Benjamin Hourigan

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003; repr. London: Corgi, 2005), 593pp. 3/5

This pacey but overexcitable thriller lets itself down by claiming to be more than fiction.

By now The Da Vinci Code has well and truly been cracked. Reading the tale of how religious symbologist Robert Langdon races against time, accused of murder, to acquit himself and save the secrets of the holy grail from Catholic fundamentalists Opus Dei and a mysterious villain working behind the scenes, should offer few surprises. The secret of the grail, as Brown has it, is of course that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers and companions, spawning a bloodline that continues into the present.

What’s most surprising about the Da Vinci code is just how surprised the characters act when they find out the secret. Langdon, the book’s hero, a Harvard Professor, is suitably nonchalant, having been in on it the whole time. But, like slack-jawed American fundamentalist yokels, just about everybody else concerned is completely flabbergasted when they hear the truth. That Brown treats the Jesus/Magdalene love story as earth-shatteringly scandalous has undoubtedly prompted overly pious Christians of many different stripes to take more offense at the book than they ought. These ideas are not new. Quite apart from the inspiration that Brown took from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, revisionist Christian scholars like Barbara Thiering and Bishop John Spong have been exploring the theological ramifications of the Jesus/Magdalene story for years. Readers: be aware that these ideas are not original, and not shocking. Retain your composure.

Even when one knows the secret, though, The Da Vinci code is a compelling read. Though his prose is, well, prosaic, his story is more tightly plotted, and his sentences more solidly constructed, than those of that other great blockbuster-writer of recent times, J.K. Rowling. Yet Brown does not have Rowling’s gift for evoking magic. The Da Vinci code disappoints us at its ending by leaving the grail hidden. Langdon finds out exactly where it is, but declines to disturb it. Just as in the Indiana Jones movies, the powerful religious artefact that draws people and events into a whirlwind around it recedes into obscurity at the finale, never to trouble the world again. But where in Indiana Jones we get to see the magic of the ancient world at work, melting Nazi faces, helping Indian priests pull hearts out of helpless victims’ chests, or turning Nazis into skeletons (yes, Nazis again), in The Da Vinci Code Brown is too anxious to make his story seem real to ever let magic of any kind, miraculous or merely emotional, enter the equation.

And this is where Brown really trips himself up, by making false claims that parts of his story accurately reflect historical fact. A documentary I recently saw, narrated by Tony Robinson, concluded that there was no credible evidence that the Priory of Sion, a secret brotherhood Brown credits with guarding the secrets of the grail, ever existed. Yet Brown makes this claim: “Fact: The Priory of Sion … is a real organisation.” (15) Brown also claims that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” (15) but the Rosslyn Chapel’s “official web-site”: notes that Brown’s description of a Star-of-David-shaped pathway worn into the chapel’s floor by visitors is inaccurate.

It’s a shame, because by leaving his claims to historical veracity out, Brown could have led readers on a merry chase without exposing himself to the criticism that he misleads his readers. Not knowing what in the book is real or not makes The Da Vinci Code a sort of Thomas-Pynchon-Lite, The Crying of Lot 49 played straight, aiming to entertain rather than to befuddle its reader. And while Brown might not draw his readers into dizzying conspiracies that tempt the reader to wonder what is real, he’s far better than Pynchon at inviting his readers to learn the truths behind his tale, because he preserves the idea that there is, indeed, a truth to be found.

Brown educates his readers on the workings of Interpol, the geography of Paris, the art of Leonardo Da Vinci, the agencies of the Vatican, the Fibonacci sequence, Swiss depository banking, and myriad other points of fact. While one would be a fool to take his book as an encyclopedia, it is in its own way informative, and it is, more powerfully still, an inducement to learn. A fine achievement.

Tom Yager makes an interesting use of conservative sentiment in an article from Monday, about OS X:

Apple has redesigned Leopard — Release 10.5 of its software platform — to meet The Open Group’s requirements for compliance with the Unix standard. ... Apple, Darwin and BSD will take computing to the next level by showing equal regard for tradition, performance and users. (emphasis added)

It’s pleasing to see “standards” glamourised in this way, by representing them as venerable and worthy of preservation. As indeed they are. With an adequate respect for traditions, and particularly traditions of interoperability, the computer users of today can expect to leave a data legacy that will continue to be accessible in the future.

For best line in an obituary speech this year, Bindi Irwin:

Whenever I see a crocodile, I will think of him.

I’m not making fun: I think it’s incredible that a man can make his children remember him through the wild animals he wrestled and cared for, instead of something prosaic like an old armchair or a hat.

I’ve just finished watching the webcast of the recent Apple press event announcing the company’s new media offerings.

Where Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, with a fizzling Leopard preview, was extremely disappointing, this latest showing is extremely solid. Not jaw-dropping, but pleasing. What we see here are timely incremental upgrades to product lines or functionality that we’ve already got in today’s products.

The Highlight
For me, the big surprise today was the announcement that you can now buy games for 5th-gen iPods from the iTunes music store. They’re mostly puzzlers, including Bejewelled, Tetris, and Zuma, but you’ve also got Pac Man and some other action-oriented titles there.

With Apple’s massive share of the digital music player market, this could be big. Apple now basically has a handheld gaming machine, and I expect that the iPod’s gaming capabilities will only get better with time. Apple has an opportunity here, too, to branch out into distributing games to the desktop, if it can figure out a way to integrate install and streaming processes for larger games into its iTunes software. This is something that could blow Steam, Gametap, and XBox Live Arcade out of the water, if Apple can do it right. A cross-platform game development library and distribution system could make Apple PCs more attractive for gamers, while diminishing the importance of Microsoft’s DirectX even on the Windows platform. Exciting stuff. Time will tell whether Apple can actualise the potential of today’s understated addition to the iTunes store.

iPods
The hard-disk based iPod models now have 60% brighter screens, lower price points, and the 60GB model’s been replaced with an 80GB one. All 5th-generation iPods (that’s all iPods with video) can now play some fairly decent-looking games. New iPod models have some search features. New iPod Nanos are higher-capacity, aluminium-cased, and come in bright colours (if you want). The iPod Shuffle is now little more than a tie-clip, which looks like a good thing. Good stuff, and since Apple only just recently gave me a new (but not a new-new) iPod with video, to replace my broken iPod Photo, I’m sure I’ll be positively blown away when, in the distant future, I decide to upgrade again.

iTunes
iTunes 7 is out, and where the move from 5 to 6 brought very little improvement, this feels much more significant. There’s a new download manager for incoming podcasts and so on, long awaited album-cover views, the ability to manage your iPod settings from a nice interface within the player window, and Apple’s bought and integrated 3d-accelerated cover-browser Coverflow. It’s kind of a shame, actually, because I never really liked Coverflow. It’s flashy, but not terribly useful. An album cover viewer is far more useful for navigation if you just lay the covers out flat, as Amarok does (screenshot).

Apple will also be selling feature films through iTunes. Not a big surprise. Though it’s terrible that we have to be saddled with DRM if studios are going to release digital distribution rights to stores like iTunes, Apple’s doing a great thing by improving people’s ease of access to large archives of music, television, and film. So, the film archive’s not very big yet, but it will be.

iTV
Apple’s got a networked media player designed for hooking up to televisions in the works, to come out in Q1 2007. It uses the Front Row interface, and costs way too much (US$299). Nice, but I won’t be getting one at that price.