A Decade of "The DaVinci Code". . . and an Old Lunch Date

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown is celebrating its Tenth Anniversary this month and has sold, according to its publisher in a recent New York Times ad, an astonishing 81 million copies.  It dominated the Times best seller list for 136 straight weeks—more than two and a half years.  The USA Today reports that it led the best seller list for two different years, 2004 (after initial publication) and 2006 (after its rerelease when the movie appeared). The publisher claimed after its first year of sales that the book sold more copies in a single year than any other adult novel, ever.  I was there at the outset in the spring 2003, first buying a copy and falling immediately under its spell, and then later buying the audio version that I listened to in the car.  I couldn’t get enough of it.

Eighty-one million’s a lot, but there are a few adult novels that have done better, like Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which has sold a nearly incomprehensible 200 million copies in 153 years, undoubtedly a figure that has been dramatically inflated because the public-domain book has gone through uncountable editions and been force-fed to endless numbers of bored high school students.   J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) has sold a slightly less astonishing 150 million (in 57 years).  Agatha Christie’s 1939 And Then There Were None sold 100 million.  J. D. Salinger’s 1951 The Catcher in the Rye trails The Da Vinci Code by 20 million and Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita trails it by 30 million.  So eighty-one million copies in a decade is impressive by any standard, especially when you add in the number of other readers who got the book from libraries, audio editions, eBooks, online and brick-and-mortar used book markets, and the uncountable number of personal copies that were (and still are) being passed around among family and friends.

Like so many others, I read all Brown’s earlier books too.  They were mostly a waste of time, although Angels and Demons (2000) introduced protagonist Robert Langdon to us and promised something better to come, which of course happened three years later with the phenomenon of The DaVinci Code.  In 2009 a third book in the Langdon series was published, The Lost Symbol, but it was a terrible disappointment for everyone hoping for another DaVinci Code.  The Freemasons were not as much fun as conspiratorial antagonists as the Catholic Church had been.  Brown’s fans, myself included, are hoping for a return to form in his new book, Inferno, which is scheduled for publication next month, May 2013, but realistically, the chances are slim to zero that he will capture lightning in a bottle again.  For now, however, hopes are running high.
          With all the prepublication hoopla attending to the birth of this new book,  I had to pick up The DaVinci Code once again, maybe one last time, just to see how much I still might enjoy it.  And perhaps in one sense it is a surprise that I did, and do, like it very much. I remember a lunch I had in 2005 with my daughter Laura, then an editor at New American Library, and another editor at the same firm, Tracy Bernstein, in charge of Signet Classics, which published introductions, prefaces, and afterwords of mine for books by Dante, Milton, and Longfellow.  They seemed pleased with themselves when, between soup and salad, they ambushed me about my feelings on The DaVinci Code.  Why, they seemed to be saying with mischievous grins, does a man with a taste for the classics, like Dan Brown’s potboiler and Super Best Seller? 

I didn’t take the bait, squirmed a little bit, and then repeated what an old friend once told me about his main criterion for judging books.  He said he liked the ones he finished.  That was glib and evasive and maybe partly true, but I really did want to say something more serious and thoughtful about the book that had, after all, captured my imagination as no other popular novel ever had before.  If I had taken the bait, I might have said something like this. 

First, the book is fun to read from first page to last, a fast-paced murder mystery with attractive lead characters.  Second, there are several very evil villains who take turns with the attention of the good guys and all the readers too.  But overlaid onto the murder mystery grid is an entire structure of religious conspiracy so persuasive as to make us wonder what part of the construction is true—or if all of it is.  Or none.

Then there is the code itself, the hidden messages said to have been left by Leonardo DaVinci in his masterworks.  We are told by Brown that DaVinci was one of a secret society called the “Priory of the Scion,” whose mission was to preserve the truth that Jesus was secretly married to Mary Magdalene, the heart of the “sacred feminine” and the mother of Jesus’ children.  In the presentation, it is all very plausible, so plausible in fact, that it has spawned a cottage industry of Christian scholars forced to find exactly where Brown went wrong with his facts.  All of which is amusing:  this is a novel, after all, a piece of fiction, so one doesn’t demand of it the same standard of truth that non-fiction has to meet.  For all I know, there may be some truth to it, but it has been fun watching the Christian world take to battle stations just to  "prove" that Brown was wrong about Jesus and Mary.   

I am not a huge fan of pop fiction, not even the escapist enticements of murder mysteries, but this is a mystery novel about a conspiracy supposedly hiding big secrets in the Catholic Church.  It contains a stunningly tempting argument, and I was merely one of 81 million who found the union of murder mystery with Catholic conspiracy theory (suppressing the "fact" that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus and mother of his children) completely irresistible.  Then there is the Holy Grail and “sacred feminine” to bring into the conversation.  What fun!  I can’t understand why everyone in the country hasn’t bought a copy.  Or at least borrowed a friend’s—or taken one out of the library. 

I wish I might have said something like that at the soup and salad lunch with my daughter and my editor, but I do feel a little easier now that I got around to saying it here.  Finally.