It seems like everywhere you turn someone is reading, has read, or plans to read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
What if a nationally respected magazine came out with an article that outlined the 
personal background of Dan Brown and how it has affected each of the books he has written?
The article might discuss facts such as the following. Dan Brown grew up in Boston. He did well in math like his father and also displayed a keen interest in religion. Brown became an alter boy at the Catholic Church his parents attended. While in this position, the young Brown witnessed embezzlement and mishandling of funds by a priest and was consequently blackmailed for three and half years into not reporting the incident. Later on, Brown gained both military and election campaign experience as a youth. At a certain point, Dan Brown was maneuvered out of a political position because of a behind the scene partnerships and denied a military promotion for undisclosed reasons. Such experiences fostered distrust for the establishment and suspicion towards religious and political institutions throughout his latter years of college. Brown was encouraged to develop a natural writing talent after winning the Screven’s Scholastic Literary Award upon graduation. He began writing short stories based on plots involving past experiences of religious and political machinations and present-day conspiracy theories. These various plots have coalesced into a few major recurring themes resulting in bestselling books.
Of course, everything that you just read above is based entirely on five minutes of sketchy internet research and one hour of speculative conspiracy-oriented writing. The process of creating the above bogus biography bears some similarities to trying to write a fiction novel. To be on the level about Brown’s biography one must say that, beyond his name and his dad being good at math, the rest of the above scenario is entirely fictitious and implausible.
Yet, reading the above scenario about Brown probably stirred up a twinge of excitement. There is something exhilarating about discovering something that was hidden, something rare, an inside look, a covert meaning, a new voice testifying to supposedly new facts of newly unearthed evidence. The plot thickens. Something promises to supposedly give us the inside track to knowing the “real” Dan Brown.
So why is this style of writing so tantalizing? What makes these kinds of books so hard to put down? Why does a good investigative fiction cause us to forfeit food, hygiene and possibly our daily responsibilities before we finish the book?
One reason for the interest is due to the nature of conspiracy theories. We finally find someone (the author or a main character in this case) who is asking questions similar to the questions we have been asking. In the world of fiction, it is possible to find answers to perplexing questions, or at least some promising leads. A good author writes of things that we all think about or wonder about from time to time – Is this true? What if this happened? ... From these few truths and a fertile seedbed of doubt, the author can creatively build a complex plot. There is just enough truth contained in the story to whet the palate. The rest is sugar and spice. And there’s lots of sugar on every page to make the book hard to put down. So we keep turning the pages. It makes for great fiction, maybe even a bestseller.
But how do we know when the author is giving us real food or just sugar water? Out of everything he writes, which is the fact and which is the fiction?
As we all know, good investigative fiction weaves in just enough truth to make it believable – as though it spoke of things as they actually were. If it’s too far-fetched, we call such writing sci-fi. On the other hand, it can’t be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It would then be called a documentary. Having laid a credible plot that the reader will accept as plausible, the author soars creatively into the realm of conspiracy, weaving together an enticing mixture of fact and fiction.
But when I finally put the book down, do I actually believe that Sherlock Homes existed or that the events of The Pelican Brief truly occurred?
Yet shouldn’t we be just as investigative as the investigator in the investigative fiction we just read? I’ve always heard that imitation is the greatest compliment.
In other words, someone tells us a story. We are intrigued and want to learn more. We go and look to see if what the author has told us is true or not. It becomes a kind of a game to try to figure out which parts of the story came from the real world and which parts came from the author’s imagination. We do some investigation of our own. We look under a few rocks and try to crack the code as to what is fact and what is fiction.
Sometimes, we don’t have to look too far to realize a story isn’t real. I don’t have to visit the Mines of Moria from the Lord of the Rings to know if they exist. We know they don’t (I hope). Other stories might take a little more effort to figure out.
Which takes us back to Dan Brown. His Da Vinci Code is a thrilling page-turner. It has become a bestseller. In such a masterfully crafted story, then, it can be difficult to discern where the fiction lies within this fiction. Are all the rocks being overturned? Is Dan Brown relating all the facts, or just the ones he needs to in order to put together a bestseller? For instance, can we know whether the Bible is reliable, if the paintings in the Louvre are described accurately, or whether parchments identifying the Priory of Sion really exist? How do we investigate these questions? How do we crack the code - Dan Brown’s code that is?
The Da Vinci Code is certainly a good read. It comes highly recommended. Doing some of your own research into the author’s research is another recommendation worth the effort.
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