The Hindu Business Line : Connections may be invisible but they are always there

May 19. `The Da Vinci Code at cinemas worldwide,' announces http://flash.sonypictures.com. Rating is at `2.9/5' based on four reviews, on www.google.com, as at the time of writing this. "The movie is so drenched in dialogue musing over arcane mythological and historical lore and scenes grow so static that even camera movement can't disguise the dramatic inertia," opines Kirk Honeycutt on www.hollywoodreporter.com, in a review dated May 17.

"The plot is driven not by its characters but by solutions to puzzles, the breaking of codes, interpreting covert references in works of art and a dazzling display of historical knowledge, all of which works terrifically in the novel but puts the brakes to all screen action," adds Honeycutt, before declaring the movie to be `an unwieldy, bloated melodrama.'

Ron Howard's big-budget adaptation trades religious intrigue for uninspired thrills, declares Owen Gleiberman on www.ew.com. "Dan Brown's theological scavenger-hunt mystery novel The Da Vinci Code may be the pop version of a novel of ideas, but that doesn't mean the ideas don't pop," opens the review. "It's a challenge, to be sure, to cram Brown's litany of signs and symbols, his intricate meditations, into a two-and-a-half-hour film."

A disclaimer in India

In India, the film, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, has been facing pre-release resistance, such as the insistence of `A' certificate or disclaimer by religious groups. Even as they come to terms with the film, now that the Censor Board has cleared it subject to the addition of `a clear disclaimer at the start of the film, saying it is a work of fiction', it is time to come to terms with the Code.

The plot of Brown's work is about unravelling `the greatest conspiracy of the past 2000 years'. On www.danbrown.com, it reads thus: "While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher." Langdon solves the riddle, only to discover a trail of clues `hidden in the works of Da Vinci'.

Yes, the painter, Leonardo Da Vinci of Mona Lisa fame! "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452-May 2, 1519) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: An architect, anatomist, sculptor, engineer, inventor, geometer, musician, futurist and painter," as Wikipedia would inform.

Brown's book is "a worldwide bestseller with more than 60.5 million copies in print (as of May 2006) and has been translated into 44 languages," informs http://en.wikipedia.org. Steering clear of the religious portions of the book, so as not to offend anybody's sentiments, let's take a tour of the book, and snatch glimpses of the Code.

The cast

First meet curator Jacques Saunière of Louvre Museum, Paris, to whom a man with a gun poses this question: "Now tell me where it is... You and your brethren possess something that is not yours." The curator wonders, `How could he possibly know this?' A bullet sears through him. `If I die, the truth will be lost forever,' the curator realises. "There existed only one person on earth to whom he could pass the torch. Saunière gazed up at the walls of his opulent prison. A collection of the world's most famous paintings seemed to smile down on him like old friends," writes Brown, and we're only in the prologue.

Hurry up, therefore, to catch up with Langdon. He studies a Polaroid snapshot that the police give him; the way Saunière's body is positioned is so odd... `Pain is good,' in italics chases you from page to page. "The sacred mantra of Father Josemaría Escrivá — the Teacher of all Teachers."

And there are more words and phrases in italics. "As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events," narrates Brown. "The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface."

Ah, if only we could decipher likewise the wild movements of the markets and crack what lay beneath the charts! Astrology was a symbolic constant all over the world, according to Langdon. Wonder if that holds the key to the Sensitive index!

"Essentially, the manuscript is about the iconography of goddess worship — the concept of female sanctity and the art and symbols associated with it," explains Langdon to Captain Bezu Fache, about a forthcoming book. Saunière was the premiere goddess iconographer on earth, one learns. "His books on the secret codes hidden in the paintings of Poussin and Teniers were some of Langdon's favourite classroom texts." He had "a personal passion for relics relating to fertility, goddess cults." Strangely, Brown doesn't have any reference to India in the Code, despite the country being so rich in codes and female goddesses.

Elsewhere, Langdon dials 454, the access code to pick up voice mail of Sophie Neveu. "Mr. Langdon," the message began in a fearful whisper. "Do not react to this message. Just listen calmly. You are in danger right now. Follow my directions very closely."

The Fibonacci sequence

Now, look closely at the number sequence 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21. What's that? The Fibonacci sequence, "a progression in which each term is equal to the sum of the two preceding terms." But how was it relevant to the murder in the museum, wondered Fache? "There can be no coincidence that all of the numbers Saunière wrote on the floor belong to Fibonacci's famous sequence," explains Sophie. Saunière was a fanatic for codes, word games, and puzzles, informs Brown. "Langdon had once worked on a series of Baconian manuscripts that contained epigraphical ciphers in which certain lines of code were clues as to how to decipher the other lines."

`Compartmentalised cryptography,' is how Sophie and Langdon go about cracking. That's how intelligence agencies operate, when intercepting a code containing sensitive data. Cryptographers each worked on a discrete section of the code, so that when they broke it, "no single cryptographer possessed the entire deciphered message."

Just the stuff if you prefer `to gaze upon the secrets of the deep,' as the Bard writes in King Richard III. Mail in if you found the secret quote hidden in this piece!

ComingToTerms@TheHindu.co.in

D. Murali

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