That Damn Book (And Film)

[poliphilo]

The Da Vinci Code comes too late for me. I did all this stuff in the 80s and 90s.

I'm not saying I was in the vanguard. As someone in the Observer pointed out this morning, people like Robert Graves and Margaret Murray were putting together theories involving the Great Goddess, the sex life of Jesus and centuries-old ecclesiastical conspiracies over fifty years ago.

And behind them lies Frazer's Golden Bough- one of the key texts of the early 20th century.

What was once the prattle of a few off-centre scholars and pseudo-scholars has finally gone mainstream.

There was a time when I hoped and half-believed it was all true.

But now I know it isn't.

There never was a Goddess worshipping Golden Age.
The Priory de Sion was the invention of a mid-20th century fascist hoaxer.
Opus Dei may be sinister- but it doesn't employ albino hit-men.

And so on...

That's what irritates me about Brown. If he'd done proper research- instead of cherrypicking the conspiracy websites- he'd have known that most of the ideas he's playing with here were shot to pieces ages ago.

Comments

[methodius.livejournal.com]

My son works in a bookshop, and he and his colleagues were always joking about the gullibility of the punters who came looking for The da Vinci code and spin-offs. They would overhear people in the art books section discussing repoductions of Leonardo's paintings and they would be saying things like, "Look, there's the knife."

When I said I wanted to read it to see what the hype was about, he advised me not to waste my money; he'd read a borrowed copy, and said it wasn't worth buying. He reminded me of my cousin when she worked in a public library, and she and most of her fellow-librarians described themselves as members of the "Mills and Boon fans Exterminators Club"

But I wanted to get some insight into pop culture, so I read it. Having read Baigent et al's The messianic legacy some 12 years earlier, much of it was predictable and derivative. Easterman's The brotherhood of the tomb (which is the same genre) at least had a few twists and turns in the plot.

But for me the worst thing about The da Vinci code was that it was so badly written, and so predictable in other ways as well. An expert cryptographer and "symbolologist" arguing for several pages about a transparently obvious piece of mirror-writing was one of the worst. When the bank official asks for the bank account number, the reader immediately things "Ah, so that's the number her grandfather wrote in his own blood on the floor of the Louvre", but the characters take another few pages to get it, while the reader impatiently wonders how dim-witted they can be, and wishes that Brown would get on with the story.

As for the hype and the popular success of the book, I doubt that it is a reaction to the religious right. I think it probably is the religious right -- it's the same stratum of society that is gullible about conspiracy theories, and flying saucer cults and the like. As Ronald Hutton points out in one of his books, you can't call them UFOs (which the cultists pronounce as "you foes"), because the cultists claim to have identified them -- as extra-terrestrial spacecraft.

I read a novel about flying saucers once, by Whitley Strieber. It was one of the few books in my possession that I sent into the wild with a BookCrossing label -- I'm very reluctant to part with books, but did not think I'd ever want to read that one again, and The da Vinci code seems to be of comparable worth.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories, cryptids, ghosts, UFOs and all that stuff.

But I want solid evidence and I want to hear the case for the prosecution.

There's no way I'm going to allow myself to be suckered into becoming a "true believer".

[methodius.livejournal.com]

When I was about 14 i loved a book in our schoopl library called Focus on the unknown. I suppose it was the equivalent of Baigent et al in a later age, but I found it much more interesting. I'd like to read it again, just to see if it was just because I was less critical at that age.