The spellbinder and his tale about the Holy Grail

This Week’s Winner

Eric Bartonico, 25, is a political science student of Filamer Christian College in Roxas City. “I am the youngest of seven siblings. I still haven’t finished my education but I still believe I can make my dream of becoming a lawyer come true.”

I love reading books more than watching movies. Oftentimes, when a book is made into a movie, I realize that I like the book better than the movie. I started reading newspapers and magazines when I was in high school. As I grew older, I developed a penchant for books, and before I knew it, I had read more books than I could manage to count. That has made choosing a favorite book a task next to impossible.

I can still vividly remember — as if it were just yesterday — when I was reading my first paperback, an old copy of Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle which I had found neglected in my uncle’s house. The story was good, at least for my standards then, and I started reading more books. Soon, I discovered better books by better authors. I have read classic and contemporary authors alike. Some are good, others forgettable. There are books I read simply to kill time but others I will cherish for as long as I live.

I first read about Dan Brown in a 2005 issue of Time magazine. He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People that year. His profile was entitled “The Novel that Ate the World.” Given his popularity since the publication of The Da Vinci Code, I was one of those who heard of him a little too late. But when I read the book, I fell in love with it and with the man despised by many.

My instincts told me at first not to write about The Da Vinci Code. It is too popular, too common a book that everyone has read. I think it is Filipino mentality to get turned off by someone or something too popular. Something told me not to get on the bandwagon, not to succumb to convention, and to find a different book instead. But my love for the book and the author cannot be overridden by some silly Filipino mentality and I found myself writing a tribute to Dan Brown’s unparalleled work of art and his unparalleled genius.

Dan Brown is an author like no other and The Da Vinci Code is a book like no other. No wonder it is one of the best-selling books of all time. Brown is an author whose knack for spinning a yarn is unrivaled (although JK Rowling may have a thing or two to say about it). In the book, he touched on the ultra-sensitive subject of religion and in so doing incurred the wrath of many Christians.

The thing I love most about the book is the depth of the research he undertook to come up with his story. His extensive research only shows his intellectual profundity. One cannot help but marvel at how he bombards his readers with many interesting data and trivia while still keeping them entertained by the story. He is so good as a storyteller that not only does he entertain his readers, he educates them as well. His knowledge of history, the arts, mathematics, science and arcane symbolism is, for want of a better adjective, very extensive.

Every page is suspenseful, from Sauniere’s death to Langdon’s finding of the Holy Grail. His knack for concealing the identity of his villain is so good that I was shocked to learn in the dénouement that Leigh Teabing was actually the villain.

If you love puzzles and riddles, you are certainly going to love the book; if you’re a conspiracy buff, the book is highly recommended for it is about the alleged greatest cover-up in human history.

What shocked the world the most about the book is Dan Brown’s theory of the Holy Grail. Although the theory is not original, Brown awakens the world about the Holy Grail and changes forever the way we understand the term. Most of us believe that the Holy Grail is the literal cup that held the blood of Christ and from which He drank at the Last Supper. According to Brown, the Holy Grail is an allegory. The cup, which is an ancient symbol for womanhood, actually represents the woman who held the holy bloodline of Christ. And that woman is none other than Mary Magdalene whom we have been taught to think of as a prostitute but is depicted as Jesus’ wife (or at least that’s what some people believe).

For this, the Church called Brown’s book a heresy. To make matters worse, the author also said that the church did everything to conceal Jesus’ marriage to Magdalene, short of killing her, and that the Bible is nothing but a fabrication of the Church to suit its teachings and that Jesus’ divinity was only a creation of the Church and a product of “a relatively close vote” at the Council of Nicea. No wonder that, while the author may be popular in the sense that he is widely known, he is despised by many in the Christian world. I know of some Christians who would never read the book because they view Brown as a deceiver, a man who twists the truth.

If he offended all of Christendom, he offended one particular group even worse: the Opus Dei. Brown’s villain, or at least the instrument of his villain, Silas, is a member of Opus Dei. In the story, he murders Sauniere and all members of the Senechaux, the only priory members who know the location of the Holy Grail. Since the publication of the book, the Opus Dei became an even more controversial group and found themselves under public scrutiny — even making it to the cover of Time in 2006.

Not only did Brown offend his readers, he also offended those who originally raised the Holy Grail theory. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent filed a case against him for allegedly plagiarizing their book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which originally asserted the Holy Grail theory. It is said that his villain’s name, Leigh Teabing, was taken from the two authors, Leigh from Richard Leigh and Teabing being an anagram of Baigent.

And so Brown shocked the world. Never before has a single book been as talked about or triggered such a response and controversy. No author has ever stunned the world as he did. He touched millions of lives, whether positively or negatively.

I see Brown as a real-life Leigh Teabing. In the book, Teabing is a man who is angry at the Priory of Sion, the keeper of the Holy Grail, for not revealing the Grail at the “end of days” or the end of the millennium, which was its final charge. Teabing takes matters into his own hands and orchestrates the death of the Priory’s grandmaster, Sauniere, and the Senechaux in the hope that they would reveal the location of the Grail before they died and he would be the one to reveal to an ignorant world the secret of the Holy Grail. Brown actually does bring to the world the shocking revelation about the Holy Grail.

While the book is critically acclaimed, the author remains one of the most infamous men today. Only those with open minds can tolerate his ideas. But whether you love or hate him, there is no denying the fact that with the publication of The Da Vinci Code, Brown has secured his place in literary history as one of the greatest men ever to lay pen on paper. I do not believe that the book will be forgotten soon, that all the controversies and debates it started will simply die a natural death in the passage of time.

I believe Brown’s legacy will live long after he is gone; that the next generation and generations after it will just be as intrigued by the book as we are today; that 50 or 100 years from now, our grandchildren and their grandchildren will read the same book, ask the same questions that we did and debate among themselves whether what the book says is true.

Certainly, Brown has left his mark on literature. And literature will never be the same again.