IN MY FIRST COLUMN ON THESE PAGES, I banged on about the literary establishment’s snobbery towards Harry Potter, but I think you might have found even the most “Nothing Less Than Dostoevsky Will Do” of them coming down on the side of the Wee-Pants Wizard this week, when
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince finally knocked Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code off the No 1 bestseller slot, a position it has occupied for an
(Everything I Do), I Do It For You length of time. Because the words Bête and Noire, even joined together, even capitalised, don’t do justice to the hatred that Mr Brown’s papal potboiler inspires among literary folk.
The Times described it as “written in peanut butter prose, with plastic characters and a plot so clunky it rattles”. The
Telegraph said: “I’ve cracked the code: it’s rubbish.” And it’s not just in the rarefied air of the up-market books pages that
The Da Vinci Code has caused a stink; it’s slagged off on books websites across the world, my favourite being: “It was the only book I had on a transatlantic flight and I seriously considered asking them to turn the plane around.”
Harry, of course, has the get-out clause of being for children. Dan Brown’s get-out clause should have been: “It’s a bestseller, so therefore it’s for those essentially childlike creatures, the general public.” And then everybody would have been happy. Unfortunately, by doing some historical research and putting the Mona Lisa on the cover, Brown makes his book aspire to that quality most jealously guarded by those who consider themselves the reading elite, gravitas. The thing that really makes literary critics furious is the idea that there are people reading TDVC who think that they’re reading a proper book; who think, God save us, that they’re reading a literary novel.
Well. In the 1980s, when I first came across the idea that the literary canon was perhaps an oversanctified area of discussion, I remember reading somewhere the suggestion that if Shakespeare were alive today, he wouldn’t be writing Hamlet, or whatever might be its modern high-culture equivalent: he’d be writing Lethal Weapon (it was, as I say, the Eighties). Using the same logic, if Dickens were alive today, he wouldn’t be writing Saturday, or The Line of Beauty: he’d be writing The Da Vinci Code. With its penny-dreadful plot, its gruesome murders, its epic structure, its black and white morality, and its cliffhanger endings to every chapter — almost as if it was actually written in weekly instalments — it’s as Dickensian as Miriam Margolyes in a bonnet.
But what makes it quintessentially Dickensian — or rather, quintessentially what makes it what Dickens would be wanting to write here and now — is its success. Dickens was, of course, by a Victorian beard’s length the most popular writer of his day. Comedy equals tragedy plus time, Carol Burnett said, but one could equally suggest that literary canonisation — at least up to the beginning of the 20th century — equals popularity plus time. Why is it impossible today to imagine that the bestselling writer of the day could also be the greatest artist? We are after all more literate, and more liberal, than the Victorians. Yes, but now all classes are literate, whereas in the 19th century reading was essentially a leisure pastime of the bourgeoisie. And so it is hard, even for someone like myself who cannot bear the bringing of class into every single column written in the British press, to come to any other conclusion than that the point at which there is a sundering of, to quote F. R. Leavis, mass civilisation and minority culture, is the point at which the middle class begin to imagine that the only way to protect literature as their preserve is to hive off part of it and call it high and leave the masses to read everything else.
Enough Marxism, already. Dan Brown isn’t as good a writer as Dickens; or rather he isn’t as good a comedian, or a prose poet (I’d say there isn’t that much to choose in terms of storytelling). He rather reveals a craven motivation early on in the book by describing the main character as looking a bit like Harrison Ford, although I’d bet that were Charlie alive today he’d be pushing for every Hollywood option that came his way (“Friends of Mr Pickwick would remark many a time and oft of his physical similarity to Jack Black”). Similarly, there is a none too realistic moment when the French female police officer is shocked to see transvestite prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne; although again, that’s Dickensian, telling us that, against all logic, the heroine is an ingénue, an innocent. But, overall, what Dan Brown has done is something very clever. By marrying the myths of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to the genre of the thriller, he’s appealed to something which people desire very deeply, and that is, a sense of the sacred: a sense that there is some structure out there, some relationship between their daily lives, reading this book, terrified, on the Tube, and the divine. There isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important cultural moment, this mass buying into the idea.
And lastly: literary critics, with their sixth-form souls, are always desperate for books to have some kind of subversive power. They’re always hoping against hope that this book or that book will take us back to a time when the written word could topple kings. All right: when was the last time that a Booker winner caused any kind of consternation at the heart of a real power structure? Never? But The Da Vinci Code has been consistently repudiated by no less a genuine power centre than the Roman Catholic Church, so much so that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa, said recently: “The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.” Although he may have been talking about the Bible.
How fantastic that the Vatican is in a position where it is having to say: “He walked on water, yes, he changed the loaves into fishes, but what’s this book suggesting? He was married? Had kids? Get out of here.” That’s literature having an effect. In fact, there’s only one book that the Pope’s more worried about and, wouldn’t you believe it, it’s Harry Potter. I’m beginning to suspect the book trade must be in league with Opus Dei. Mr Brown, are you interested in a new plotline . . . ?
Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, ITV1, 11pm Tuesdays
