The Dan Brown Secret
September 4th 2006 01:42
Dan Brown Source: The Age
The enormous success of Dan Brown and the subsequent rise of the cottage industry of literate thrillers raises an interesting question. Why this kind of thriller and why now? Writing a review of Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow, Chritopher Benfrey says that increasingly fiction is being invaded by fact and this means that “imagination” and “serious fiction” are in decline. He also is not impressed by Ingrid Rowland’s claims that the success of these thrillers could be “a longing to take Western heritage seriously.”
It is very dubious to claim that novels which are based on fact are not works of imagination. Novelists like Matthew Pearl are serious researchers and instead of writing a thesis on their new findings, they incorporate the new material in their fiction. Does that make their efforts less imaginative? “Serious fiction” might as well be in decline and there may be other reasons for it. But, Benfrey’s assessment conforms to the standard formula of dismissing popular culture by the elitocrats.
Nevertheless, what do Dan Brown and Matthew Pearl portend to the world? That the western civilization is under siege and this popular outburst of Western culture is the last gasp of the West before it sinks into nothingness? Or does it represent the continuous debasement of the aristocracy of wisdom in the age of internet? After all, Da Vinci and Caravaggio and Dante were once province of high culture and university arm chairs, names to be reverently whispered in art galleries. Imagine the discomfort of the aesthetically privileged class seeing those names packed into paperbacks and read on trains!
Matthew Pearl Source: Random House
But, I personally think that the answer is much simpler than that. As I noted earlier, material like this was is in use much earlier than Dan Brown. What Dan Brown did was to use this material in a conventional thriller which was in decline after the Cold War. Dan Brown himself wrote two conventional thrillers which didn’t do that well before he wrote Angels and Demons, the first of Richard Langdon series. He explicitly states that Robert Ludlum was a great inspiration for him to write the Da Vinci Code.
So, the extraordinary success of these novels might be indicative of the fact that we are out of Cold War and farther and farther from it. No longer under threat of nuclear destruction, we want our heroes not to stop bombs in the hands of rogue nations but find a missing Caravaggio painting or the Holy Grail and increase our aesthetic education or make us immortal .
And yes, I haven’t forgotten the terrorists. The latest novel by Frederic Forsyth, master of the cold war era thrillers like the Odessa File or The Day of the Jackal, is called The Afghan. The more the things change, the more they remain the same.
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