All over New York, black placards recently unfurled on the sides of high-rise buildings. “Be Part of the Phenomenon,” they commanded. At the bottom, in smaller letters, the phenomenon was identified: the film of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks as the academic who turns detective. We were being warned to make ourselves ready, as if for the Second Coming.
The Da Vinci Code began as a secretive, seditious cult. Having sold more than 40million copies in 44 languages in the past three years, it has become the basis of a mass movement. When fiction is this popular, it tells us lies we desperately want to believe.
The book’s contagious success is all the more intriguing because The Da Vinci Code is about ideas. Its hero is an accredited intellectual, an academic. Robert Langdon, Brown’s iconographic detective, is “hunk-handsome” and delivers his learned rigmaroles in a voice that is “chocolate to the ears”. It helps, perhaps, that Langdon, an art historian, studies a non-existent subject: he is “Professor of Symbology” at Harvard.
The code-breaking plot jerks along in a series of chases, conducted in cars, taxis, armoured trucks and executive jets; en route, Langdon recapitulates his research. Racing through the Bois de Boulogne, he “quickly gave the standard academic sketch of the accepted Knights Templar history”. This exhibits a myopic dreariness that is truly donnish, because he is being solicited from the shrubbery by a gaudy array of transsexual prostitutes.
Most thrillers detonate explosives; the bomb in The Da Vinci Code is a speculative theory about religious history, which — when Langdon and the other code-breakers let it go off — blasts God to smithereens. The book argues that Christianity is based on a misogynistic lie. Unseating God, it coaxes us to worship the Goddess.
This gynocratic deity is located in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The bewitching smirk of the Mona Lisa belongs to her, as do the cascading tears of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who (according to Brown’s decipherment of the code) is Christ’s wife, the mother of his child, the legitimate inheritor of his church and — disguised in drag to impersonate St John — his table mate in Leonardo’s Last Supper.
Brown expects us to gasp when he identifies the Holy Grail — the vessel that carries Christ’s sacramental blood — as the fertile womb of the Magdalene. But Wagner advanced the same thesis in his opera Parsifal in the 1870s. DH Lawrence told the same story in The Man Who Died and, during the 1940s, Robert Graves wrote a novel about the sex life of Christ, King Jesus. The judge threw out the legal case for plagiarism brought against Brown by the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail because such heresies have been the common currency of mythomanes for decades.
The Da Vinci Code adds an apocalyptic swagger of its own by invoking the imminent End of Days and threatening that its disclosures will upset the shaky moral order of our world. What’s odd is that the world has taken the book at its own estimation.
Before shooting began in Paris, President Jacques Chirac summoned Howard and Hanks to the Élysée Palace to negotiate an international treaty. Chirac wanted Audrey Tautou — given the role of a nubile cryptologist — to be replaced by his daughter’s friend Sophie Marceau. He also patriotically requested a higher fee for Jean Reno, cast as a bumbling cop. In return, Chirac promised to ease access to the Louvre, where Howard was to film the murder of a curator. Howard ignored Chirac’s pleas, but the intervention confirmed the novel’s hints — made in its account of papal politics — about string-pulling in high places.
Meanwhile, religious leaders battle Brown as if he were the Antichrist. The Vatican has appointed a doctrinal enforcer to combat his blasphemies, and a Carmelite nun sent herself to Ireland on a purgatorial pilgrimage before the filmmakers started work at Lincoln Cathedral (which doubles as Westminster Abbey, the setting for a showdown at the tomb of Isaac Newton). Fortified, she returned to lead the protesters heckling Hanks. The Dean of Lincoln denounced the novel as “tosh” and “balderdash”, though he swallowed his objections when offered a £100 000 facility fee for use of his consecrated turf — more evidence, apparently, for Brown’s view of Christianity as a venal commercial enterprise.
Although The Da Vinci Code flirts with heresy, its real subject is not faith but power. The Archbishop of Canterbury, denouncing the book in his Easter Sunday sermon, likened it to the campaign of the reporters Woodward and Bernstein, who picked apart the evasions and deceptions of the Nixon administration in All the President’s Men. Brown once remarked that “the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven”; it is a doctored, sanitised document. The Archbishop of Canterbury responded by criticising the tendency to treat biblical texts as “unconvincing press releases from some official source”. But is he really prepared to claim that Moses wrote Genesis while taking dictation from God on Mount Sinai?
In Brown’s novel, the omniscience of the deity is ensured by electronic surveillance, on which the dirty trickster Nixon — who taped his own conversations in the Oval Office — also relied. Security cameras in the Louvre send the message: “We see you.” But their pretence of divine vision is bogus: no one has bothered to turn them on. Back in Washington, the technology of control is less faulty, and God’s police keep a closer watch on refractory mankind.
The murder in the Louvre is ordered by Bishop Aringarosa, who fights back against a liberalising Pope from within the Madison Avenue headquarters of Opus Dei. As Aringarosa arms himself against “the hands that threatened to destroy his empire”, he resembles the lethal managers of another empire that is as determined as the Catholic church to universalise itself, and which — in Afghanistan, Iraq and no doubt soon enough in Iran — also makes wars in the name of God. Brown’s plot alludes to the council convened by the Emperor Constantine at Nicea in 325AD, where the church fathers gave Christ equal rank with God the Father. To deify Christ disentangled him from Earthly politics, nullifying his role as a defender of the poor and downtrodden.
Does this sound familiar? Soon after 9/11, President George W Bush called his war on terror a “crusade”. As such messianic vaunting suggests, the United States is the Holy Roman Empire reborn, with the addition of a nuclear arsenal.
Brown rationalises the appeal of his novel in one of Langdon’s reflections: “Everyone loves a conspiracy”. We don’t exactly love conspiracies, we are tormented by them. Conspiracy theories simplify history and concentrate blame. They rule out randomness and invest events — the assassination of President Kennedy, the traffic accident that killed Princess Diana — with a devious and usually malevolent purpose.
As it happens, The Da Vinci Code can be used to identify Diana’s executioners and to explain their reasons for disposing of her. A fantastical rumour traces her ancestry to the Merovingian dynasty, the French royal line that supposedly descended from the offspring of Christ and Magdalene; the Pont de L’Alma tunnel, where Diana died, is on the site of the earliest Merovingian tombs.
Dan Burstein, the editor of a book of essays on the phenomenon, suggests that The Da Vinci Code is about the other “Holy Grail quests” that engross us — the endeavour “to unlock the secrets of the human genome, to go to Mars, to understand the Big Bang”. The denouement, however, is less cosmic.
At the end, Langdon tracks a mystical meridian through the streets of Paris. The trail leads him to the inverse pyramid that aims its glassy apex at the floor just outside the Virgin Megastore in the Carrousel du Louvre. Here, if anywhere, is the location of the modern-day Grail, in a mercantile cathedral whose sacred annexes are occupied by the Body Shop; the quest dwindles into a shopping expedition.
The Da Vinci Code has already generated board games, explanatory DVDs with tours of its settings and a succession of illustrated, amplified editions. The film will, of course, extend the franchise operation.
As Brown’s villian, Sir Leigh Teabing snarls: “The greatest story ever told is the greatest story ever sold.” He is referring to the inaccurate version of Christ’s life merchandised by the Catholic hierarchy, but he might just as well be describing Brown’s novel. Langdon reminds Sophie that every faith is a fabrication and says that problems only arise “when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors”.
Brown’s hoodwinked readers have failed to heed this sly warning. The Grail is never tracked down in the book because the book itself is the Grail — not a vessel filled with grace or with holy blood, but a paper bag containing a phony elixir that promises to resolve all spiritual qualms and to clarify the meaning of the universe. — Â