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I am not in the habit of arguing with literary critics of my works. Indeed I do not, on principle, approve of writers answering back when such critics pass judgment on their work. Mr Antoine Borg’s missive (18 June, 2006), however, does not qualify as literary criticism. It simply amounts to a diatribe against the undersigned and an unsubstantiated one at that. I specifically take umbrage at your correspondent’s assertion that my literary contribution “is a muddled attempt to ride on the wave of controversy created by the international bestseller.” In such circumstances I must claim my right of reply like any other citizen.
In my commentary I make it amply clear that what irked me in Dan Brown’s thriller were two things: one, the wretched literary style he unashamedly, and perhaps intentionally, if not ingeniously, employed; two, the disgraceful remodeling of Church and art history, carried out with one goal in mind: that of teasing readers into seeking a so-called truth which is in actual fact a weird re-hash of discarded Christian minority beliefs.
As a prose stylist, Mr Brown leaves much to be desired. Consider the opening lines of the novel: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.”
In all likelihood no other novel has ever began with the word “renowned”. Newspaper reports may have done so a good number of times. No-one would find it amiss to read the morning after Saunière’s mishap: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière was found dead last night in the Louvre at the age of 76”. Newspaper headlines are one thing, the opening paragraphs of novels are (supposed to be) another.
In actual fact, this is not the first time Mr Brown adopts this method to open his novels before his readers. He pulled the same trick in his first sentence of Angels and Demons: “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.” The point here is not the ghastly images Brown relishes.
One does not need to possess a great ‘writerly culture’ to know that the evaluation of novels depends a great deal on their opening lines. Let me quote just one (well-known) opening of a classic novel, to make my point on this acquired taste – Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great fortune is in want of a wife.”
One of the basic rules of fiction, if not the first one, is that the writer “shows, he does not tell”. If we took Austen’s opening line the point becomes clearer. Ms Austen does not tell us anything about her theme – her irony precludes that pitfall – she nevertheless, shows us what her story is going to be about. A lesser writer might have attempted this opening paragraph (and it is always easier to suggest what lesser writers could do):
“Renowned match-maker Mrs Bennet subscribed to the notion that her daughters would be well advised to do their level best to seduce the immensely rich Mr Bingley who was visiting the neighbourhood and that her husband was duty bound to organize a ball and where they could ply their craft in the most liberal fashion possible.”
So, the thriller opens with the grisly murder of the supposedly renowned curator Jacques Saunière inside the Louvre. Before dying from gunshot wounds inflicted by Silas the Albino, Saunière uses his blood to draw on his bare abdomen a five-pointed star: the pentacle, used 4,000 years before Christ to denote the goddess of human sexuality, well known to us in Malta – Ishtar or Ashtoreth, or Astarte (depending on one’s preference for romance or semitic phyla), also used, incidentally, in Satanic serial killer films.
This is where Harvard Professor Robert Langdon enters the scene. Providentially, the Professor happens to be in Paris and being known as an eminent symbologist he is called in to investigate. Langdon sets out to decipher the message sprawled on Saunière’s pale stomach: “13 – 3 – 2 – 21 – 1 – 1 – 8 – 5 O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!”
Initially he fails (otherwise how to sustain the suspense?) but he does not take long to find out that Saunière is referring to Mary Magdalene, or the Goddess of Sexuality, etc. etc.
Enter Sophie Neveu (a mish-mash of Sophia, the Wisdom Goddess and New Eve, if you get the drift). The late Jacques Saunière, we learn from this inevitably wise character, “was a very prominent and well-loved figure in Paris.” Now, didn’t we already know, from the very start, that he is renowned? We do learn, however, even at this early stage that he left the message to her. She would know. She is his granddaughter.
The deeper we go into the volume the more aware we become of its shallowness. Indeed, not deeper than the profundity of an in-joke circulating among sophomores or even in a girls’ boarding school at secondary level.
By the time readers have been hopefully overwhelmed by the plethora of enigmas piled on riddles – so skillfully advertised to draw the readership of millions – the Harvard Professor with the unstinting help of Sophie’s wisdom manages to decipher the code and the colossal historical truth that the quest for the Grail was, in fact the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene is saved for posterity! Good Lord!
In spite of the fact that Michael Baigent and Co lost their libel suit against Dan Brown, it is absolutely obvious the author had lifted his so-called “research” from their publications. What makes things worse, Mr Brown has asserted the veracity of the material upon which he exercised his writer’s imagination both implicitly, by assigning historical exposition to his fictional scholars, and explicitly by placing a “fact” page next to the frontispiece of the book; but more pointedly when, during his book promotion exercise, he vouched for its validity by telling Charles Gibson on “Good Morning, America” that if the book had been nonfiction his factual assertions would not have changed.
Given that it is written in a ghastly prose style and built on very tenuous premises, one wonders how Dan Brown’s pulp fiction made publishing history and became a massive best-seller. Several answers to this query have been offered. Some said the book was published in the wake of 9/11 and the ensuing Iraq War, others have blamed it on the intellectually hollow times we are living. Perhaps one of the more satisfactory explanations was provided by book review editor Peter Zane of the New Observer:
“The modern works (upon which Brown bases his book) are part of a long tradition, as old as Christianity itself, of voices unsettled by questions of faith. It is easy to dismiss many of them as goofy and harebrained, but they lead us to a central fact: the mind craves certainty. Lacking solid information, it seizes on speculation. We know so little about the life of Jesus and the inner workings of the Catholic Church that is small wonder so many wild ideas have flourished around them.”
Mr Brown may not have been serious about his money-spinning yarn. He gives us a sure hint by naming one of his important characters “Aringarosa” – a red herring. But Peter Zane is very serious when he concludes his review thus: “Make no mistake, The Da Vinci Code is a piece of pop culture schlock. Yet, like serious literature, it reflects our longing to apprehend truths beyond our grasp.” It is basically the same reason why Cagliostro hoodwinked Pinto. Are we no wiser than the Grand Master who let himself be bamboozled by that wily alchemist? I wonder.
Frans Sammut
Zebbug
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