As an avid fan of mystery stories, I’m sure I would enjoy The Da Vinci Code, especially since I’m attracted to Robert Langdon by name alone. As a rational human being, however, I’m reluctant to open its pages. Not knowing any better, I’ve enjoyed such quasi-historical movies as Amadeus and Braveheart, learning only later how fast and loose the productions had played with the facts. Now it’s too late: the false images are burned into my consciousness, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace them with the truth.
That’s the worst of historical fiction. At its best, it provides a wonderful gateway into the fascinating field of history itself, breathing life into the dry and confusing swirl of names, dates, and places that normally overwhelms us in school. But truth should never be sacrificed on the altar of art; if you want to tell the story your way, make up your own characters—don’t lie about real people and events. The Teaching Company, one of my favorite educational organizations whose products I highly recommend, produced two complimentary lectures on fact and fiction in The Da Vinci Code; because we were specifically given permission to pass them on to our friends, I’m posting links to them below. If TTC complains, I’ll take them down. They’re each about half an hour in length.Who can say why one book becomes a best-seller and another doesn't? Who could have predicted the Harry Potter phenomenon? (Certainly not his creator.) No doubt there are many reasons for the wild success of Dan Brown's fiction, not the least of which is the intriguing stories. Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times considers another factor: Dan Brown’s ideas speak to the heart of American popular religion today.
It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain—to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.
Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.”
In the Brownian worldview, all religions...have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.
The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.
These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah—sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.
But the success of this message...can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling...nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—jealous, demanding, apocalyptic—may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.
The Teaching Company lectures
I'm not even sure you would enjoy the books. Brown often creates tension not by building a scenario where the most horrid consequence is extremely difficult to avoid, but by bringing a character to a new location, telling us that what she saw there would change her life forever, and then cutting away to another part of the story. Add to that a professor of cryptology who takes several pages to figure out where the sequence 1-1-2-3-5-8-13 etc. comes from, and you can understand how the book was less than satisfying - even if it had been historically accurate.
Okay. A cryptologist who doesn't immediately recognize Fibonacci? That's enough to discourage me, even if he does have a cool name.
My point exactly. He could have googled in on his cell phone!
