Da Vinci Crude

So I was in the grocery store and the paperback of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code had been released so I bought it. Had one of those 25%-off stickers on it, so what the hell.

I had already read another of his books, Angels and Demons, because someone handed it to me. It's a fair measure of a book to ask how much of it you remember a year after reading it, and this is what I remember about Angels and Demons: the writing itself was very bad, the historical stuff fairly interesting, the climax completely preposterous and unbelievable, but nonetheless it moved very fast, kept the pages turning. As for what the plot actually was, what happened in it, the only part of that I remember is the climax, precisely because it was so utterly absurd. (I mean, come on: Robert Langdon in freefall with only a coat or a blanket or whatever the hell it was? Gimme a great big break, please.)

I could say almost exactly the same thing about Da Vinci Code. I saw an article somewhere saying that Mr. Brown handles the writing and the plotting, while his wife does the historical research. This means that the person really responsible for the book's success is Mrs. Brown. The theory generating so much controversy is, after all, not Brown's; he acknowledges this himself, in the text of the novel. But the background, starting from the works of Leonardo and then expanding from there, is undeniably fascinating. (Leonardo is fascinating, period.) So even though those sections of Mr. Brown's novel that are purely expository can be a bit of a slog sometimes (is it realistic that these characters, under duress, would spend that much time laying everything out so damn thoroughly?), at least it's an interesting slog.

But the writing itself, qua writing? Really, really rotten. I have another way of measuring a book, one that I employ in bookstores before I ever buy: I call it the first-paragraph test. A book has an interesting cover, or it's by an author I've heard of but never read, whatever; I flip to the first page and read the first paragraph. If it sounds like something I've read before, I don't buy the book. Simple as that. And Da Vinci Code? It fails the first sentence test. If the first sentence of the first paragraph begins proper noun then verb, I'm outta there. It's a standard trope of thriller writing, and mystery-novel writing, and many other kinds of genre writing, most of it quite bad; and while there are exceptions to this rule, on the whole it serves me very well. And Mr. Brown's first sentence? "Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery." Blah.

Let us take, for contrast, an earlier historical thriller that was also made into a movie, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Straight off the top, he begins his work of fiction with a second layer of fiction: "On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbe Vallet...." Eco then lays out his narrator's history with the supposed book, what the book deals with, and how he approached his "translation" of the book. All this before ever beginning his plot, which is even more historically complex--not to mention being more credible as history per se. (And yes, I know--the sentence quoted above has a proper noun and a verb, right there up front; but Eco knows he's working in genre territory, and immediately tweaks it with that layer of interesting metafiction. Therefore, it works for me.)

And yet, as I said, the book moves fast. On my flight to Florida I read a hundred pages; on the flight back I read another hundred and finished it. (All this while also working on a rewrite of Beaudry, till my laptop battery died.) The guy in the row ahead of me was reading the book too. There's no denying that it holds your attention and keeps the pages turning, even if you're saying to yourself "Okay, could Sophie possibly sound less French?" Obviously this strength, together with the historical research of Mrs. Brown, has made the book a raging success; and there's an old rule of thumb that bad books make good movies, so who knows, it could turn out to be a great Hollywood thriller. Fair enough. Obviously it all works: even with my steadfast rule about bad writing, I made an exception, read the book and, on the whole, enjoyed it well enough. Bravo to Mr. Brown for that, at least.

I am, however, firmly on Mr. Brown's side when it comes to the legal argument over whether he plagiarized Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and again on his side as the Vatican tries to convince people to boycott the movie. As the Slate article linked above points out, if writers are presenting a theory as truth, then they have to accept that other writers must be free to then cite that theory and present it in their own fashion. I wrote a screenplay based on the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.; some of my sources are seriously in the public domain (Herodotus, Plutarch, etc.); some are not. The more contemporary histories of Marathon differ on what exactly took place during the fighting; if it were true that I chose to go with one historian's set of facts more than another's, would that leave me open to plagiarism charges? If I didn't use his language but simply accepted his version of what we know about the facts, how could that be plagiarism?

And the Vatican? Well, they just don't get it. The book isn't anti-Christian, it's anti-Catholic church. It suggests (and here perhaps is the novel's real value) that the importance of Christ was not his divinity but his message, which is unsullied by any questions of whether he married or not, had children or not. With this I am in complete agreement. But the Vatican has never liked having its turf challenged, and so, as they did with Last Temptation of Christ, they are trying to organize a boycott. But it didn't work then and it won't work now; in truth, Last Temptation isn't a very good movie, and if they had just left it alone it wouldn't have drawn nearly as much attention as it did. Granted, a Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks based on an incredibly popular novel is going to draw attention no matter what; but the Vatican's attempts to reduce the number of attendees is, again, just about certain to have the opposite effect. Those of us who might be on the fence about going to see a simple thriller are probably more inclined to go, just to thumb our noses at this attempt at artistic repression.

The Vatican certainly has every right to argue that the novel is based on a whole series of flawed assumptions and bogus history, and in fact I'm inclined to think that they're probably right. But a boycott is just plain silly, and counter-productive; what's worse, it makes people that much more inclined to think that maybe the book's right, otherwise why would the Vatican be expending so much effort to try and suppress it? Silly, silly Vatican.