The Da Vinci Code


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"


Peter Bradshaw
Friday May 19, 2006
The Guardian

Millions of readers have devoured Dan Brown's Vatican conspiracy thriller about the handsome American scholar Robert Langdon and his gamine French sidekick Sophie Neveu, who uncover shocking secrets about the 900-year-old cult the Priory of Sion, formed to guard the terrifying truth about Jesus Christ and his relationship with Mary Madgalene - a secret encoded in the paintings of top Priory of Sion member Leonardo da Vinci. Now a movie, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey "Amelie" Tautou, has faithfully brought the distinctive qualities of Brown's prose to the silver screen.
I was approached to join the Priory of Sion as an undergraduate at Cambridge. I was a naive, beardless youth reading for the Church, and an eminent literary scholar had invited me to tea in his rooms in Magdalene College. Pushing a subtly recessed mahogany panel, he opened a secret door and I was led, wonderingly, into the gigantic underground vault beneath that college, rarely, if ever, shown to outsiders. An inner chamber, lit by flickering candlelight, was thronged with sinister chanting figures in monkish robes, gathered round an enormous silver pentangle. I recognised former Cabinet minister Norman St John Stevas under one cowl. A female figure, the Prioress of Sion, sat enthroned above them. Suddenly, the chanting stopped, and there was a loud animal squealing as one monk dragged a terrified billy goat into the centre of the pentangle, its hooves skittering frantically on the marble floor. The Prioress drew back her hood and the face of Princess Margaret was revealed, contorted with livid emotion. She stood up, and produced a jewel-encrusted dagger. The floor was soon awash with blood as the Prioress slaughtered Norman St John Stevas in front of the poor animal - and the organisation arranged for a double to take his place.
Priapic dancing followed and then over coffee and petit-fours my host explained to me that in about 20 years' time, with their connivance, a novel describing the Priory's activities would appear, a novel of such deliberate and ineffable clunkiness that no one would believe it. Billions would be mesmerised. The plan was that a film would follow, which would be the same only more so, imitating the jaunty plonking rhythm of the book. It was to be sublimely implausible: the Priory's secret would be safe for another generation.
And so it has come to pass. It has to be the only explanation for this film: a bizarre succession of baffling travelogue escapades taking Hanks and Tautou, as two cardboard cutout characters on the trail of the terrible secret, scampering from the Louvre to Westminster Abbey and a remote place of worship north of the border - decoding away like billy-o with a gun-toting albino monk on their tail. If it's Wednesday, it must be Scotland. Ian McKellen plays the twinkly-eyed British scholar Sir Leigh Teabing who opens their eyes to the truth, Jean Reno is the grizzled Paris cop who suspects them of wrongdoing, and Paul Bettany is the creepo assassin-monk from Opus Dei who mortifies his flesh with a cat-o-nine-tails and a barbed "cilice" belt round his thigh. He could have put himself through a lot more agony just by nipping out to Borders for a copy of the book.
Hanks has trendy long hair, an open-necked shirt and modish suit, though he has not attempted the resemblance to Harrison Ford specified in the novel. Tautou models a discreetly professional outfit and a shoulder-length hairstyle, maintained in a state of glossily reflective perfection without the aid of a stylist. Their relationship is tepidly platonic; anything raunchier would be in poor taste, for reasons unveiled in the final reel. Chased for days and days, they do not need to eat or sleep or use sentences that ordinary human beings would use. At one stage, our un-dynamic duo find themselves on a red London double-decker bus, jabbering about getting to "Chelsea library". I would love to read one of Dan Brown's deadpan descriptions of that remarkable building.
Well, every decoding is another encoding, as the structuralists used to say, and here is a paragraph by Leonardo about cryptography I have discovered in the British Library:
"We none of us are entirely sure that you, the reader, are not just ignoring our elegant devices; it is really dangerous to be over-confident about this, or over-analytical, as we can never simply assume that exquisitely crafted codes work - yes, they are often wily and very often I have discovered a lurid symbol which is likely to be a buried message, secret or even a completely and totally clandestine image which has within it an eccentrically ordered and complex nucleus of visual clues, even including some weird xylophones, bizarre yes, but these could be the paintings which will disclose or unveil the most perilous truths to have existed."
The preceding sentence, I can now reveal, has been written in the Priory of Sion code. You take the first letter from every fourth word, starting with the first: so the first word, then the 5th, then the 9th, the 13th, and so on. It spells out a message about the future of western civilisation that is too terrifying to be stated openly.

baffling- zbijający z tropu, zaskakujący
clandestine- sekretny
clunkiness- niezdarność
connivance- pobłażanie; współudział
creepo- odrażający
gamine- dorastająca dziewczyna, smarkata
ineffable- niewypowiedziany
jabber- paplać, trajkotać
jaunty- żwawy, beztroski
nip- ukraść, zwędzić
plonking- monotonny, mechaniczny ( o dźwięku)
raunchy- lubieżny, sprośny
recess- umieszczać w niszy
scamper- truchtać
sidekick- asystent, pomocnik
skitter- poruszać się lekko, dreptać
squeal- piszczeć, kwiczeć, skowyczeć
tepidly- letnio, ciepło
thronged- zatłoczony, zapełniony
vault- skarbiec, grobowiec


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