Title: The
Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown
Main Characters: Sophie
Neveu, Robert Langdon, Jaques Sauniere, Fache, Silas, The Teacher, Teabing and Remy.
Description of one of the main characters: Sophie Neveu is a French cryptographer. She is the grand daughter of the
famous Jaques Sauniere of the Louvre museum. She has a fight with her
grandfather 10 years back and hasn't spoke to him since then. She is very good at
breaking codes.
Whom I like and why: I
like Jaques Sauniere. He was a grand master in the secret society of Pagans. He
is a titan in setting clue hunts. He taught his grand daughter to break
different type of codes. He loved Leonardo Da Vinci and made cryptex, a box
which Da Vinci used to make.
Whom I dislike and why: I
dislike Remy. He serves the Church. He is one of the servants of ‘The
Teacher’, a man who wants to know about the Holy Grail, whose identity is known
only to the Grand master and the three other masters. He is the only person who knows 'The Teacher’s' real identity.
Setting/Theme of the Story: Robert Langdon gets a call in the middle of the night from the hotel concierge telling
him that there is a visitor waiting to meet him. Langdon requests the concierge
to tell the visitor to come the next day but the concierge tells him that the visitor
is an important person and is already coming to his room. The door bell rings
and Robert is surprised to see a judicial police. The man shows him a picture
of the famous Jaques Sauniere lying down dead and asks him to immediately come to
the judicial police head, Fache. Robert Langdon goes with the officer to Fache,
who leads him to the dead body of Sauniere, who had positioned himself in an odd way and had drawn
the pentacle symbol with his own blood before dying. There is also something written beside
him.
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
O, Draconian devil!
Oh, lame saint
Robert Langdon immediately identifies that the way Sauniere had positioned himself
was exactly like the symbol of Leonardo Da Vinci. Suddenly Sophie Neveu, a
French cryptographer, comes to them telling that she has found what the number
code meant. She leaves a phone message telling Rober Langdon to meet her secretly in the gents bathroom. Fache goes out of the room for sometime and finds that Langdon and Sophie are missing. Meanwhile Sophie tells Langdon that what Fache
showed him wasn’t the whole of what Sauniere had written. There was 1 more line
to it.
P.S.,
Find Mr. Langdon.
Robert
tenses when he sees that line. But Sophie explains to him that it was a message
left by her grandfather for her "P.S.,
Find, Mr. Langdon" actually
meant ‘Princess Sophie, Find Mr. Langdon’, as Sauniere always used to call her
‘Princess Sophie’. Immediately Robert found that ‘O, Draconian Devil!’ and ‘Oh.
Lame Saint!’ were anagrams which actually meant:
Leonardo
Da Vinci
The
Mona Lisa
Now,
the message left by Sauniere to his grandfather was actually:
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5
Leonardo
Da Vinci
The
Mona Lisa
Princess
Sophie, Find Mr.Langdon
But
both of them are not able to figure out what the numbers meant. To Robert Langdon, the
numbers seem very familiar. He thinks hard and identifies it as the PHI (the divine
propotion – 1.618). They both escape from Louvre museum and go to Sauniere’s
bank where The Holy Grail was kept.
The
Holy Grail was Magdalene, the wife of Jesus Christ. Jesus had handed the
responsibility to carry on the church, to Magdalene, before he was crucified. But the church didn’t like
it and took the responsibility themselves and never let the world know about
Magdalene.
Robert
and Sophie escape the police and go to Leigh Teabing’s house. Teabing, who is
highly interested in the holy grail shows Sophie Magdalene in a painting of the Last supper. At last they go to Rosslyn as they find another clue given by
Sauniere as a poem.
The
Holy Grail neathe ancient Roslin waits
The
blade and Chalice guarding O’er her gates.
Adorned
in masters’ lobbing art, she lies.
She
rests at last beneath the starry skies.
All
these days Sophie thought that all the other members of her family were dead.
But she finds her grandmother and her brother in Rosslyn. Robert also gets to
understand that the Holy Grail’s identity should not be known but should only
be respected and worshipped. Sophie learns that she was in the bloodline of Jesus.
