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How did Da Vinci succeed?
16/05/2006 09:47 - (SA)
Los Angeles - It may be the last mystery
left about The Da Vinci Code - how did a work by a near
unknown author and sneered at by some of literature's leading
lights become one of the best-selling novels of all time?
With well over 40 million copies sold worldwide and the film
version of the novel set to open the prestigious Cannes film
festival on Wednesday, it is a question that scores of authors
and would-be ones would love an answer to.
To hear some people tell it, author Dan Brown stumbled on
the literary equivalent of turning lead into gold.
They say his was a formula that mixed clumsy, forgettable
sentences with breakneck pacing, lectures on art, history and
religion, sinister conspiracies, evil villains, puzzles and
cliffhanger chapter endings to produce literary gold.
While some like novelist Salman Rushdie called the book
"typewriting" and others, like critic Laura Miller, called it
"cheesy", book industry professionals refuse to sneer, saying
this was far from a case of good things happening to a bad book.
It was instead a case, they said, of all a reader's wants
appearing to be conveniently located in a single book,
especially the desire to learn something.
In this case, the teaching was about a highly debatable
thesis that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and their descendants
continue through the present day.
Nick Owchar, deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book
Review, said:
"My theory is that non-fiction sells better than fiction and
this book has a heavy concentration of history and purported
facts that people have taken to. It doesn't read well as a novel
but it reads well as an encyclopaedia.
"The book challenges the familiar story of Jesus's life but
it is also challenges ideas that for a vast number of Americans
are a familiar part of their faith and people enjoy toying with
things that are subversive."
A scam?
Journalist Peter Boyer, who analysed in this week's New
Yorker how Hollywood carefully handled the marketing of the
movie, said that at the heart of the book is a thesis that:
"Christianity as we know it is history's greatest scam,
perpetrated by a malignant, misogynist, and, when necessary,
murderous Catholic Church."
Boyer said Brown tapped into a hunger not just for
spirituality but for alternate constructs of faith - similar to
the public interest in the Gnostic gospels and even the Gospel
according to Judas.
Beyond that, the novel was also boosted by an innovative
marketing campaign that helped it hit number one on the New York
Times bestseller list within a week of publication, something
unheard of for a book by a little known author.
Stephen Rubin, the publisher of Doubleday Books, a division
of Random House, said that he and his staff knew they had
something exceptional the minute they received the first 120
pages of the book.
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South Africa
