Posted on 04/19/2005 7:14:59 AM PDT by Grendel9
Filed: 19/04/2005)
Toby Clements grits his teeth and finds inspiration in a bestseller
Every couple of months, I have lunch with a friend who writes historical thrillers. He shares a publisher with Dan Brown, the author of the extraordinarily successful The Da Vinci Code, and every time we meet, we spend the first 15 minutes complaining about his rival's sales, which this week reached nearly 2½ million in paperback in Britain alone.
The Da Vinci Code remains a mystery to its rival's author
Neither of us had read the book, but that didn't stop us forming strong opinions about it. It was enough to see it at the top of the bestseller lists every week to know that we didn't much like it. Three months ago, we met again and it was the same old story - only this time I asked my friend what he thought the secret of the book's success was. He shrugged his shoulders ruefully. He only wished he knew.
"Wouldn't it be funny to write a spoof of The Da Vinci Code?" I wondered aloud. "Only instead of being some tosh about the Holy Grail, the secret at the heart of the book would be how to write a blockbusting bestseller."
"You should do it," he muttered, forking his omelette. It was one of those things you resolve to do and just as quickly forget. Only when I got back to work on the books desk of this newspaper and began leafing though The Bookseller, I was confronted with the depressing news that a raft of similar titles was sailing towards us.
The Magdalene Legacy (by Laurence Gardner) promises to reveal stuff beyond The Da Vinci Code; The Rule of Four (by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason) is about two Princeton academics unravelling some old coded manuscript; while The Geographer's Library (by Jon Fasman) concerns a reporter getting mixed up in alchemy while searching out 14 cursed talismans. This one is supposed to be quite literary, while Map of Bones (by James Rollins) sounds more muscular - it isn't The Map of Bones, for example - and involves some American Special Forces veterans tracking down the relics of the biblical Three Kings, stolen from a German cathedral.
Behind these come countless guides, and even DVDs, promising to reveal the truths behind The Da Vinci Code. Today the streets of Paris are vibrating to the soft shuffle of trainer-shod hordes trudging around after Brown's heroes, from the Louvre to the Church of Saint Sulpice, their noses buried in the novel. Outside, their coaches wait to whisk them off to London to the Church of the Knights Templar and then on to Rosslyn in Scotland, or, as Brown would have it, Scotland's Roslyn.
The Da Vinci Code is obviously not a normal novel. It is enormously long and very badly written ("Everyone in the reception area gaped in wonderment at the half-naked albino offering forth a bleeding clergyman"). It is simultaneously bombastic and bafflingly banal, full of uncontrolled, wrong-headed prose, tin-eared dialogue and crazy errors of fact. The characters are drips. And yet I stayed up half the night reading it.
So what is the secret?
This was the start of my parody: the secret of the great blockbuster novel (I was not yet sure what it was, but I was certain it had nothing to do with Mary Magdalene) has been passed down through the ages from great author to great author. These authors, I surmised, more of them women than one might expect and all of them directly related, pooled their knowledge in the hope that one day a descendant of theirs would write the perfect novel.
A sinister cabal of publishers hopes to steal the secret and turn it into a bestseller that would occupy the number one slot for ever and so destroy all competition. The two drippy heroes must solve a string of preposterous clues to rescue the secret from the dark forces.
I could say my book, The Asti Spumante Code, nails the The Da Vinci Code dead, and that anyone who goes into a bookshop to buy Dan Brown's opus ought to buy my one instead. I could say mine is better written and more succinct. Some of it, I could say, is quite funny - intentionally so, unlike Brown's. And yet, I must admit I have not found that magical ingredient that makes it The Da Vinci Code. I still don't know the secret.
'The Asti Spumante Code: A Parody' by Toby Clements (Time Warner)
I would like to read "The Asti Spumante Code" but it does not look as if it's available stateside.
Perhaps a "Ghost in the Machine Code" - random pieces of the secret of the universe are encrypted in code fragments littered about the world embedded in game boxes, TV remotes, motor controllers, etc.
</geek tangent mode>
Couple of geniuses, to be sure.
But that has nothing to do with these two losers, who admit they only dislike the book because it sold more than theirs. Arrogant elitists, the both of 'em.
Da Vinci Code sucked, but Digital Fortress is Dan Brown's most horrible piece of garbage ever.
You thought that was bad? Try his book 'Digital Fortress', it made me want to gnaw off my own foot.
Great minds and all that...
Everyone I know who has read it raves about it. I just can't get into it. I tried last night and it put me to sleep. The guy sure can't write.
I read it, when I was on painkillers and literally could not get out of bed.
I thought it was crap. The concept is fun and interesting, but the means by which the characters interact, escape from, and reunite with each other are ridiculously improbable.
One bit of action that set me on edge can be distilled down to: "Crap, we have to get out of France, but every cop in the country is looking for us. If we only had a private jet...oh wait, we do!"
There's alot of stuff like that. It read like a film script. Which, as it happens, it sort of was.
Perhaps the reason the book was so successful is that large numbers of people don't read nowadays, and don't know cr*p writing when they read it.
What blew my mind though was that Dan Brown actually believed that what he wrote as fiction was indeed true. It was an eye opener to the KOOK factor that I was unaware of before reading it.
I have no agenda, nothing against genre fiction. I am the furthest thing from a literary snob--heck, I love Janet Ivanovich, Diana Gabaldon, Dick Francis, Robert Parker, and none of them writes great literature. But Brown is just a talent-free hack. Everyone is reading his book only because everyone else is reading the book.
I'll admit to have picked it up because I was curious as to what everyone else was reading. That said, I enjoyed it as a lightweight adventure yarn, nothing more. My tastes run more towards Clive Cussler when it comes to fiction.
Jeez, Guys. When I get to Chapter 2 or 3 and find I've
lost interest in a book, I lose the book! Why would
I want to continue torturing myself...so I can pan it
to others and show how erudite I am? <>g<>
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