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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
A fascinating conspiracy about Jesus transformed the cheesy thriller, "The Da Vinci Code," into a phenomenal bestseller. Too bad it comes from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," a masterpiece of bogus history.
Dec 29, 2004 | Recent history offers many examples of Americans' inability to tell fact from fiction, but none more tangled than the story of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code." The book is among the most popular novels of all time, with 8 million copies sold since its publication last year and what seems to be a permanent reserved slot on the bestseller list. You see people reading it on planes and trains, and if at a social event you happen to mention that you write about books for a living, someone is sure to pull you aside eagerly to discuss it. This baffles and annoys a lot of literary types, many of whom haven't read "The Da Vinci Code" or couldn't get past the first few hackneyed pages. Why is the public so preoccupied with this cheesy thriller? they wonder.
"The Da Vinci Code" is indeed a cheesy thriller, with all the familiar qualities of the genre at its worst: characters so thin they're practically transparent, ludicrous dialogue, and prose that's 100 percent cliché. Even by conventional thriller standards, the book isn't particularly good; the plot is simply one long chase sequence, and the "good guy who turns out to be evil" is obviously a ringer from the moment he's introduced. Dan Brown is no Robert Ludlum, so why has his thriller so outdistanced the work of his betters?
The answer is that what readers love about the novel has nothing to do with story, or character, or mood, or any of the qualities we admire in good fiction. They love it because of the nonfiction material the book supposedly contains, a complicated, centuries-spanning conspiracy theory. The people who buttonhole me at parties and barbecues to talk about "The Da Vinci Code" usually can't even remember the names of the novel's two main characters or anything that happens to them. What entrances these readers is the possibility that a secret society has protected a religious and historical secret for almost 2,000 years, a secret that could undermine Christianity as we know it. "It really makes you think," an earnest arts administrator told me last summer.
The story begins with the murder of a curator at the Louvre and follows his estranged granddaughter, a French cryptologist, as she and a handsome Harvard professor attempt to solve the crime while evading the police (who suspect them in the murder) and assorted bad guys. Little by little, various characters reveal to the cryptologist that her grandfather headed up a shadowy group called the Priory of Sion, whose past leaders included such luminaries as Isaac Newton and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci.
With the Knights Templar (an order of medieval crusaders), the Priory has guarded proof of the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene. Furthermore, they have proof of the child produced by that marriage, who is said to have founded a dynasty of French kings. Clues to this secret can supposedly be found, among other places, in Leonardo's paintings (particularly "The Last Supper") and in early Christian scripture suppressed by the church. The legend of the Holy Grail really refers to Mary Magdalene (vessel of Jesus' blood), who also stands for the "sacred feminine," a principle Brown claims was purged from the faith by church fathers.
Fortunately for Brown, as the book has filtered into the awareness of people who are qualified to refute most of its claims, he's always been able to plead fiction; "The Da Vinci Code" is, after all, only a novel. Although he begins the book with a statement that it accurately describes real documents, and that the Priory of Sion really does exist, even this leaves him with plenty of wiggle room. The book's selling point is the impression that it contains large and provocative servings of historical fact; yet when challenged on the many fallacies in his novel, Brown can always assert that, as a work of fiction, "The Da Vinci Code" can't be held to any standard of accuracy.
A cozy situation for Brown, but it became somewhat less so recently when, in the U.K., a lawsuit was filed against him for "breach of copyright of ideas and research." The complainants, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, are the coauthors, with Henry Lincoln, of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," a bestseller from the early 1980s. Virtually all the bogus history in "The Da Vinci Code" -- nearly everything, in other words, that today's readers' find so electrifying in Brown's novel -- is lifted from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail."
This puts both Brown and the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," in a tricky position. Baigent et al. have always maintained that the "facts" supporting their theories are available to any dedicated scholar and that the theories themselves, while unconventional, have been seriously entertained by other "experts," (including some, they claim, in the "upper echelons" of the Roman Catholic Church).
Since "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" presents itself as nonfiction, it has been in its authors' interest to downplay how much of it is invented. However, if the "research" and ideas in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are not the original creations of the book's authors, they become harder to copyright, and the possible infringement suit against Brown might be weakened. No one, after all, has a copyright on the facts surrounding Abraham Lincoln's assassination or the Treaty of Versailles.
For Brown's part, it's to his advantage to insist that the farrago of lies and misrepresentations used to prop up the conspiracy theory in "The Da Vinci Code" (and, originally, in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail") is part of the historical record or at least in general circulation. Perhaps that's why Brown, who has avoided talking to the press about the accuracy of his book since "The Da Vinci Code" became a hit and drew fire from historians, granted a lengthy interview to the makers of "Unlocking da Vinci's Code: The Full Story." The documentary recently aired on the National Geographic Channel and earned the 5-year-old cable network its highest rating ever.
"That information has been out there for a long time," Brown told the filmmakers when asked about the historical "underpinnings" of his novel, "and there have been a lot of books about this theory. The interesting thing is that they're all history tomes that sit in the back corner of bookstores. 'The Da Vinci Code' has taken a lot of that information and put it in a different genre, and there's an enormous part of the population now that's hearing this for the first time. And it feels brand new."
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