A review, published in The Nation in spring 2005, of a batch of books designed to help readers make sense of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”.

In bed with a code

Those whom ‘The Da Vinci Code’ left gasping for more can now fill a small library with Da Vinci decoders, but certainly the plot thins.

Paul Dorsey
The Nation
Among the hundreds of handy quotes that come from the diminutive giant of literature Alexander Pope, who puts in an appearance in “The Da Vinci Code”, is this gnarly old favourite: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” And so it certainly is when delving into the stuff of which Dan Brown fashioned his God-zilla of a bestseller.
There are at least 16 books out now about Brown’s mystery thriller, all combing through its tangled bouffant of dyed mysticism in search of recognisable roots, and a massive chunk of the Internet is doing the same thing.
“The Da Vinci Code” (henceforth on this page simply “DVC”) bobbed to the surface in mid-2003, to generally favourable reviews, though a good number of book critics snickered at its silliness.
It’s been their sad fate to sit gape-mouthed the past two years as DVC scoffed at their dismissals and replicated itself 25 million times, thumbing its nose at them from the top of bestseller lists from Bangkok to Buffalo Jump, Idaho.
The American author has gone from being an English teacher to being one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He’s been aloft on the New York Times bestseller list for 110 weeks and counting. DVC tours of Europe are immensely popular (a seven-hour rummage through London will set you £75 – that’s Bt5,500). And a major motion picture is slated for next spring.
Having been to the mountaintop with Harry Potter, Asia Books has stocked up on the novel, a lovely illustrated version of it and a batch of these DVC code-crackers, which we’ve taken it upon ourselves to compare, waving aside our wonderment as to why further explanation is needed for all the places, artefacts and conspiracy theories in the original thriller when Dan Brown was so garrulous about them in the first place.
As it turns out, of course, the nasty critics, including The Nation’s own James Eckhardt, were right: Brown did a monstrous Uri Geller number on a multitude of facts.
Thus, if you’ve read the novel or plan to do so before the film comes out, you face a dilemma: Pick up one or all of these backgrounder books and risk having much of the mystery demystified, or ignore them and risk a spiritual drowning in Dan Brown’s pseudo-religious maelstrom.
What to do? You could turn to the church for guidance.
Amusingly enough, DVC has stiff new competition on the bestseller lists from two 20-year-old books by hot new pontiff Benedict XVI, whose right-hand man in red at the Vatican recently told folks not to read Dan Brown, “and above all, don’t even buy ‘The Da Vinci Code’.”
No comment thus far from the papacy whether it’s okay to read the “real” history behind the thriller.
Our recommendations are as follows. Much fun ensues, even if the novel becomes less so.

The most fun
The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code
By Sharan Newman
Published by Berkley, 2005
Sharan Newman’s a clever charmer, a real kidder. Wise about the old ways and suitably solemn in the presence of greatness, she’d nevertheless be a hoot as a guide on one of those Louvre tours.
A medieval scholar and a novelist herself, Newman says she was being asked the same questions so often about stuff in DVC that she figured she might as well write it all down and put it out as a companion to the bestseller.
And like the other decoder books under review here, a good buddy it is for those who didn’t know (before Dan Brown came along) about things like Opus Dei and the “divine feminine”.
Even if you can tell the difference between a Freemason and a Rosicrucian (and maybe even have a thorny cilice digging exquisitely into your thigh), “The Real History” has a padding of wry humour that makes for a comfy loll about in familiar surroundings.
Despite all the wisecracking, Newman has done her time in the library, digging out the authentic version of Brown’s endlessly referenced quasi-truths and then – without once denigrating DVC – exposing the novel for the Hollywood pop-fiction that it is by popping most of its colourful balloons.
More caringly than the other decoders, where the evidence of Brown’s shadowy “history” is inconclusive, she squares off the opposing testimony and leaves it to the reader to decide, a route made easier by footnotes and recommended reading at the end of each chapter.
Along with the origins of some of the characters’ names, Newman tucks in to the Gnostics and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rosslyn Castle and Temple Church, Isis and Mithras, Newton and, of course, that unscrupulous conniver Leonardo.
That Swiss bank in Paris where the Grail keystone was stashed, for example, isn’t where it’s supposed to be and, besides, you can’t get there from where Brown says you are.
But Newman stumbles when it comes to phi (see “Fee, fi foes” on this page), and is only marginally less disappointing than Brown when she pursues the Holy Grail itself, concluding that the elusive whatever-it-is is “whatever it needs to be”.
“Who does it serve? Everyone,” she chuckles.
As does the DVC phenomenon, apparently.

The most gullible
Cracking the Da Vinci Code – The Unauthorized Guide to the Facts Behind the Fiction
By Simon Cox
Published by Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 2004
Simon Cox, given his editorship at Phenomena, “the magazine devoted to challenging dogmas, orthodoxies and half-truths”, is worried about Christian websites flailing Dan Brown for taking potshots at official church history. “If you are looking for a denouncement of Brown and his novel,” he states right up front, “you have come to the wrong place.”
Fair enough, except that when, on his title page, he greets readers with the scary motto of the old Grail-was-here church in Rennes-le-Chateau, southern France – “Terribilis est locus est” – he’s inadvertently warning them that they’re in for some crap, rather than about to uncover any soul-shaking horrors.
First among these decoders onto the bandwagon, back when DVC had sold a mere six million copies, Cox displays some fancy early footwork in an A-Z format, amid eight pages of colour pictures and a predictable bibliography.
But his research into the “facts”, sadly, has been about as thorough as Brown’s, so keep your remote handy if the TV documentary he’s made of the same title shows up on Discovery (or more likely UBC’s daft X-Zyte channel).
“Cracking”, billed as “the first book to cut through the confusion”, merely cuts out the honest truth about many of the purported mysteries, making Cox an ideal pitch-man for Hollywood’s forthcoming version.
Cox, though, has the most interesting notes among the decoders about London’s Temple Church. It’s where the Magna Carta was negotiated, he points out, its garden is referred to in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”, and William Marshall, first earl of Pembroke, whose effigy lies there, was unbeaten in 500 jousts.
He and Newman differ on whether Marshall was a Templar at all. Newman says he was just an “associate” of the order.
Cox is the counterpoint to Bock: the paranoid would-be iconoclast versus the bedwetting Christian Mighty Right. We prefer someone sensible in between to sort out the spikes of the True Cross from the thumbtacks on the conspiracy map.

The most believable
The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code
By Michael and Veronica Haag, with James McConnachie
Published by Rough Guides Ltd, 2004
Pocket-sized and succinctly styled for browsers of all ages, with clever writing and great little sidebars (though the frequent bold-face type is annoying), this guide doesn’t seem rough at all, even if its premise is modest: “enables you to make up your own mind or take your own research further”.
It is, in fact, the best of the code-busting bunch.
Michael and Veronica Haag aren’t shy about helping us make up our minds. They sit down to Brown’s banquet table of conspiracy theories, “whether Dan Brown troubled to look into it himself or simply picked up a garbled version” from someone else, then proceed to taste everything, and – having sampled other gourmand tables – often end up using the spit bucket.
Dan, they note, gets mixed up about the real reason for the First Crusade, contradicting himself by first saying it was meant to destroy evidence of Jesus’ descendants, and then that it was aimed at preserving it for French king and head crusader Godefroi de Bouillion, who fancied himself one of them. Godefroi was, we’re roughly reminded, neither the king nor the leader of the crusade.
Brown’s co-conspirators won’t like it at all when they read this: “The Grail was invented in the 12th century by the writer Chretien de Troyes [and] there was nothing necessarily holy about it.”
The mysterious thing debuted as a mere serving dish, the Haags say, “but there was something wonderful about the Grail’s first appearance … and all the more because Chretien never finished what he began, so we do not know what the secret of the Grail was meant to be.” Its future clearly lay in sequels, by more imaginative minds.
“Rough Guide” takes a scrub brush to all the pointless pigment laid on poor Leonardo’s paintings by people with too much time on their hands, and all the mystical connotations evaporate with the smell of the turpentine.
Brown’s anagrams are fun, the Haags admit, by “Amon L’Isa” for “Mona Lisa”? Leo can’t be blamed for secretly alluding to the Egyptian gods Amon and Isis, because (1) he never gave the world’s most famous portrait a title and (2) it was known only as “La Giaconda” (playful woman) to viewers until (3) it got its English moniker much, much later.
The Haags, who present black-and-white photos throughout and an extensive bibliography, were writing when DVC was only a baby phenomenon, at 10 million copies sold.

The most holier than thou
Breaking the Da Vinci Code
By Darrell L Bock
Published by Thomas Nelson Inc, 2004
In the “new scholarship of historical revisionism” that Brown mined for DVC, says Darrell Bock – a New Testament research professor at a Texas theological seminary and its (uh-oh) “centre for Christian leadership” – “we begin the discover the real secret and code behind ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
“It is nothing less than a conscious effort to obscure the uniqueness and vitality of the Christian faith and message.”
“No, it’s fiction!” Brown might object. “Shut up!” Bock might reply.
In sharp counterpoint to Sharan Newman’s humour, Bock is boringly serious about putting a stop to what one of his backers calls in a cover blurb “the agenda that lurks behind the codes”. “A welcome literary antidote to literary poison,” croaks another fan.
Bock figures there are seven codes in DVC and shatters them all in a blur of quasi-scholarly Sunday-school sermonising, with the Gospels quoted chapter and verse – but only four Gospels, mind you, because (a) there were “nowhere near 80 gospels” sifted through at the fourth-century Council of Nicea, as Brown suggests, and (b) the Big 4 were selected because they were the only ones that mattered to the Christian community as a whole up until and at that time.
There’s a LOT here on the nature of God and the divinity and/or humanity of Jesus, punching away at Brown’s tenet that later church leaders trampled on Jesus’ humanness so they could sell him as the one true God.
Bock wraps up with some quaint preaching, saying “the real code” was broken by Jesus’ resurrection, by which Christians declare that God showed them “who Jesus is, where life is and where life goes”.
If you want to known where Bock stands on the Grail, Rosslyn Chapel, the Templars and all the other stuff, that’s chucked into a meager “glossary” at the back, and it’s mostly ill-informed or merely conservative. For example, “Criticism has sometimes been directed at Opus Dei”. Whew.

The most thorough
Secrets of the Code
Edited by Dan Burstein
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004
After an exhaustive essay on why he thinks DVC is so popular, Burstein unleashes a blizzard of other people’s tracts on the key aspects of the novel, including whole helpings of books from the by-now-usual suspects on whom Dan Brown leaned so heavily for his own “research”.
This is a stunningly comprehensive and well-presented collection and a joy to read, all at one go or piece by piece. Here you can inhale passages from the original sources, like “Holy Blood Holy Grail” and Pickett and Prince’s “The Templar Revelation”, without having to scour the out-of-prints.
Among the more amusing bits is Opus (“We’re not a sect!”) Dei’s official reaction to DVC: “bizarre and inaccurate”. DVC’s characterisation of the arch-conservative Catholic organisation’s policy on self-mortification is “exaggerated”. There’s no outright denial about pious masochism, though, and Opus Dei quotes Pope John Paul II as seeming to say that laying a good daily whipping upon oneself is okey-dokey.
Burstein has his own website (www.secretsofthecode.com), but it’s basically just selling his book. If you sacrifice your e-mail address, though, he’ll share a taste, such as this:
His hired “investigative journalist” found a secret code on DVC’s cover. If you string together the letters that are in boldface, they spell out “Is there no hope for the widow’s son?”
“This sentence,” Burstein says, almost trembling, “refers to the Book of Enoch, where a favourite Dan Brown theme arises about the lost treasure of the Temple of Solomon.”
The encoded phrase, he goes on, was also the title of a talk given to Mormons in 1974 that “purportedly established a connection between Freemasonry and the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
“Just a guess – but we think the new Dan Brown book will be called something like ‘Widow’s Son’ [actually, it’s called “Solomon’s Key”], and will be about a Mormon-Mason treasure hunt throughout America.” (Actually, it is.)
So maybe Brown, praying for a bestseller sooner or later, was touting his next, then-still-unwritten novel on the cover of his fourth? Nah, we doubt it too.

I’ll wait for the movie, thanks
The film version of DVC is in pre-production and scheduled for release in May 2006. There’s a preview video making the rounds already, but it’s just a visual no-show with a breathy, melodramatic voiceover. A slew of companion DVDs are also planned.
Apart from inheriting the bestselling novel’s cachet, it’s got the same director (Ron Howard), screenwriter (Akiva Goldsman) and producers as the Oscar-winning “A Beautiful Mind”, and obviously having Tom Hanks in the lead role won’t hurt a bit – although DVC described its hero Robert Langdon as “Harrison Ford in tweeds”).
Hanks’ co-stars are Sir Ian McKellen of “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men” fame as Sir Leigh Teabing, Jean Reno in typical character as the gruff French cop and Audrey Tatou as Sophie.
The book’s locales are all bracing for their share of the headlines – and kickbacks – with even the Scottish government investing a few quid in expectation of a handsome return from tourism at Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, Mark Burnett, the producer of TV’s “Survivor”, has optioned Lewis Perdue’s “The Da Vinci Legacy” (see “See you in Hell” on this page), though whether it’s for the small screen or the big screen isn’t yet clear.

See you in Hell – I mean court!
Trouble came to DVC land, the inevitable backlash, when Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh claimed last October that Dan Brown “lifted the whole architecture” of the 1982 “non-fiction” book “Holy Blood Holy Grail” they co-wrote with Henry Lincoln.
It’s so similar, they whined, that they had no choice but to sue Random House, whose imprint Doubleday is DVC’s publisher. Cited prominently in DVC, their book ends up looking like fiction too, they say, somewhat cheekily.
If anyone should sue it’s Lewis Perdue, who’s 1983 thriller “The Da Vinci Legacy” contains, according to Burstein, “a deep, dark secret from early Christian history involving a Gnostic female messiah named Sophia, dead art curators, Swiss banks, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mary Magdalene, discussion of goddess sects and much more”.
Perdue may get his just desserts. See “I’ll wait for the movie, thanks” on this page.

Fee, fi foes
“He pronounced it fee,” Dan Brown’s hero says of his symbology student in DVC. It’s fye (presumably meaning “sounds like sigh”), says the effortlessly knowledgeable “Secrets of the Code”, which also warns against confusing phi with its “reciprocal” Phi, whatever that means.
All the decoders acknowledge that the fascinating building-block-of-life called the “Golden Ratio”, calculated at 1.618 etc, can be seen in the heart rhythm, nautilus shells, honeycombs, leaf arrangements and the Great Pyramids, and Cox is keen to spot it also in widescreen TVs, credit cards and, er, the faces of supermodels.
It’s a frequent template for art, architecture and music, too, and Cox says, “The use of the Golden Ratio is evident within the major works of Leonardo, who for a long time had shown a great interest in the mathematics of art and nature.”
But Burstein chuckles at the idea of Leonardo utilising it, saying he’d already put his best works to bed by the time the mathematical model for the ratio was published in Italy.
Newman has a go at phi, but falls well short of satisfying anyone’s curiosity, blaming her inattention in high-school math class. She has no problem, though, with Leo plotting his masterpieces with it.

Pssst, wanna join a cult?
From all that we’ve read, Cox’s biggest blunder is his assertion that the “Jesus-R-Us” Grail protectors of the Priory of Sion exist and their Dossiers are real.
He does update the story (where the other decoders mostly just give up on it), reporting a December 27, 2002, communique from the former private secretary to the late Pierre Plantard, its last reported chief, saying the club was back in action under a new, unnamed woman “navigator”.
“However, many insiders [whatever that means] regard this re-launch as a publicity stunt,” Cox writes. A stunt to what end he doesn’t say, but little morsels like this might make his guide worthwhile and save a trek round the Internet.
Bock, the theologian, pokes at the Priory at the back of his book. While its Dossiers “seem quite likely a complete fabrication”, he’s decided the Priory was indeed registered and existed, at least until Plantard resigned in 1984.
Then Bock, of all people, actually comes up with some additional information. Its “original president”, Andre Bonhomme, he reports, told the BBC in 1996 the Priory “doesn’t exist anymore. We were never involved in any activities of a political nature. It was four friends who came together to have fun … Plantard always had a great imagination. I don’t know why people try to make such a big thing out of nothing.” Good stuff.
Meanwhile, over at the paper-strewn offices of Haag and Haag, Brown is harpooned with vicious glee from his novel’s opening page, his “fact” list, in which he too insists that the Priory “is a real organisation” and its Dossiers genuine.
“The Priory is a nonsense invented by a disagreeable little French fascist called Plantard in the 1950s [who registered it] as a social club, but it was never very social and he was the only member,” the Haags chortle, adding that France’s national library, where many writers have claimed the Dossiers reside, has never had any record of any such thing. That’s that, then.
Not so fast. One of Burstein’s essayists, Amy Bernstein, pleads convincingly the Priory was in fact registered at the library, but only as part of Plantard’s grand hoax to prove he was descended from French kings and thus somehow deserved to run the country.
She paints Plantard as a frustrated but tenacious “occult nationalist” whose Priory morphed out of a few friends’ “recreational club” that hadn’t lasted a year.
A “willing pawn” of Plantard’s wrote two books that linked the Priory to Rennes-le-Chateau and the Grail, and that’s where the authors of “Holy Blood Holy Grail” fell into Plantard’s quicksand of fraud, blind to the warning signs posted by French debunkers.
Decades later, Dan Brown tumbled into the same swamp, followed by millions of admirers.

Somebody stop this guy
Those who can’t get enough of DVC – and their numbers are legion – have quickly made a bestseller of Dan Brown’s “prequel”. His absurdly similar 2000 novel “Angels & Demons” has sold eight million copies on DVC’s coattails and it too appears destined for Hollywood.
Interest has also been aroused in his earlier novels, “Digital Fortress” and “Deception Point”, although neither garnered much attention on release. Keenly awaited, naturally, is Brown’s fifth book, a Masonic romp through his home turf of New England called “Solomon’s Key”, due this summer.
Asia Books has another hefty compendium by Dan Burstein on the DVC prequel, called “Secrets of Angels & Demons” (also unauthorised), and kindly gave us a copy to review, but we were exhausted.