The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.