Thoughts on DaVinci, Halfway Through

I am halfway through The DaVinci Code. I’ve really enjoyed it...until last night. It’s the part where Langford and this British expert guy explain the conspiracies to Sophie. Constantine, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and lots of humanizing of Jesus are part of this discussion. And in his efforts to build a credible plot for his story, Brown resorts to rewriting history.

I like historical fiction. James Michener’s Poland and The Covenant place fictional characters into accurate historical contexts. Michener doesn’t change historical events. He only injects made-up persons into those events and lets us be entertained (and educated) as we watch his characters interact with those events.

Clive Cussler does something similar with thrillers. In Treasure, he imagines that the great Egyptian library at Alexandria was not destroyed, but was smuggled off to the Americas, where Dirk Pitt, of course, locates it. Each of his books takes some well-known story from history (the Titanic, Amelia Earhart, and the final days of Abraham Lincoln, as examples), creates an alternate but plausible scenario, and weaves it as a subplot into his contemporary thrillers. It’s a form of historical fiction, and I like it.

Biblical fiction does the same kind of thing, taking a familiar Bible character--Joseph, Sarah, Mary Magdalene, and others--and generating a full story about their lives. The story remains true to the tidbits we know from the Bible, but takes liberties in filling in the gaps.

Then you have fiction which creates what is called “alternate history.” For instance, a writer says, “Let’s pretend that the Germans won World War II. Here’s a story about a resistance group in London fighting the Nazi occupation.” The author rewrites history in order to create a new context. You could do the same thing by imagining that Napoleon conquered Russia during a particularly mild winter, or that Robert E. Lee won at Gettysburg and marched on to sack Washington D. C., and slavery was legalized throughout the USA. In such cases, the author only pretends that historical events turned out differently. (It's also akin to last Saturday night's hysterical opening to Saturday Night Live, which presented an alternate universe in which Al Gore won the election, and all the things which would be different as a result.)

Dan Brown tries to have it both ways, and in the process shows enormously flagrant intellectual dishonesty. He creates the context for his novel by rewriting what undisputed history tells us about the Dead Sea Scrolls, Constantine, Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, DaVinci and his paintings, the life of Christ, and much much more…and yet, he insists that the events he cites are true. Imagine Michener writing Poland around the contention that it was the Poles who actually invaded Germany. James Michener has no doubt turned over several times in his grave over Brown's literary transgressions.

I’ll finish the book. But Brown plays dishonestly with the rules, adjusting reality to fit his story while denying that he’s doing it. And that really really honks me off.

And I haven’t even gotten to the really good stuff yet.

Posted on May 19, 2006 12:45 PM|

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