot was originally nothing more than a card game. Apparently the suits most commonly known in the English-speaking world – clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades – are the French version, but Italians still play with the swords and cups we now associate exclusively with the Tarot. Never knew that until now, which just goes to show that this book will teach you things, so long as you’re not prepared to take anything it says at face value.
And I’m not, because Langdon is demonstrably full of shit.
“Your grandfather,” Langdon said, hurrying behind her, “When he told you about the pentacle, did he mention goddess worship or any resentment of the Catholic Church?”
Sophie shook her head. “I was more interested in the mathematics of it – the Divine Proportion, PHI, Fibonnaci sequences, that sort of thing.”
Langdon was surprised.
Very surprised. In fact he’s so surprised it sends him into a flashback. No, really. They’re trying to get out of the Louvre before the police realise they’re on a wild soap chase, neither of these supposedly brilliant codebreakers have figured out that there are anagrams scrawled all over the floor, and it feels like there’s been no progress on this front forever. Every time someone mentions the words ‘Fibonacci sequence’ I now have the whole cast of Monty Python and The Holy Grail roaring “GET ON WITH IT!” in my head.
Clearly this is an excellent time for a flashback.
Harvard. Langdon writes 1.618 on a board and turns back to his ‘sea of eager students’. A student named raises his hand and correctly identifies the number as PHI, pronounced ‘fee’, spelled Φ.
“Not to be confused with PI,” Stettner added, grinning. “As we mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!”
You know what I was saying about the lack of jokes in this book? Turns out that’s a good thing.
As Langdon loaded his slide projector, he explained that the number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence, a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equally the sum of the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618 – PHI!
Okay. I only had to look up the term quotient to understand that, which is interesting, because I don’t understand maths at all. I’m so dyscalculalic that if someone asks me to remember a three figure number – say 656 – I’ll struggle to remember it and then, when asked to write it down, I’ll write 565, stare at it wondering why it’s wrong, delete it and then write 565 again. My brain does not number. It can’t, it won’t and it refuses to try, which is probably the result of the anxiety caused by spending much of my school days sobbing into my maths books. Even thirty years later I look at a page of figures and it’s like a metal grille comes clanging down in my head. Forget it, fuck it, lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. It’s just not going to happen.
Yes, I am a mathematical idiot. I am the closest thing you can get to a totally amathematical reader unless somehow you taught a grilled cheese sandwich to read. And even then, I can’t be sure that the hypothetical grilled cheese sandwich wouldn’t be able to remember π to more decimal places than me. (0, in case you were wondering. Is it 3.17 something? Maybe? I don’t know. See what I mean?)
In other words, I’m the target audience for this bit.
“PHI’s ubiquity in nature,” Langdon said, killing the lights, “Clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded one-point-six-eight as the Divine Proportion.”
“Hold on,” said a young woman in the front row. “I’m a bio major and I’ve never seen this Divine Proportion in nature.”
Langdon then points out that in bee hives if you divide the number of female bees by male bees then you always get the number PHI, prompting the girl to capslock “NO WAY!” and Langdon to “Way!” like it’s 1994. We’re not worthy!
Now, I may be an idiot, but I’m a curious idiot, which led me to discover that the reason bees have Fibonacci-looking gender divisions is that female bees have two parents and male bees have only one, the male bees being the result of unfertilised eggs. I had no idea bees could do that. Consider my mind blown, although not quite as blown as Miss Capslock NO WAY up there. Wait – if she knew about bees wouldn’t she know that?
Fucking hell. Langdon, you’d better not be having these classroom flashbacks too often. The brown stuff is piling up in heaps already and we haven’t even reached the relevant section.
Of course, there are minds being blown to smithereens all over the room as Langdon goes on to explain that the shell of the nautilus, pine cone petals and the segments of insects all follow the golden ratio. (Most of this is not very true.)
“This is amazing!” someone cried out.
I love how the crowd is pumped like a Bieber concert.
“Yeah,” someone else said, “But what does it have to do with art?”
“Aha!” Langdon said. “Glad you asked.” He pulled up another slide – a pale yellow parchment displaying Leonardo da Vinci’s famous male nude – The Vitruvian man.”
He’s playing all the hits tonight.
“Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. Phi again. Another? Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. Phi again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. Phi. Phi. Phi. My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion.”
The crowd writhes in ecstasy. Floral tributes rain down and fall at Langdon’s feet. Someone throws a live baby on the stage.
Over the next hour he shows them examples of the golden ratio, from the works of Beethoven to the UN Building in New York and Stradivarius violins. Everyone presumably sucks this down eagerly and asks for more. Nobody, for example, hurries off to fetch a tape measure and test out his claims, because that’s why other characters exist in this book. Langdon is a knowledge hose and their role is to open their mouths and WHAAARRRGARBL like the dog in the ancient meme. This is also our role as readers, which is why it all falls down if you remove your mouth from the hose for a second and ask “Hang on, isn’t there a better way to do this?”
Finally we ramble to the laboured point, which is that the pentagram is a representation of the Divine Proportion.
“For this reason the five-pointed star has always been the symbol for beauty and perfection associated with the goddess and the sacred feminine”
The girls in the class beamed.
How very headpatty of you, Robert. Are we going to have a lady problem?
“Tomorrow I’ll show you his fresco The Last Supper, which is one of the most astonishing tributes to the sacred feminine you will ever see.”
“You’re kidding, right?” somebody said. “I thought The Last Supper was about Jesus!”
Langdon winked. “There are symbols hidden in places you would never imagine.”
Yeah, I’m told you can make a star by bending over and spreading your cheeks.
I’m sorry, but this guy is a total anus. I found him boring at the start of this chapter and now I’m lurching towards active dislike. It was a bad enough idea to stick a classroom flashback in a chase sequence, but the problem goes beyond pacing. It’s that Langdon is an embarrassingly bad wish-fulfilment character, and everyone around him has been dumbed down to make his erzatz intellect shine like gold instead of the iron pyrites that it so obviously is. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the same technique with Sherlock Holmes, but he was a competent enough writer to make Holmes look – if only within the realms of the world he had carefully constructed – like an absolute genius. Dan Brown has no such gift.
Finally we escape from this shitfest flashback and we’re back in the Louvre. It’s at this point that Langdon realises that the lines on the floor are anagrams. See what I mean? You’ve figured that out, right? Of course you have. Because you have more braincells than toes. But it’s taken our academic rock star over fifty pages to figure this out. The man is an idiot.
And yet he figures this out before Sophie, who is supposed to be a gifted cryptographer but instead just makes the baby Alan Turing cry. She’s supposed to have been able to solve cryptic crossword puzzles at the age of twelve, but I’m guessing for the intervening twenty years she’s been dining every morning on a hearty petit dejuner of lead paint chips and glue.
So we’re finally here, folks. Yes, the lines are anagrams for…wait for it.
Leonardo da Vinci!
The Mona Lisa!
Last time, on The Da Vinci Code, some stuff happened and it was all rather silly. Also we met cryptologist Sophie Neveu and learned a surprising amount about the toilets at the Louvre. Oh, and Jacques Sauniere – in his protracted and astonishingly busy death throes – wrote ‘PS Find Robert Langdon’ on the floor. Obviously this does not look good for Bob.
Unlucky for some, and definitely for us, because we’re still stuck in a pissoir with Robert Langdon, who has just found out he’s a murder suspect.
“Why would Sauniere write this?” Langdon demanded, his confusion giving way to anger. “Why would I want to kill Jacques Sauniere?”
Who knows? I think the bigger mystery right now is what the hell was going on in Sauniere’s head. The man knows he’s got about twenty minutes to live and his thought process seems to be;
I’m kind of sorry he’s dead. The man was clearly as mad as a bag of badgers but you have to admit he sounds interesting.
Langdon says he couldn’t have killed Sauniere because he was in his hotel room at the time. He has an alibi; the concierge will attest that he was there. But then this is the same concierge who lets randos roam up to guests’ rooms at half past midnight, and this guy says Langdon could have left at any time; he doesn’t know. He wasn’t paying attention.
This book is terrible publicity for the Ritz, Paris, isn’t it? I’m picturing some guy sitting with his feet up on the reception desk, picking his teeth and being all like “Yeah, whatever dude,” when someone rolls up to the desk wearing a t-shirt saying ASK ME ABOUT AUTO-EROTIC ASPHYXIATION and wielding a customized chainsaw with dildos sticking out all over it. And the concierge is all “Room 404? Yeah – take the master key. It’s cool. I’m not here to kinkshame.” Agatha Christie novels had led me to believe that the fancier the hotel the more tight-assed the staff are about protecting its reputation, but clearly Saint Aggie’s way out of date.
Anyway, after some more sputtering from Langdon, Sophie explains that Sauniere meant the message for her and Langdon once again has a small meltdown trying to keep pace with whatever Joseph K. mess he’d landed himself in this time. I don’t blame him for this one bit.
Sophie says she knew Sauniere and that the Vitruvian Man was her favourite painting, which is why he decided to lay out his corpse in that pose. Presumably this is a normal thing that people do in Sophieland, because she recognised that this – like the Fibonacci sequence – was his way of saying ‘hey’.
What would have happened if her favourite painting was Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, for example? How was Sauniere going to get hold of a knee-length auburn wig, a pair of tits and a human sized clam shell in a sealed section of the Louvre? Or what if she was into Artemisia Gentileschi? Was he going to saw his own head off? I don’t get it. I suppose it’s very fortunate she happened to like Vitruvian Man.
Sophie’s voice caught, and Langdon heard a sudden melancholy there, a painful past, simmering just below the surface. Sophie and Jacques Sauniere apparently had some kind of special relationship. Langdon studied the beautiful woman before him, aware that aging men in France often took young mistresses.
Gross, Bob. Your first assumption is that she’s some old man’s ‘kept woman’?
Sophie explains that the P.S. was a message to her – Princesse Sophie – and that Jacques Sauniere was her grandfather. Her grandfather, Bob. Now go rinse your mind out with soap and water. Or just chew on the nearest urinal cake.
I like chapter fourteen already. It’s only two pages long.
Collet and Fache watch Langdon’s GPS dot milling around in the men’s room and muse that he’s taking a little too long for their liking.
“Any chance Langdon is onto us?” Fache asked.
Collet shook his head. “We’re still seeing small movements inside the men’s room, so the GPS dot is obviously still on him.”
Honey, if you’re seeing small movements in the men’s room, you might want to eat more fresh produce.
Ah, that’s better. I can’t believe it’s taken me until chapter fourteen to make a poop joke. I love you, chapter fourteen. You don’t last long, but you set up that poop joke like a pro.
Fache does not know that Robert knows about the P.S. Find Robert Langdon on the floor, but then we’re set up for another cliffhanger when someone phones and says there’s something ‘not quite right’ about Sophie.
No shit, Sherlock. Her first reaction on seeing her grandfather’s dead, naked body was ‘Oh, that looks just like my favourite work of art.’ She’s a Sauniere, if nothing else.
…is trying really hard for me to love it as much as I loved chapter fourteen. It’s even shorter, although I don’t know. Is there a poop joke set up?
Silas felt strong as he stepped from the black Audi, the nighttime breeze rustling his loose-fitting robe.
Ah, that’s our Silas. Melting into the background like a drunk, screaming clown with a lit Roman candle sticking out of his rectum. Still, I suppose a man in a monk’s habit wouldn’t be nearly as conspicious in a church as he would…well, just about anywhere else, really.
He knew the task before him would require more finesse than force, and he left his handgun in the car.
Silas, I’m guessing – from the way that you have all your clothes on – that you’re about to kill someone. I know this line of thinking isn’t popular with the NRA, but if you’re setting out to kill someone then don’t you think a gun might help?
But it doesn’t, because a weapon of death has no place in the house of the Lord. No, really. That’s his explanation. I don’t know, either, but you have to admit that this level of cognitive dissonance is kind of characteristic of people who place far too much faith in any one thing, whether that thing is God, the free market or kale.
The plaza before the great church was deserted at this hour, the only visible souls a couple of teenage hookers showing their wares to the late night tourist traffic.
Silas likes what he sees, so he flexes his thigh, making his barbed wire pain garter cut into his flesh. Yeah, those girls are totally not going to be able to pick him out of a line up when the police come asking questions about the murder that’s about to happen.
“Mademoiselle, do you remember seeing anyone enter the church at the time in question? Do you recall what they looked like?”
“Sure. He was a swole, six and half foot albino in a monk’s habit. He came by us, checked out Veronique’s tits, made a weird hissing noise and then stomped into the church trailing blood from under his robe.”
Silas reaches the door of the church. The whole chapter is him getting out of his car and approaching the door. I suppose it’s better than the previous Silas chapter, where he just sat in the car and recalled his backstory.
He raised his ghost white fist and banged three times on the door. Moments later, the bolts of the enormous wooden portal began to move.
In other words, he knocked and the door opened.
I like how this book constantly reminds me of George Orwell’s six little rules of writing. And by ‘reminds me of’ I mean ‘sets fire to, pisses all over and capers cackling in the piss-reeking ashes’.
I like you, chapter fifteen. You were short, but you were more than satisfyingly silly.
…sees Sophie take the reins as the POV character. I must admit that this is one of Dan Brown’s better choices, to go with the third person limited POV. It’s the perfect choice for a novel as shamelessly airporty as this one, especially with these bite size chapters.
We learn that ten years ago Sophie returned from ‘graduate university in England’, to find her grandfather doing something so sinister and awful that we can’t talk about it right now. And they haven’t spoken since then.
Only this time he broke his promise not to try and contact her and called her just that afternoon, to warn her that she is in grave danger and that he needs to tell her the truth about her family.
My family? Sophie’s parents had died when she was only four. Their car went off a bridge into fast moving water. Her grandmother and younger brother had also been in the car, and Sophie’s entire family had been erased in an instant. She had a box of newspaper clippings to confirm it.
Ah yes. The old ‘Worst Day Of My Life’ box of newspaper clippings that everyone keeps around to confirm that their dead relatives are definitely dead.
Sophie is quite strange.
She is also a genius, having been able to complete cryptic crosswords at the age of twelve, although it hasn’t yet occurred to her that the writing on the floor might be a pair of anagrams.
Tonight the cryptographer in Sophie was forced to respect the efficiency with which her grandfather had used a simple code to unite two total strangers – Sophie Neveu and Robert Langdon.
What? Sophie, he stripped naked, painted a pentagram in his own blood, doodled around the place with black-light pen and then expired after carefully laying himself out in the geometric pose of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. That’s not a simple code. Those are the bedlamite flailings of an absolute fucking nutcase. The whole thing was based on him knowing that your favourite work of art was Vitruvian Man, and as if that wasn’t silly enough, now we discover you haven’t spoken in ten years. Is your favourite work of art still the same? Because people change a lot between twenty-two and thirty-two. Who’s to say your tastes haven’t changed? Twenty-two year old Sophie might have loved Vitruvian Man, but thirty-two year old Sophie is drawing a blank because she’s really into Anne Geddes now.
You fucked up, Pop-Pop. You posed your deathbed to look all Leonardo but you really should have dressed up as a baby dressed up as a bee. She’s never going to get that clue.
You know what would have been a simple way to get Sophie to find Robert Langdon? When you called her to tell her she was in terrible danger you could also have said ‘Find Robert Langdon,’ and spent your final moments making your peace with God or whatever instead of attempting to arrange your bloody, spilling giblets into a scavenger hunt clue.
The question was why?
Well, we’d all like to know that.
Sophie stares out of the toilet window so Dan can describe Paris again, because he hasn’t done that for a while. He’s probably like me when I go too long between poop jokes.
She looks down and thinks it’s about forty feet to the ground and there’s no way out of the bathroom window. Then she figures that Robert’s best bet is to run like hell to the US Embassy, which is the closest thing anyone has had to a sensible idea in this novel so far. I’m guessing this brief gasp of sanity won’t last.
Last time on The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon came face to abs with the corpse of Jacques Sauniere and promptly admired the dead man’s muscle definition. Like you do. Also he did some symbology and it was terrible. Something about pentacles, I can’t remember.
At this point in time, our heroine – Sophie Neveu – arrives at the Louvre. Sophie is a British-educated French cryptographer, and – unlike Robert – her job title is actually a real thing. It’s also a hell of a lot more pronounceable than Symbololology.
Her appearance promptly turns Fache from bull to pig – of the male chauvinist variety – and he angrily thinks that the main problem with Sophie is that she distracts the men in the office. This is, of course, Her Fault.
Langdon turned to see a young woman approaching. She was moving down the corridor toward them with long, fluid strides…a haunting certainty to her gait. Dressed casually in a knee-length, cream-coloured Irish sweater over black leggings, she looked to be about thirty. Her thick burgundy hair fell unstyled to her shoulders, framing the warmth of her face.
Okay, that’s not the very worst description of a woman I’ve ever read from a male writer, although in the interests of full disclosure I should admit that I spent the summer I gave up smoking distracting myself by mainlining George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. What I’m saying is that I’ve read some pretty dreadful descriptions of women. Myrish swamp, anyone?
Unlike the waifish, cookie-cutter blondes that adorned Harvard dorm room walls, this woman was healthy with an unembellished beauty and genuineness that radiated a striking personal confidence.
Oh. Oh dear. She’s Not Like Those Other Girls. This always goes well and never reveals deep-seated issues with women.
Also what the hell is up with bad writers and blondes? Stephenie Meyer, E.L. James and now Dan Brown – they all seem to have some serious problems with blondes. Is it because blondes are basically a lazy way of dismissing a woman as dumb, generic and therefore unsuitable for supposedly deep and intelligent heroes like Robert Langdon, Christian Grey and Edward Cullen?
Because if that’s the case I’m kind of flattered, actually. In this universe, blondes really do have more fun, because they don’t have to listen to Robert Langdon or wake up in strange hotel beds to find a rubbish vampire staring at them.
Sophie announces that she’s deciphered the numeric code, but before she explains she tells Robert that there’s an urgent message for him at the US Embassy. She actually coughs up a reasonable explanation for how she knows this, then hands Robert a number which he calls and it goes not to the US Embassy but to her voicemail, where he hears her voice telling him not to react and follow her directions, because he’s in danger right now.
…sees us back with Silas, who is currently hulking around outside the still italicless Church of Saint Sulpice. There’s a whole lot of backstory about how Silas killed a bunch of people – including his father – and ended up in prison, then there was an earthquake and the prison was destroyed. He escaped and wound up unconscious in a seminary, where one of the priests took a fancy to him – and no, not in that way – and renamed him Silas, after the man who was freed by an earthquake in the Book of Acts. And the priest was – of course – our good friend Bish Bling.
Meanwhile Bish Bling is somewhere above the Mediterranean recalling a conversation with a man he knows only as The Teacher. The Teacher charged Bish Bling a cool twenty million for the names of the four senechaux, in order for Silas the Crap Assassin to half-assedly murder them.
Begins with Sophie explaining that all of the numbers on the floor are in the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical sequence in which the two preceding numbers are added to make the next.
By this point Bezu Fache has had just about enough of people infodumping on him and demands to know what it means. And that’s not good, because I’m not even on page 100 yet and already I know that if someone in this book asks what something means it usually means we’re all about to get donked on the head with a metaphorical 500lb stage weight labeled EXPOSITION.
But then Sophie says this;
“Absolutely nothing. That’s the point. It’s a simplistic, cryptographic joke. Like taking the words of a famous poem and shuffling them at random to see if anyone recognises what all the words have in common.”
It’s not a very good joke, Sophie. It also doesn’t work very well if the poem in question is Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, or anything by Edward Lear.
This is an even weirder explanation of Sauniere’s dying thoughts than Langdon’s theory that he decided to stick it to the patriarchy with his final breaths.
When Fache is understandably unsatisfied with this theory, Sophie tosses her head and flounces off to commit suicide professionel. In italics. That’s career suicide in French, in case you were wondering.
Fache thinks Langdon is on the phone to the US Embassy and has a growl about this to himself, at which point I realise that Fache has become the POV character for this chapter. I don’t think he’s had a go before.
Langdon gets off the phone and invents a quick lie about some friends getting into an accident back home, and that he’ll need to fly back to the States tomorrow. Then he says he needs to use the toilet and heads for the crapper. Fache goes back to Sauniere’s office where that statue of a knight stares at him in a Hey-I’m-Important-To-The-Plot sort of way and where Collet reveals that not only are they watching Langdon, but someone has slipped a GPS tracker into the pocket of his coat.
How do symbologists go to the toilet? Well, I’m glad you asked. Here’s how.
At the end of the corridor, illuminated signs bearing the international stick figure signs for toilets guided him through a maze-like series of dividers displaying Italian drawings and hiding the toilets from sight.
When he finds the little boy’s room, Sophie reappears; her flounce was just a feint.
Langdon stood beside the sinks, staring in bewilderment at DCPJ cryptographer Sophie Neveu. Only minutes ago Langdon had listened to her phone message, thinking the newly arrived cryptographer must be insane, but [snip]filled with uncertainty Langdon had decided to do exactly as Sophie advised. He told Fache that the phone message was regarding an injured friend and…
I KNOW. I just read that in the last chapter. Not even a page ago. Why are you repeating yourself at me, book? This book feels like one of those annoying documentaries where your attempts to follow the story are hampered by the need to recap every five minutes.
Also the bathroom smells of ammonia, in case you were wondering. Piss, in other words.
The smell of urine makes Langdon oddly romantic.
Langdon was surprised to see that her strong air actually radiated from unexpectedly soft features. Only her gaze was sharp, and the juxtaposition conjured images of a multi-layered Renoir portrait…veiled but distinct…
Okay. That description is the first that’s landed for me. I can picture the Renoir quality he’s describing. Good job. Unfortunately it’s kind of ruined by…well, everything else I’ve read so far. Seriously – check out that paragraph further up the page. It reads like the sinks are staring at Sophie. (This actually happened to a friend of mine once. And yes, there were funny mushrooms involved.)
Sophie tells Langdon that he’s the prime suspect in Sauniere’s murder, prompting our hero to sputter and WTF, since he hadn’t even met the dead man. She also tips him off to the GPS tracker in the pocket of his Harris tweed and drops the final bombshell of the chapter; there was a fourth line written in black-light pen on the floor, one that the police erased before he arrived. It said P.S. Find Robert Langdon.
Way to drop a guy in the shit, Sauniere.
Last time on The Da Vinci Code Silas offered even more reasons why he is the world’s worst assassin, we met shadowy bad guy Bish Bling (government name Manuel Aringarosa) and Robert Langdon took an entire chapter to walk through the Louvre in the company of grumpy French police chief Bezu Fache. Also Robert Langdon’s next book sounds terrible.
Having squeezed beneath the security gate, Robert Langdon now stood just inside the entrance to the Grand Gallery.
Yes! Finally our hero has reached the murder scene. But wait, we have to hear about the parquet flooring for a page or two first. Langdon spots the Caravaggio on the floor and is all ‘Is that a Caravaggio?’ because he can’t do anything without namedropping. And because nobody in this book seems to be able to do anything without recapping what happened in previous chapters, Fache goes into detail about how Sauniere died and that he was shot through the security gate.
Oh, and the grand gallery is kind of…well, grand. As in big. Which is why it takes about three pages to walk down it, leaving Robert Langdon bored enough to start ruminating on why his Italian squeeze left him to track manta ray migrations. Probably because manta rays are cool and interesting, I’m guessing.
Goddamn, how long is this gallery? Even Langdon can’t believe this shit.
They continued walking briskly, yet Langdon still saw no corpse. ‘Jacques Sauniere went this far?”
After another long page of recapping how the body was found, we finally get to the stiff.
Sauniere looked remarkably fit for a man of his years…all of his musculature was in plain view.
Dan, much as I hate to interrupt you while your hero is checking out a corpse, we really need to talk about these weird random ellipses. It’s seriously putting a crimp in my quote game. An ellipsis is traditionally used to indicate that you’ve snipped something out while quoting, unlike here where it’s just hanging out trying – and failing – to look like a semi-colon. I’m going to have to start specifying which ellipses are mine and which are verbatim. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen a semi-colon yet.
Anyway, sorry. Let’s get back to admiring the body. Sick delts, bro.
Sauniere has spreadeagled himself on the floor and drawn a pentagram in his own blood, which is clever of him since I’d imagine that a gunshot wound to the belly would bleed way too extensively for that kind of thing. But I’m expecting logic and sanity from a book where Silas the Conspicious and Crap Assassin is a silent and deadly killer and Religious Symbology is an actual academic discipline. (It’s not, by the way.) For the purposes of the plot we’re just going to have to pretend that what spilled out of Jacques Sauniere resembles something other than a giant, rhesus negative Rorschach blot.
The bloody star, centered on Sauniere’s navel, gave the corpse a distinctly ghoulish aura. The photo Langdon had seen was chilling enough, but now, witnessing the scene in person, Langdon felt a deep uneasiness. He did this to himself?
YES, HE DID THIS TO HIMSELF. Holy shit. That’s like the seventh time this has been repeated already. It was satisfyingly spooky the first time, but it kind of lost its impact on the third or fourth repetition, like when a small child lands a joke and is so delighted by the response that they keep telling it over and over again until everyone starts to lose the will to live.
Fache asks for Langdon’s thoughts and we are off, ladies and gentleman. It’s about to get symbololological in here.
“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.
I love this. We’re on chapter six and already the hero has accidentally given away why his particular branch of academia doesn’t actually exist in the real world. Firstly because it’s hilariously pointless and secondly because there is no way to say the word Symbology out loud without your tongue kind of crash landing on that L.
Fache says the pentacle is associated with devil worship, prompting Langdon to ‘well, actually…’ and say it’s pagan, and this goes off into a derail into the etymology of the word pagan before returning to the point.
“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.”
Okay, first off, isn’t the ‘divine goddess’ redundant? Goddesses are divine by their nature, which is probably why I’ve never heard a religious historian use that term. Also pentacles are used as symbols for a fuckload of things, although a brief Googling reveals that they were referred to as ‘pantacles’ by that specialest of snowflakes, Aleister ‘It’s Spelled Magick, actually’ Crowley.
But anyway – for the purposes of this plot it’s referring to the sacred feminine. And just that. No ambiguity. It’s that thing he said and it couldn’t possibly be anything else. The sooner you get on board with this concept the easier this book becomes.
Also it’s a symbol of Venus, because the planet Venus traces a pentgram with its eight (earth years) orbit, which appears to be true. Huh. Langdon also wanders off into a mental digression about how the Olympics were timed to honour the half cycles of Venus, which sounds a lot like bollocks, since the games were in honour of Zeus and not Venus/Aphrodite.
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.
This is definitely bollocks. The Olympic rings were designed by Pierre de Coubertin in 1913, and the five rings represent the five continents – the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania.
You know, it’s true that this book is educational. I’ve learned all kinds of stuff in just six chapters, mostly in the process of shooting down Langdon’s bullshit.
Okay, I think that’s enough fact checking for now. If we don’t stop now we’ll be here until the sun exhausts its fuel supply. Let’s see – where were we?
Oh yes. Fache is once again saying the pentagram is Satanic, because we didn’t do that two pages ago or anything. Shut up, Fache. You’re going to set him off symbologising again, and nobody wants that.
But Langdon is here to chew gum and symbologise and he’s all out of Wrigleys, so off we go again, this time with him turning up the bullshit hose to ‘blast’ and spewing several paragraphs about how the mean old Christians turned all pagan symbols into bad things in order to demonise them, which is how Poseidon’s trident became the devil’s pitchfork and Venus’s sacred pentacle became the go-to graphic for the cover art of heavy metal albums. It’s partly true but so astonishingly simplified that it may as well not be. He doesn’t – for example – mention how some canny Christians sold their Virgin Mother as another incarnation of pagan goddesses, much like the Romans smoothly identified foreign goddesses – such as the British water goddess Sulis – with their own deities, in this case, Minerva.
Oh God. Help me. I’ve gone all Robert Langdon. And it’s not even chapter seven. Fuuuuck.
Anyway, so. Yeah – Sauniere is spread eagled in order to replicate the pentacle, because according to Langdon “replicating a symbol is the simplest way to strengthen its meaning,” which is probably why everyone in this book says everything about three times.
Fache thinks Sauniere used his blood to write so that the police would follow certain forensic procedures. Not sure what those would be, but while we’re on the subject of forensic procedures, wouldn’t Silas’s DNA be in the mix somewhere? The guy walks around leaking from open wounds, for Christ’s sake.
Then Fache points out that Sauniere has a blacklight pen in his hand, turns out the lights, busts out the black-light and reveals some words. But we don’t know what they are. You have to keep reading for that. He’s good at cliffhangers; I’ll give Dan Brown that much.
Meanwhile Collet is lurking in Sauniere’s office, where he’s being freaked out by a statue of a knight that has been mentioned twice now and is almost certainly relevant to the plot. And the kicker? Collet is listening in. Le gasp! Langdon is under surveillance cachee! Mon dieu!
…delivers us to the Church of Saint-Sulpice, which still hasn’t been granted italic status, even when it’s being an eglise. Then we meet a nun named Sandrine, who is the first female character in this book about the sacred feminine.
Her abbe calls her to tell her that the head of Opus Dei – that’s Bish Bling, to you and I – phoned him to ask if one of his numenaries can see the church tonight, and that he can be at the church at one in the morning, which is twenty minutes away. So it’s currently 12:40, which is about six minutes after Langdon first crawled out of bed. Now, I know there are overlapping timelines in this book and the narrator can’t be everywhere at once without the kind of hardcore omniscient narrator ju-jitsu you probably shouldn’t attempt unless you are actually George Eliot, but this chapter does convey the unfortunate impression that Langdon’s endless Odyssey to the Louvre has taken place at the kind of speeds that should rightly be studied by CERN.
Sandrine agrees to the request and then has a small moment of irritation at the way Opus Dei treat women, then she feels a shiver and thinks ‘women’s intuition’. No, really. She thinks that. In italics and everything.
Dan Brown is going to be good at writing women. I can feel it already. Call it women’s intuition.
There’s writing on the floor of the Louvre.
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
O, Draconian devil!
Oh, lame saint!
Langdon and Fache are both pretty much stumped, until Fache steps back further with the black-light and reveals that Sauniere has drawn a circle around himself, creating a replica of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. You know, as you do when you’re bleeding to death from a gunshot wound.
And this is where poor old Leonardo Da Vinci gets dragged into this shit.
Da Vinci was a prankster who often amused himself by quietly gnawing at the hand that fed him. He incorporated in many of his Christian paintings hidden symbolism that was anything but Christian – tributes to his own beliefs and a subtle thumbing of his nose at the Church.
Since when did the Renaissance have a problem with anything pagan, for fuck’s sake? Titian and Botticelli painted two of the most famous Venuses in human history.
Anyway, Langdon has some opinions. Here’s one.
“I was just thinking that Sauniere shared a lot of spiritual ideologies with Da Vinci, including a concern over the Church’s elimination of the sacred feminine from modern religion. Maybe, by imitating a famous Da Vinci drawing, Sauniere was simply echoing some of their shared frustration with the modern Church’s demonization of the goddess.”
Absolutely, Bob. I’ve never bled to death from a gunshot wound before, but now that you mention it that would be the exact thing that would be running through my head in that moment. As my abdominal wall opened and I felt my small intestines shifting to places I knew instinctively that they were never, ever supposed to be, that’s what I would be thinking: Why hasn’t the 21st Century Catholic Church made any progress on the ordination of women?
Fache is not buying it and sensibly points out that the more sensible thing for a dying man to scribble on the floor is maybe the name of the person who killed him. Of course, because this is The Da Vinci Code this is not simply a case of Fache stating the bleeding obvious, but an elaborate trap being listened in on by Collet, who is still lurking in Sauniere’s office and thinking what a devout Catholic his boss is.
Almost like Fache might have divided loyalties or something. Hmm…
THE BEST BAD BOOKS 