The world is a week away from Dan Brown's latest thriller, The Lost Symbol. Literary critics almost universally despise Brown's "paint by numbers" approach to writing and author Salman Rushdie claims that Brown gives bad novels a bad name. The disdain has followed The DaVinci Code and its prequel, Angels and Demons into the movies. Of course "the Code" is one of the most successful novels ever, and the movie version took in about three quarters of a billion dollars at the box office.
What draws folk to these books? I read The DaVinci Code and is was a page-turner. A bloated, stilted, inaccurate page-turner. I did laugh out loud on occasion, astounded that the sleep-deprived hero, Robert Langdon, running for his life, would stop and offer mini-lectures on the "symbology" of art and religion. In the end it did a huge disservice to the worlds of art and religion but maybe it felt close enough to the truth that people felt dark secrets were being revealed.
I talked with individuals who enthused about the "findings" in these novels as though they were carefully researched exposes rather than the figment of a novelist's imagination.
Do we simply live in an era when any old trashing of organized religion, especially the Roman Catholic church, will suffice? Please let me know if you have your copy of The Lost Symbol on order.
I also read the Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, and they are definitely page turners. They are fast-paced mysteries of people on the run.
ReplyDeleteI think there is also an allure to the concept of the church being based on false beliefs. There is a lot of distrust of the institution of the church. I think the church in general is seen as judgmental, authoritative, and condescending. There may be a sort of satisfaction in reading stories about the church that make the church seem sinister and deceptive.
I also think some people like new ideas. A women at the Last Supper? Jesus was married and had children? It seems almost sacrilegious to some, which gives the story a sense of the forbidden, which can be attractive.