the da vinchi code

КИЇВСЬКИЙ НАЦІОНАЛЬНИЙ УНІВЕРСИТЕТ ІМЕНІ ТАРАСА ШЕВЧЕНКА

ІНСТИТУТ МІЖНАРОДНИХ ВІДНОСИН
КАФЕДРА ІНОЗЕМНИХ МОВ

ДОМАШНЄ ЧИТАННЯ
З АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ

І СЕМЕСТР

Виконала: студентка 3 курсу відділення МЕВ Ніколайчук К. Р.

Викладач:
Лазаренко Т. Д.

Київ 2014
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code is a novel written by American author Dan Brown and first published in Great Britain in 2003 by Bentam Press and has become a worldwide bestseller with over nine million copies being sold.
The plot of this book concerns the attempts of Dr. Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University, to solve the murder of Jacques Saunière, the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris, after Saunière's body had been found inside the Louvre naked with a cryptic message written on his torso in his own blood and posed like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, Vitruvian Man.
With some help from a French police cryptographer, Sophie Neveau, who feels that he is being wrongly accused, he manages to escape and together they embark on a quest to find the real killer.
That quest leads to clues, puzzles and riddles that link back to an ancient society tasked with protecting the truth about Jesus Christ and unlock the greatest secret in Western civilization.
The plot continues in ways that combine the detective thriller and conspiracy theory genres with Saunière's murder being attibuted to powerful forces that wish to preserve ancient secrets relating to Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene and having been the father of their child.
The interpretation of hidden messages inside Da Vinci's famous works, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, figure prominently in the solution to the mystery. The solution itself is found to be intimately connected with the possible location of the Holy Grail and to a mysterious society called the Priory of Sion, as well as to the Knights Templar. The Catholic organization Opus Dei also figures prominently in the plot.
It transpires that Saunière was in fact the secret head of the Priory of Sion - an organisation that was devoted to preserving certain secrets about the location of the Holy Grail. The cryptic messages on his body being his own dying attempts to leave an important message to his grand-daughter, Sophie Neveu, who was employed by the French state as a cryptologist.
According to the novel, the secrets of the Holy Grail, as kept by the Priory of Sion, are as follows:
The Holy Grail is not a physical chalice, but a woman, namely Mary Magdalene, who helped to carry the bloodline of Christ into the following ages.
Mary Magdalene was of royal descent (through the Jewish House of Benjamin) and was the wife of Jesus, of the House of David. That she was a prostitute was a slander invented by the Catholic Church to obscure their true relationship. At the time of the Crucifixion, she was pregnant. After the Crucifixion, she fled to Gaul, where she was sheltered by the Jews of Marseilles. She gave birth to a daughter, named Sarah. The bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene became the Merovingian dynasty of France.
The French expression for the Holy Grail, San gréal, actually is a play on Sang réal, which literally means "royal blood".
The Grail relics consist of the documents that testify to the bloodline, as well as the actual bones of Mary Magdalene.
Sophie Neveu and her brother are descendants of the original bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene (their last name was changed to hide their ancestry).
The existence of the bloodline was the secret that was contained in the documents discovered by the Crusaders after they conquered Jerusalem in 1099.
To my mind, there are three main characters in that novel: Robert Langdon, Sophie Neveu and Leigh Teabing. They all have the same purpose to find the Holy Grail.
Langdon, the novel’s protagonist, anchors the story. He is likable, capable, and goodhearted. Langdon is trustworthy, as is Sophie, his female counterpart and love interest. This trustworthiness makes him stand out in a narrative in which the author casts doubt on the motivations of every major character except Langdon and Sophie. In the novel’s many moments of uncertainty, Langdon’s presence is consistently reassuring.
Although he is very intelligent man in the academic world, Langdon is clumsy and inept with guns and weapons and lacks resolve when it comes to planning and executing action. He would rather think about codes and symbols than figure out how to escape the Louvre under the eyes of policemen. For this reason, he is balanced well by Sophie, who transforms his intellectual abilities into survival skills that are applicable to real life.
Neveu’s presence in the novel embodies the Chinese idea of yin and yang, or two complementary forces that work together in harmony. From Langdon and Teabing, Sophie learns that pagan religions and the Priory valued balance between male and female. Sophie and Langdon form the male and female halves of a single protagonist, and their goals never diverge. In this way, they echo Teabing’s and Langdon’s ideas about the partnership of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In their view, the male and the female worked together toward a goal, without the female being subordinate to the male in any way.
Both Sophie and Langdon, like the Mona Lisa, exhibit male and female traits: for example, Langdon’s headiness is balanced by Sophie’s real world know-how. Sophie is quick-witted, agile, devious when she needs to be, and physically assertive, as when she helps to disable Silas in the chateau. But at the same time, she is caring and compassionate. She feels the loss of her family deeply and mourns the death of her grandfather. Sophie combines a masculine toughness with typically feminine qualities.
Initially, Teabing is a welcome benefactor for Sophie and Langdon. His estate, Château Villette, with its gorgeous sitting room and enormous, book-lined study, seems to be an appealing embodiment of its owner. Teabing supplies much-needed comic relief, and he banters with his manservant and with Sophie as if he were a rich and dotty old uncle. His Land Rover and the bribes he gives to his pilot at the airfield in France help Sophie and Langdon escape from the police.
Soon enough, though, Brown reveals that Teabing is a murderer. After his true identity is known, Teabing turns into a living example of the way wealth can corrupt. Teabing, who has always lived a privileged life, convinces himself that his money entitles him to the knowledge of the Grail’s location. His ballroom-turned-study, which at first seems charmingly cluttered, begins to look like the crazy lair of a serial killer. His jokes turn from entertaining to manipulative. And his habit of throwing money around, bribing people in order to ensure the group’s safe passage out of France, seems self-serving.
Teabing is willing to go to any lengths to get what he wants, no matter who he hurts along the way. In some sense, his desire to expose the truth about the Grail can be seen as noble. But by the end of the novel, it is clear that he is really out to satisfy his own perverse obsession, not to find truth.
While this novel promotes faith, it also cautions against pursuing one’s beliefs to the point of fanaticism. Brown offers two examples of characters that become fanatics: Silas and Teabing. Silas is a religious fanatic. He allows his desire to please God and act on behalf of the Church to cloud his judgment. Silas is willing to murder as long as he believes he is supporting the Church.
Similarly, Leigh Teabing believes so strongly in finding and revealing the Sangreal documents that he is willing to murder for his cause. While each of these men fanatically supports diametrically opposed agendas, they both come to believe that the ends justify the means. Brown seems to admonish this behavior because neither fanatical character is successful.
The first thing to say about this book is that a Catholic should reject it emphatically. For its principle thesis is this: Our Lord Jesus Christ was not divine. He was only a man, albeit an extraordinary man. Jesus, from the royal house of David, was married to Mary Magdalene, with the aim of claiming an earthly throne and restoring the line of kings as it was under Solomon. After Christ was crucified, a pregnant Mary Magdalene escaped to France. The seed of Christ that she carried became the root of the Merovingian royal family, and the line, which continues to this day, must be hidden and guarded from enemies, e.g. the male-dominated Catholic Church, which relies on the false history it has created to remain in power.
According to Dan Brown, Mary Magdalene is the key to understand the mysterious quest for the Holy Grail, or San Greal, which he translates as royal blood, not the sacred chalice of the Last Supper. She was the vessel that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. The Grail, Brown imagines, is the ancient symbol for womanhood, and the Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine principle. Setting out this feminist ideology, Brown supports the hypothesis championed by Protestants and progressivist scholars who claim the medieval Church “made” Mary Magdalene a prostitute to prevent women from taking their rightful place of power as Christ supposedly intended.Brown rejects the Catholic tradition of Mary Magdalene the sinner who washes the feet of Jesus.
Without receiving any historical evidence, the reader is expected to believe a novel and shocking revelation: the history of the Catholic Church has been one long attempt to conceal this bloodline of Mary Magdalene, which has been protected for ages by a secret brotherhood founded in 1099 – the Priory of Sion. The fantastic fable continues. This Priory was the secret society that established the Order of the Knights Templar so that its first nine knights could secretly retrieve ancient documents proving the Christ/Magdalene bloodline hidden under the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The whole ideal of Crusade was just a grand front for the Templars, according to Brown.
But The Da Vinci Code doesn’t paint a completely negative picture of the Church. By the end of the novel, Brown has revealed that Teabing, who is not associated with the Church, is responsible for the murders of the Priory brothers. This revelation forces the reevaluation of many of the negative implications about the Church that Brown makes at the beginning of the novel: Opus Dei did not order Silas to kill; Bishop Aringarosa feels terrible about the murders of the Brotherhood and offers the victims’ families money; the Church itself was planning to separate from Opus Dei and bring its practices more up to date with modern society. And before Silas dies, he feels immense peace thinking of God as a deity of forgiveness, a feeling of reassurance that Bishop Aringarosa has given him. Silas turns into an example of a person who has been rescued by his faith.
I found the short chapters in Dan Brown's books enjoyable. I think they make it feel more fast-paced as the chapters quickly jump to different areas of the story. I also like the fact that the frequent chapter breaks make it easy to find a stopping point without having to quit in the middle of a chapter.
I assume, he is writing for people mildly interested in conspiracy theories. The mood is suspenseful. Brown creates a feeling of suspense in this novel in three ways: he keeps the chapters short; he sacrifices detail for action; he switches back and forth between various sub-plots. The plot itself is suspenseful because information is often revealed in flash-back or deliberately withheld in an effort to surprise the reader.
I think it is no accident that The Da Vinci Code is the best-selling novel of all time. This is a brilliantly conceived book, as well written as any thriller out there, only better. Why? Because it's not a mystery about spies, corrupt corporations, or hi-tech weapons. It's about Divine mysteries that have been kept from us by the permutations of time and by corrupt individuals in high spiritual places. These are core issues of spirituality and gnosis that resonate with our pysche and subconscious views, built up over lifetimes. It is this that makes the book so compelling. Fortunately, the fact that the author is an very good at his craft, adds to the enjoyment. All in all, I will recommend this book to everyone who likes different mysteries in history and try to find answers.