Lanier Burns

January 3, 2004

A Summary of THE DaVINCI CODE by Dan Brown

This novel (Doubleday, March 2003) has been featured on best-seller lists, magazine covers, and numerous chat-rooms for most of the year.  With 4.3 million copies in print, the story will find it’s way to the theatres in time.  Its literary features feed American appetites; a fast-moving plot, interesting characters, intrigue, controversy, magical details, and even puzzle-solving. 

Jacques Sauniére, elderly curator of the Louvre is shot in the Grand Gallery by a sinister monk.  Secret forces are seeking “one of the most powerful secrets ever known” that has been kept by an “unbroken chain of knowledge.”  Brown assures us in a preface that his descriptions and details are factual, a common literary device in historical fiction.  As he dies near the “Mona Lisa,”  Sauniére pens a coded message on the floor, strips off his clothes, and configures himself like Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man.”   Robert Langdon, Harvard “symbologist,” and Sophie Neveu, French cryptologist, are brought in to solve the ciphered message.  They learn that the curator is the gatekeeper of the Priory of Sion, a secret society whose membership included Leonardo.  The Priory possesses suppressed knowledge about the identity of the Holy Grail that would harm the Catholic Church.   Opus Dei is a malevolent, Vatican-sanctioned sect that seeks to destroy the secret about the Grail, lest it “leak” through “deep throats” to the public.  Langdon and Sophie stay a step ahead of the police, an Opus Dei hit-man, and a clandestine “Teacher” in a race to unravel the “Fibonacci” code.  In the image of Indy Jones, they commandeer an armored truck and hitch a private jet along the way.  In the end, the reader learns that the Holy Grail is not the chalice of Christ’s last supper, as traditionally thought.  Instead she is Jesus’ wife, Mary Magdalene, who appears to his right in Leonardo’s “Last Supper.”  She bore his son, whose lineage ultimately founded France’s Merovingian dynasty.