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The Da Vinci Code
Ron Howard
certificate 12A, 149 mins
I once saw five people reading The Da Vinci Code in one tube carriage. In the interests of transparency I should admit that the first and last time I saw a stranger reading one of my books I stalked them for the rest of the day, so this kind of ubiquity does not endear Dan Brown to me. Then again neither do his clunky writing style, the boundless implausibility of his stories, or his attempts to write characters who are ten times cleverer than himself: (‘I’ve got it! What if this meaningless sequence of letters is actually a message, somehow rearranged?’ ‘You mean...’ ‘Yes. An anagram!’ ‘Gasp!’). But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
As for the film, it benefits from losing Brown’s narration, and gaining Audrey Tautou - though her career has I think had prouder moments than saying, ‘I don’t understand, explain some more,’ 72 times. The problem is length, as the film insists on keeping every part of the story. The effect is like trying to cram a full black binbag into a waste paper basket - it’s no more rubbish than before, but it hardly shows your rubbish in its best light.
Why then has this novel had such phenomenal success? Let me be clear that I’ve never read it and never will do either, at least not as a consumer, though I have examined it as a pundit. The difference may not be immediately obvious, but it’s important to me. What my researches have turned up is that the book has extremely short chapters and each one ends with a cliffhanger, so it is an insidious drug. Each chapter leaves you thinking, ‘I’ll just read one more to see what happens next…’. My rehabilitation came when the fifth chapter didn’t have a cliffhanger, at which point I ripped the book out of my own hands and threw it across the room, saved.
Is this enough to explain its world domination? Well, of course, if I knew the secret of its success, you would all have read my own schlock theological thriller The Lowry Enigma. But the theology has to be in there somewhere, don’t you think? It is its claim to rewrite the Christian story that sets The Da Vinci Code apart from other fat, fast-moving books to read in swimming trunks.
And this is where facetious snobbery is transfigured into righteous anger. The Da Vinci Code is a barrage of misinformation. It offers a version of the history of Christianity which is not so much distorted as completely bonkers, with virtually no honest basis in the evidence at all. For example, we learn that the Emperor Constantine single-handedly invented the divinity of Christ, when in fact the idea had been explored for 250 years by a hundred Christian writers. We are told that he chose four gospels from 80 contenders to go in the Bible, when Christians had accepted the fourfold gospel for at least 150 years. Brown marries Jesus and Mary on the basis of a tendentious reading of a tract he suggests may be by Mary herself, when no scholar would date it less than a hundred years after Jesus’ death. (Interestingly and smartly, the film distances itself somewhat from these claims, making them ground for heated debate between the expert and our sceptical hero, in turn making the film more easy-going on believers.)
I know, ‘It’s only a story’. But the very first word of the book is ‘FACT’, and Brown explicitly claims that the historical background is true. More importantly, I have heard an appalling number of people talk about what they have learnt about the history of Christianity from The Da Vinci Code. In truth, we know that all fiction contains fact, and we learn from it. Our knowledge of Victorian London is Dickensian (and less happily so is our vision of the French revolution); we know about heroin from Irvine Welsh, Asperger’s from Mark Haddon, regency manners from Jane Austen, police procedure from The Bill. It is perfectly possible for fiction to tell the truth and for fiction to lie. The Da Vinci Code is either ignorance dressing itself up as authority or mere lies.
It matters, not just to Christians whose beliefs are challenged, but to all of us, because the past is the only soil our roots have; historical blindness is like driving without mirrors. Everyone should have the opportunity to investigate Jesus on the basis of facts, without glib distortions from evangelists or paranoid airport novelists.
Most fundamentally, what is at stake is our confidence in truth. Dan Brown not only rewrites 2000 years of our shared story, but shields his revision behind a thorny thicket of conspiracy theory, which rebuts appeals to evidence and consensus with ‘Ah, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ It invites anyone who is interested in these most important facts and stories to give up hope of knowing what really went on: each side has their own story, you can’t trust either of them, give up and go back to Jeffrey Archer. Oh for a reliable, readable and reasonably priced Short History of Christianity that we could read on the tube.
the effect is like trying to cram
a full black binbag into a waste
paper basket -
it’s no more rubbish than before,
but it hardly shows your rubbish
in its best light