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What makes 'Da Vinci' run? |
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Written by Chauncey Mabe
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Wednesday, 17 May 2006 |
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In the beginning was ``The Word.''
Way back in 1972, a thriller by that title enjoyed a long ride on the best-seller list, finishing the year in the top 10. Older readers may recall its author, Irving Wallace, who concocted a succession of best-selling potboilers through three decades before his death in 1990.
Almost everyone, however, will recognize the novel's plot.
Consider Amazon.com's description of ``The Word'': "The classic thriller of an ancient manuscript, a secret society committed to hiding an explosive truth, and the man who must uncover that truth _ if he can stay alive long enough." The "explosive truth"? That Jesus didn't die on the cross, but survived to marry and have children.
That, of course, is roughly the storyline of ``The Da Vinci Code,'' Dan Brown's publishing phenom, which has sold 40 million copies in hardcover alone, while generating ferocious backlash from religious groups and secular scholars for its liberties with church history.
The debate, intensifying with the release of the Tom Hanks movie version Friday, has exasperated some. Conrad Gempf, an American teaching at the London School of Theology, posted this wry comment on his Web site: "Dan Brown is a novelist and `The Da Vinci Code' is fiction. Asking a New Testament person to comment is like asking a marine biologist to comment on `Finding Nemo.' The expert is of course going to say that stingrays do not sing and clown fish do not talk."
But one thing is certain. There's nothing new under the sun, at least not in publishing. What made for a best seller in 1972 is identical to what made for a best-seller in 1902 (Owen Wister's ``The Virginian,'' No. 1 for the year), or a century later, when ``The Da Vinci Code'' came out in 2003.
Taking our cue from Professor Gempf, let us turn to a novelist for comment, in this case James W. Hall, the author of a distinguished series of Florida-set crime novels, including ``Under Cover of Daylight,'' ``Mean High Tide'' and ``Off the Chart.''
First off, there's the conventional wisdom that the success of ``The Da Vinci Code'' rests largely on the appeal of its conspiracy theories. Not true, Hall says. The world's full of conspiracy-theory novels no one's heard of.
"At least a dozen or more books are out debunking `The Da Vinci Code,'" Hall says. "That really doesn't matter, it keeps selling."
Hall is not just any novelist. A longtime professor in the creative writing department at Florida International University in North Miami, he taught a course on popular fiction back in the 1980s. With the help of his students, Hall came up with 12 common denominators shared by all best-selling novels.
And ``The Da Vinci Code,'' which Hall has read three times, has all 12. Currently writing a book based on his research, Hall is reluctant to share the entire slate of best-selling characteristics, but he is willing to talk about several of them as they pertain to ``The Da Vinci Code.''
What's not essential is literary quality _ Hall has found that melodramatic plotting, hackneyed prose and one-dimensional characters are no bar to compulsive readability.
A key aspect of ``The Da Vinci Code,'' Hall says, is its "high nonfiction content." Like the books of James Michener, Arthur Hailey and Tom Clancy, ``The Da Vinci Code'' is full of historical data Brown claims is true. It doesn't matter that Brown's assertions have been proven wrong again and again.
"The less information there is in a novel, the more likely it will be literary," Hall says, "although all literary novels that hit the best-seller list do have high nonfiction content. Think of `The Poisonwood Bible' or `Cold Mountain.'"
Nonfiction, Hall says, sells better than fiction across the board, but a certain number of readers will, "very rarely," cross over if they think a novel meets their taste for facts.
"The Da Vinci Code'' purports to offer everything you want to know about Jesus and Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci and (the real-life secret society) the Priory of Sion," Hall says. "And don't worry, you won't get queasy reading about emotions. This brings in a lot of men who don't normally read fiction."
While a taste for conspiracy theories may not contribute to sales of ``The Da Vinci Code,'' its religious content does. In fact, Hall will have a chapter titled "God Is Great" in his new book.
"It's amazing how important God is in all these books," Hall says. "Every one of them. Even in a book like `Jaws,' one woman declares the shark attacks are a plague from God. I'm reading a book _ nonfiction _ about the religion of the Founding Fathers. Right from the beginning we've been wrestling with how important faith and belief should be in public life, and that debate goes on in best-sellers."
Another important characteristic of every blockbuster, Hall says, is scale: A small personal story is set against historic events. ``Gone With the Wind,'' for example, is an intimate romance with the Civil War as a backdrop. A novel like ``Peyton Place'' seems to be all small personal story, but when you magnify that little town by all the little towns, you get a snapshot of America. (A sleazy, soapy snapshot, but still.)
"`The Da Vinci Code,' of course, is set against the Crucifixion and the entirety of Western religious history, which is a pretty grand scale," Hall says. "Also the hero, Robert Langdon, gets to travel to places we don't normally have access to, which is another kind of scope."
Brown's book is also high on "American Dream/American Nightmare," as Hall calls it. "We believe anything can be fixed, by cracky. Our American ingenuity will solve the most arcane puzzle of all time, even with all those forces arrayed against you.
"That's another characteristic of American heroes, they're usually anti-intellectual. Langdon's a professor, but he's more a blue-collar kind of scholar. What he knows comes from books, but he solves things in the real world. He works in the classroom, but he's still a cowboy."
A related and, to Hall, surprising characteristic is what he calls "the golden country," a moment evoking Eden, an idyllic place before it all got spoiled or complicated. In ``The Da Vinci Code,'' the Eden moment comes when Sophie Neveu, the lovely Paris police cryptographer, mulls over a memory of the country house where she learned to love riddles and games from her grandfather, who is later disgraced in her eyes.
"There's an Eden moment in every novel I've looked at," Hall says.
``The Da Vinci Code'' may hit all 12 of Hall's characteristics, but that doesn't mean its author has been calculating or manipulative.
"The most important thing is that Dan Brown is not cynical," Hall says. "He believes everything he writes. You can't fake this, which is why most of his imitators are doomed to fail. Dan Brown wrote the best possible book he could write. My book about these principles will not be a formula for success."
Indeed, most break-out pop best-sellers are originals, created by writers who don't really know what they're doing.
"If they knew they were employing a strategy that goes back to the very beginning of American best-sellers, they might be too self-conscious," Hall says. "`The Virginian' has all 12 elements."
Meanwhile, Hall doesn't begrudge Brown and other best-selling authors their good fortune.
"If it weren't for Dan Brown, I wouldn't be able to keep my lights on," Hall says. "The Dan Browns, Stephen Kings, Anne Rices, they flood the industry with cash that pays for the other 95 percent of the novels published. The New York Times book section would never review most Danielle Steel books, but it wouldn't exist if not for her and others like her."
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