The famous man looked at the wooden lectern. On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now ... and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel ... I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ” An interesting analogy from a writer who endured a long critical ice age, during which his own books would sell by the million but pass unnoticed in the posh papers’ book sections. In 1982, in an afterword to the anthology Different Seasons, King referred to his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, which makes this a unique case of the burger calling the macaroni cheese junk.
As I write, we are 35 days, 12 hours, 20 minutes and 11 seconds away from the internationally synchronised publication on September 15 of Dan Brown’s next helping of processed slop, The Lost Symbol. (The title is, according to one source, as “opaque as possible” to deter pre-emptive companions, guides and rip-offs. When it was initially announced as The Solomon Key in 2006, several publishers rushed out books about King Solomon’s book of magic.) The book’s official website provides a continuous countdown, while designated Twitter and Facebook pages drip-feed clues about its content to the faithful (a photograph of a Greek monastery, a Google Map of Waterloo Bridge in London, and riddles such as, “12in across and 5ft high, bound in silver and fallen from the sky, that a pilgrim should kiss once in his life”). It is six years since Brown’s career-making fourth novel The Da Vinci Code , which changed the face of fiction publishing, spent 68 weeks at No 1 in The Sunday Times bestseller lists, 120 in the Top Ten, and was crowned the UK’s biggest-selling paperback novel yet, with its predecessors slotting neatly in at 2, 3 and 4. The Lost Symbol will have a global first print run of 6.5 million copies, the largest in the history of Random House. Anticipation and speculation are running at Harry Potter levels.
In The Da Vinci Code, the Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon (now universally imprinted as Tom Hanks after two hit movies, despite being described as “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed” in the book) chases around Paris and London on a quest to decode a series of art-historical and numerical riddles before a dirty, centuries-old Roman Catholic secret about Mary Magdalene is deleted for ever. Despite its huge success — 81 million copies now in print — critics, commentators and contemporaries have fallen over themselves to damn Brown with not-even-faint praise.
Viewed through the prism of the media, his record-breakingly popular novels are universally condemned as dishonest tat. John Humphrys, denizen of the Today programme, called The Da Vinci Code “the literary equivalent of painting by numbers, by an artist who can’t even stay within the lines”. Mark Lawson, who at least gave it house room in The Guardian, spoke of “450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh”. Salman Rushdie told those attending a lecture in Kansas in 2005 that The Da Vinci Code is “a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name”. On an edition of QI, BBC Two’s comedy-panel quiz show, Stephen Fry pooh-poohed it as “loose-stool water”.
The cerebral stand-up comic Stewart Lee began his recent BBC Two series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle with a blunted attack on Brown, stating: “The worst published author in the world today is also one of the most successful.” Afloat on a tangible wave of recognition from his audience, he mocked Brown for writing sentences such as: “The famous man looked at the red cup.”
Lee admits that he made the line up, having only “skimmed” Brown’s books, looking for examples of that plain, overliteral prose style. He still refutes the pop ularly accepted defence that Brown is a great storyteller and The Da Vinci Code the ultimate page-turner: “I don’t see how the storytelling could outweigh the bad writing. Even Alistair MacLean will occasionally use a metaphor correctly. There is nothing of any value in Dan Brown; it’s like notes towards a screenplay. Any creative writing teacher will say, show, don’t tell. But Brown will use a phrase like ‘the frightened man’, which tells you that he’s frightened but doesn’t show it.”
Between all this bitter acrimony and the cacophony of ringing cash registers, you start to wonder if any other author in literary history has pleased and p****d off so many people at the same time. (In 2007 YouGov surveyed 2,304 adults for Costa, the coffee chain, and found that of the 85 per cent who admitted to a “literary guilty pleasure” — an odious concept, if you ask me — Dan Brown came level with John Grisham at No 3, behind J. K. Rowling and, yes, Stephen King.) But will this growing mountain range of fashionable opprobrium and mockery have any appreciable effect on the expected sales of the long-awaited Lost Symbol, pre-orders for which are already making Harry Potter look like a children’s book as September 15 draws nearer? (Never mind The Solomon Key; he could have called it The Allen Key and made it Langdon’s quest to assemble flat-pack furniture and still topped Amazon.) Stephen King’s own-goal comparison of The Da Vinci Code to instant pasta may be an astute one. Like the Kraft dinner, which fed families during wartime rationing in the US, the novel entered the market at an opportune moment. According to Lawson, it made sense of the aftermath of 9/11, offering “terrified and vengeful Americans a hidden pattern in the world’s confusions”. In a forthcoming book, The Noughties, the journalist Tim Footman suggests: “There was something about The Da Vinci Code that seemed to capture the decade’s sense of fear and paranoia; the sense that things were not quite as they ought to be.”
I read it, in late 2004, for a far more prosaic reason: because everybody was reading it. The New Yorker published a piece in 2005 by the magazine’s editor David Remnick, who, on a visit to London to report on Tony Blair’s re-election campaign, said: “I was reading the novel that everyone in London seemed to be poring over in the cafés and on the benches in St James’s Park, Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” A convenient idea, but, in fact, everyone was still reading The Da Vinci Code. I’m not one for confessional journalism, but I admit I loved it. Any deficiencies in style or research went unnoticed as I raced for the finish. I promise you I am not an idiot, but I was so taken with it that I bought the special illustrated edition and the Rough Guide.
The book’s runaway success may well simply be due to reader-rewarding short chapters. Equally, it could be code itself. After all, people love a puzzle, from the buried golden hare, whose whereabouts were mapped by clues in Kit Williams’s 1979 book Masquerade, to the name of the killer reportedly spelt out by the composer Barrington Pheloung in the theme music to individual episodes of ITV’s Morse. Dan Brown claimed, in a rare 2003 television interview for the reclusive author on ABC’s Good Morning America, that his interest in puzzle-solving was forged during his comfortable New Hampshire childhood: “On Christmas morning, when other kids might find their presents under the tree, my siblings and I would find a treasure map, with codes, that we would follow from room to room.”
The ensuing boycotts and plagiarism lawsuits can’t have harmed sales either. Another rare Brown appearance was at the High Court in London in 2006, when Judge Peter Smith threw out a copyright-infringement claim from the authors of the 1982 nonfiction book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, which, ironically, did brisk renewed business. The year before he saw off a similar claim from the author of The Da Vinci Legacy, published in 1983, a similarly themed art forgery thriller, which was miraculously reissued in 2004.
Brown’s books are certainly not sold off the back of the author’s personality. A shy, enigmatic recluse who hasn’t granted a formal, sit-down interview for six years, he comes to life, if at all, largely through clues unearthed by fans and reporters, such as David A. Shugarts, who wrote the bestselling guidebook Secrets of the Widow’s Code and based the final chapter, In Search Of Dan Brown, on “reasonable guesses based on the facts”. Brown was born in 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire — where, tellingly, he still lives — to a maths teacher and “faculty wife”, both choir directors at the local Episcopalian church. He was inspired to write novels after reading Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy on holiday in 1994 after some years attempting to make it as an Elton John-like singer-songwriter in Los Angeles. He released two albums, Dan Brown and Angels & Demons, samples of which can be found online, but I wouldn’t bother. (More interesting is his first book, 187 Men to Avoid, a toilet volume with one pithy description per page, such as “Men who stir-fry” and “Men who own hamsters”, credited to Danielle Brown. You can buy it second-hand.) As for the religious outrage, in casting the Roman Catholic Church as a sinister, secretive institution and caricaturing members of Opus Dei as masochistic monks, The Da Vinci Code made a lot of enemies within evangelical circles where the rising tide of militant atheism added to a modern persecution complex. The Vatican urged a boycott of The Da Vinci Code film, which went on to make $758 million at the box office. Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, the Vatican economics minister, publicly stated: “Let’s be careful not to play their game . . . by giving them free publicity.” Angels and Demons, set in Rome, was accused by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the US of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales”, and was attacked by the Bishop of Nottingham for “anti-Catholic sentiment”. (Brown refutes these claims.) Ruth Gledhill, this newspaper’s long-standing religion correspondent, says: “His critics feel that he has exploited Christianity to make a name for himself. I think that they’re making a big mistake — they have to look at how they could benefit from it. One of the most interesting fallouts from the Dan Brown phenomenon is the wonderful effect it has had on Opus Dei, who have found that interest in their organisation has increased, which, along with the internet, has inculcated a new openness. He has made Opus Dei the religious version of a celebrity.”
Gledhill admits to being a Dan Brown fan and calls him a great writer. In this regard, she is a rarity. Those who admit to enjoying his novels are not usually passionate. Using a method that Professor Langdon would no doubt decry as “unscientific”, I put a call out for devotees on Twitter and was inundated with gently mocking responses: “You may be looking for rather a long time ... It will be like trying to find a Tory voter after the 1992 general election ... I fear such people are only the stuff of legend.”
Julie Campbell, a 50-year-old property management co-ordinator, “enjoyed his book tremendously”, though she preferred Angels and Demons, because Rome is her favourite city. She used words such as “appealing”, “intriguing” and “attention-grabbing”. (No lightweight, she has just finished rereading Emperor, Conn Iggulden’s four-volume novel about Caesar.) Perhaps imitation is a more useful form of flattery for Brown. His success has opened the gates to a horde of thriller writers specialising in religious/historical/ archaeological enigmas solved by manly academics. It would be mean to dismiss these books, but you have to smile at the copycat nature of the titles: The Mozart Conspiracy, The Doomsday Prophecy, The Alchemist’s Secret, The Genesis Secret, The Exodus Quest, The Alexander Cipher, The Moses Stone (“An ancient code, a sinister secret and a deadly chase for the truth”), The Romanov Prophecy, The Templar Legacy, The Venetian Betrayal, The Alexandria Link, The Painted Messiah, The Blood Lance (“Lord Robert Kenyon is a wealthy financier and a senior member of the Knights of the Holy Lance etc”), The Doomsday Key and The Judas Strain. In case you’re getting any ideas, I have already copyrighted The Pythagoras Stepladder and The Dawkins Huff. The cover design is interchangeable: antiquity-suggesting calligraphic flourish and parchment effect; ancient symbol or cross; and a ghostly image of stone circle/church vestibule/major European landmark.
It all seems frankly unstoppable, although Alison Barrow, the director of media relations at Transworld, which publishes Brown’s books in the UK, prefers not to think of him as critic-proof. “Press reviews for The Lost Symbol will be only one factor in influencing sales,” she says. “But readers’ reactions to the book and their word-of-mouth enthusiasm will have by far the greater impact.”
When, in April, the publication date of The Lost Symbol was confirmed, rival publishers immediately started rearranging their own schedules, bringing forward new books by high-profile authors to avoid a battle they could not realistically win, including Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks and William Trevor. Who can blame them? Barrow told me: “We don’t disclose actual spends but believe this to be the biggest marketing campaign ever staged for one book in the UK.” The manuscript has been read by only four people in the UK, and security at Transworld has involved “a number of passwords and encryptions on internal and external communications — in the great tradition of a Dan Brown novel!”
So what might readers expect? Well, Brown likes to plant codes in the dust jackets of his books, “in plain sight”. On the US hardback of The Da Vinci Code, a series of bolded letters spelt out: “IS THERE NO HELP FOR THE WIDOW’S SON.” There are also references to a sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, called Kryptos. Add to these the cover designs of the new book, released in July, which depict a Washington skyline and a wax seal showing a double-headed eagle, a link to Scottish Rite Freemasonry. There are already unauthorised books speculating about the content of The Lost Symbol, the most thoroughly researched being David A. Shugarts’s Secrets of the Widow’s Son, published, remarkably enough, in August 2005. He postulates that “the widow’s son” might be King Solomon’s master architect Hiram, or even Jesus. (A Mystic Meg version of Brodie’s Notes, the book promises to “enhance your experience, enjoyment and engagement with The Solomon Key when you finally sit down to read it”.) Although Barrow says that there is “no such thing as a completely ‘safe bet’ in publishing,” she says: “We genuinely hope that The Lost Symbol will be the biggest ever hardback adult novel since records began.”
Which will please millions, even if Stewart Lee won’t be among their number. “I was talking to Ann Widdecombe about this, and she said, ‘I think it’s good if people are reading anything’. I don’t agree. I think reading Dan Brown is like being spoon-fed until your tastebuds are destroyed.”
The Lost Symbol will be published by Transworld, September 15, at £18.99
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
SIC: TOUK