This afternoon I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and happened to notice a copy of Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress. It was remaindered at $5.98, then marked 50% off that price, then plunked on the “LAST CHANCE” table.
All of which reminds me that no one is talking about Dan Brown anymore, which is a pity because he’s such an easy target. I have not read any of his other novels; my wife read Angels and Demons for her book club, which she thought was pretty much the same book as The Da Vinci Code except with a different MacGuffin. Other people have told me the same thing about his other books. Perhaps he was the sort of writer who only had one book in him, but he kept writing it until it caught on. I admire persistence. According to the Wikipedia’s article, his future projects include two books that also sound like the same book with a different MacGuffin—one about a secret society that’s kept a vast conspiracy going for centuries and the other about, um, a secret society that’s kept a vast conspiracy going for centuries. The fans won’t be disappointed.
What makes me proud to be an American is that none of the members of these age-old conspiracies, all of which have members at the highest levels of government, have been allowed to kill Dan Brown, or even to imprison him on charges of blasphemy. “Should you kill people because you don’t like their books?” Salman Rushdie (a real novelist) once asked rhetorically. His answer was that you shouldn’t. “Even Dan Brown must live,” he said. “Preferably not write, but live.”
Meanwhile, Dan Brown’s descent into irrelevant remainderhood reminds me how glad I am that Mike and I didn’t write a book about The Da Vinci Code. If you haven’t read The Grail Code yet, now is an excellent time—now that you can actually enjoy the history of the Grail legends without worrying about what Dan Brown said about them.
November 10th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Mr. Brown seems to have fallen low in the West. In India, though, the ‘da Vinci Code’ is still in the top five. For whatever reason, young people simply love it, even Catholics. I expect the new movie to boost that other book of his too, the one it’s based on. Help, I can’t remember the name.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:54 am
[...] Here is great post from the authors of The Grail Code, Mike Aquilina and Christopher Bailey, on the oblivion into which the author of the Da Vinci Code has fallen. [...]
November 18th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
[...] The BBC reports that the writers’ strike has delayed the production of Angels and Demons, the “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code. It’s based on a book Dan Brown wrote before he wrote The Da Vinci Code, using the same hero and the same plot. Apparently “the script needs more work,” which is a bit of a puzzle for a number of reasons. First, couldn’t they just use the same script they used for The Da Vinci Code? I didn’t read Angels and Demons, but my wife (who read it for her book club at the Mystery Lovers Bookstore) tells me that a few global search-and-replace runs would take care of all the minor differences. Second, why does a script needing more work bother them now if it didn’t when they made The Da Vinci Code? Third, doesn’t delaying until the script can be polished pose a slight danger that the fascination with all things Dan Brown could fizzle before the movie is released? Fourth, when you announce to the world that the script for a Dan Brown story isn’t quite good enough, aren’t you just inviting long paragraphs of dripping sarcasm from the grumposphere? Fifth, if you’re adapting “a novel so bad that it gives novels a bad name” (as Salman Rushdie said about The Da Vinci Code), isn’t a bad script what you actually want? And sixth, if you’re a writer struggling to make a living from your writing, can you avoid lapsing into unseemly grouchiness when you see the Dan Brown empire poised to make another few hundred million dollars? Apparently not. [...]